cross-posted from: https://sopuli.xyz/post/44122961
After decades of living in a linux-FOSS world, I noticed these games at a 2nd-hand street market:
- Starcraft (few different versions/themes)
- Age of Empires (few different versions/themes)
- Civilization
They were a dollar each, so why not. I grabbed. Got home, installed win7 on a machine someone dumped on a curb, but could not install any of the games b/c I live offline. Fucking hell.
When I last played Starcraft well over a decade ago, I lived online and probably thought nothing of it. But it seems clear this shitty requirement is an anti-sharing policy because these games do not inherently need Internet. You can play against the machine or on a LAN. It’s not just the elitist exclusive WAN requirement that pisses me off… there’s a privacy issue too. And what happens when I enter the product key of a used CD? They probably have a tolerance on how many times that can happen, perhaps dependant on whether the hardware changes. Fuck the nannying.
Also consider that Blizzard and Microsoft servers are not going to run forever. They can pull the plug at any time and then no one can install their game. Should be illegal to make installation needlessly dependant on a service. Forced obsolescence.
Some of these games also require a CD to be inserted, which means you must have a fucking noisey CD drive attached at all times. Back when these games were made it was no big deal because all laptops and desktops had CD drives. Not anymore. I’m mostly annoyed by having to insert the disc, wait for it to spin, then I have to hear the loud spin as I play which also wastes power. So I installed Alcohol 120 to image the Warcraft 3 disc (which I still had from yrs past). It has 3 different versions of the crack for the particular shitty scheme used on WC3. None of the images work.
Obviously if I want to play these games I will need warez versions. How good are those dodgy distros these days? I can imagine some are just the original content but you still enter a product key (which I have anyway). But if they still need a WAN that won’t cut it for me. Do the warez versions overcome all these issues? Are they still in circulation?
Alternatively, I should ask, have there been any versions of these games repackaged and re-released for the retro gamers which don’t impose the shitty protections and server dependencies?
If not, I must say unlicensed cracked versions would be the most ethical ones:
- designed obsolescence thwarted
- privacy kept
- more inclusive (offline ppl and those without CD drives)
- better UX (no fiddling with discs and hearing the spin)
The original StarCraft and Brood War expansion didn’t require Internet for installation. And while the original boxed copies (I got the “Battle Chest” re-release which is the same) required the CD to be in the drive, the last one or two official update patches let you copy the .mpq (?) data files from the CD into the installation directory so you can play without them.
If any of those CDs require internet to install, they must have been later releases during the dying era of CD game installs. I have original CD copies of all AOE games and they dont need any internet at all.
For games that require the CD inserted, I have had mixed luck with dumping the CD contents to an ISO using dd, then mounting that for installing and running the game.
Using dd is important as you can flat dump every single bit out of the CD, including the hidden license information.
Also virtually every old game that requires a CD probably has a NoCD crack out there in the world. That was some of the easiest and most commonly bypassed DRM back in the day.
StarCraft 1 and AoE 1 shouldn’t require internet, I bought them close to release day and I didn’t have the internet back then.
Age of Empires 2 and the expansion pack don’t require internet either in the original CD release. The games had LAN/Direct IP Support, but matchmaking was handled externally by a web browser based lobby system known as MSN Zone, and then people used GameRanger when that shut down until the remaster happened with the Forgotten Empires team.
They might have the same games at GoG. You won’t need to do anything extra if they do have them.
Strange that Civilization needs online to install. Which number is it?
GoG?
https://www.gog.com/de/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GOG.com
GoG is a DRM free game store
Thank you.
GoodOldGames
Feel ya, to this day I haven’t play Battefield 2142 because I couldn’t get a working crack, and this game is 20 years old already, it was the first time I came across that crap.
Been a long long time that I’ve been away from game piracy so I can’t point you to good places to find cracks though.
To be fair, BF2142 didn’t have a traditional campaign, just more training maps. It was 99% multiplayer.
Sadly, there were some private servers that were up for like a year or so a few years back, but they got C&D’d. I had a few fun matches online reliving some childhood nostalgia at least
Neither 1942 nor Vietnam (or Quake III, Unreal Tournament, Counter Strike, Day of Defeat and the dozens of other Half-Life mods…), but you still could singleplayer offline against bots.
