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)

UPDATE

I am surprised about how much attention this thread got. The versions of software I experienced are as follows:

  • Age of Empires III
  • Starcraft II Wings of Liberty
  • Starcraft II Legacy of the Void
  • Civilization V

AoE does not require Internet… sorry for any misinfo I implied on that. AoE did not install because of a graphics driver issue that caused the installer to detect 0mb RAM on the video card. It ran fine offline after fixing the driver. The only fault w/AoE is the perpetual demand for a CD to be inserted.

The other three games certainly require Internet. It’s in fact written on the boxes so they covered their asses legally.

  • James Croll@piefed.doomprepper.comEnglish
    1·
    5 days ago

    I admire your courage. But can I ask why you choose to live mostly offline? I do a pretty job of both. I have plenty of things I do offline, and things I do online. But you are pretty extreme about the online thing, and I was wondering you have a particular reason for that.

    • freedomPusher@sopuli.xyzOPEnglish
      1·
      2 days ago

      It’s a culmination of several goals.

      • I am trying to live as unbanked as possible. Local ISPs do not accept cash payments. I do not want to feed anti-cash suppliers. I boycott them. So the only way I can get online from home is over GPRS using a prepaid sim card. Those prices are not competitive. I can get online for ~¾ the cost of a big mac per month, but that’s with a ~4-5gb cap. Sometimes I do that on rare occasions.
      • I oppose the forced use of the cloud by gov public services. Being offline is the only real way to test and experiment with public services to know when to protest the exclusion of offline people. It also ensures that I can take my protest to court and truthfully testify that I have no residential Internet.
      • In the context of gaming, it’s fine if a game inherently needs the cloud for the experience. But when a game artificially but needlessly demands cloud access as a precondition to installation, it’s somewhat of a human rights violation because it’s people’s human right to access and experience culture. It’s wrong for game makers to exclude offline people if a game does not strictly need it.
      • I believe the right to boycott is fundamentally the single most important consumer right. It is the only consumer protection that consumers can give themselves without depending on others for protection. It should be practiced and tested constantly.
      • Apps have taken a shitty direction that assumes non-stop cloud access. This is a kind of vulnerability that weakens civilization. The fact that no Lemmy client apps store data locally and support offline reading and queued responses is a weakness that promotes the elitism of excluding offline people. The circumstance exacerbates pressure to buy an Internet subscription. I should be able to pop into a cafe periodically and sync with Lemmy servers, go home, and do my reading there. My offline experiment enables me to see what most people do not.
  • empireOfLove2@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    40·
    11 days ago

    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.

    • boonhet@sopuli.xyzEnglish
      2·
      11 days ago

      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.

      Ha, depends on the type of DRM. Early SecuROM was pretty easy IIRC, later SecuROM was a pain. Whatever the first Godfather game used was an absolute pain, I believe no standard crack actually worked properly (game would get bugged after a while), but someone managed to create a .cue file you could mount that it would see as a legit disk.

      Of course those of us simply copying the crack files to the game directory didn’t have to worry about all that, it was the lovely scene folks that took care of all that.

    • freedomPusher@sopuli.xyzOPEnglish
      1·
      11 days ago

      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.

      I’ll have to get back to you on exactly which one I have and how it reacted offline. I just discovered that AoE is still making new releases every year. You must be spending a fortune if you have every single AoE game ever released. Or if you have dodgy versions, then those could be internet-independent due to crackers.

      Using dd is important as you can flat dump every single bit out of the CD, including the hidden license information.

      The fact that dd has no smarts about the media is exactly why it’s a problem. The copy protections are designed to ensure that bit-by-bit copies fail to work. They insert some kind of optical ”defects” which force drives to do some kind of error correction. A copy (image or physical CD-R) has a copy of the bits but not the defects, so there is no error dection/correction activity, and that’s how the game knows it’s not a factory disc.

      • empireOfLove2@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        2·
        10 days ago

        Sorry should have clarified. I have AOE 1 thru 3 with expansion packs, I dropped off about the time they did the aoeII HD remaster.

      • lost_faith@lemmy.caEnglish
        2·
        11 days ago

        Not sure this trick still/will work(s) but at one time you could copy a cd at 1x and it would work (like dd but slower and not as reliable) but anything over 1x didn’t work, that was copying from the media directly, iirc. We used to do this back in early to mid 2k

  • TachyonTele@piefed.socialEnglish
    20·
    11 days ago

    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?

  • loutr@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    18·
    11 days ago

    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.

    • BurgerBaron@piefed.socialEnglish
      10·
      11 days ago

      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.

      image

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  • Redkey@programming.devEnglish
    11·
    11 days ago

    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 CDs into the installation directory so you can play without them.

  • OhVenus_Baby@lemmy.mlEnglish
    8·
    11 days ago

    Arggg matey. Yarr harr harr. You don’t need internet outside of downloading the game.

    Source. I’ve tried 2 of 3 of your games offline Civ. And multiple AoE chapters.

  • PiraHxCx@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    6·
    11 days ago

    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.

    • Haquer@lemmy.todayEnglish
      8·
      11 days ago

      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

      • PiraHxCx@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        2·
        11 days ago

        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.

  • burghler@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    2·
    11 days ago

    Can’t play Mass Effect LE half the fkin time either cause the cookie times out and I need to log in again. Fuck EA, glad they’re dying