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·
      1 day 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.