Last week, I bought GT Legends, a racing simulation, from amazon.de. I really enjoy racing games and, while I do like arcade racers very much, I also play simulations. So for €9.95, what could I possibly do wrong?
Lots.
Installing the game killed my system. Obviously, the game employs the heinous StarForce copy protection system and the StarForce driver on the game DVD is incompatible with Windows Vista x64.
Luckily, I’m already prepared for these almost regular incidents and within 20 minutes, my drive image was restored. After some googling, I discovered a StarForce update that you can install after the game (but before rebooting) to get it working.
Next, I tried to register for an online account. The game simply displays the message “Registration Failed: Invalid CD-Key”. How great.
Being at least able to play offline, I tried to create an image of the game’s DVD in order to play with the image mounted in Daemon Tools (Advanced Pro’s IDE drive). Guess what? StarForce just hangs until I unmount the DVD, at which point it crashes.
Fantastic. So for buying the game, I can not play online and have to play disc jockey, fetching the CD each time I want to go for a drive.
Had I just downloaded a pirated version, I wouldn’t have been able to play online, too, just like it is now. But I wouldn’t have to keep the CD in my drive, my Vista x64 wouldn’t have been screwed up and I would not have the revolting StarForce drivers on my system.
What exactly was the point of all this key code and DVD verification stuff?
Maybe game producers could just stop pressing DVDs altogether and upload their game, cracked, to a warez site. Honest people then just transfer the money to their bank account and can play like everyone else - without fucking up their systems, trying to decipher badly printed CD keys and waiting for shipping.
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