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.
It sounds like you assume that if offline access was a fundamental right, the government would not only respect it, but the offline access would also be private by default. I think that is a bold assumption, but I think we’ll just have to disagree because it’s impossible to know what the government would actually do. I just know that society tends towards efficiency, and offline methods are simply inefficient, so I expect it to go away in the future, unless there was some fundamental reason why offline access was necessary (and not indirect reasons, like the right to privacy).
I think at this point it’s also good to revisit your original comment at the root of this thread so we can clarify what exactly you are asking for. It sounds like you are asking for two things: for offline methods to interact with government services and utilities (in other words, things necessary for survival), and for offline methods to use commercial services, like games.
What is the reason you want offline access to government services? Surely it’s not privacy, since you usually have to provide your government ID to interact with the service. My guess is that you want to avoid giving data to commercial entities, and also avoid interaction with commercial entities, like Microsoft. Your primary concerns are third-party data collection and boycott rights. So it sounds like you don’t necessarily want offline access, you want to be able to interact with government services without any other dependencies.
But the postal service is just one example I brought up. There are tons of other dependencies in the background. I’m positive most governments use Microsoft Word. They’ll be using it to draft the paperwork that they send to you. They probably scan and OCR your letters for archival, and their scanning software is probably commercial and collects data. If your goal is elimination of external dependencies, then offline access is just the tip of the iceberg. And just because these dependencies are hidden, doesn’t mean one can ignore them. If that was the case you could just send your documents to a friend and ask them to send it to the government for you, and ask them not to tell you how they did it. That way you wouldn’t know if a commercial service was involved!
OK and as for offline methods to use commercial services, like games, I think in this case your goal is privacy. However I think this demand is fairly unreasonable as well. Obviously there are certain services that require online access, like real-time chat applications. The problem is that any company can construct artificial reasons for why they need online access, or even data collection. Youtube can say that they require personal data to curate your feed. You already mentioned that data minimization laws were ineffective. I don’t see how you can reasonable expect companies bend over backwards to provide offline access, when it’s far simpler for them to just make up a reason for why they need online access, or why they need your personal data.
I should clarify since I realize I got a bit mixed up in earlier comments: when I argue that privacy should be a fundamental right, I don’t expect to force all companies to follow some vague definition of “data minimization”. I just want to make sure the government can’t ban encryption and anonymizing services like Tor. In other words I’m not forcing companies to perform certain actions, I’m preventing certain consumer actions from being criminalized. I think this is much more realistic of a goal. And I believe that as long as encryption and anonymization is possible, then certain individuals will want it, and certain companies and groups will provide it. Anti-trust is important here too.
Of course the market for privacy is tiny, but that’s simply the reality. Not many people care unfortunately, and it’s unrealistic to force companies to care about something few people care about. However, the good news is that some people do still care. There are FOSS re-writes of some of the games you mentioned. For Age of Empires theres 0.A.D and OpenAge. I think this is the best one can hope for.