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On 19/03/2025 19:15, Spalls Hurgenson wrote:
In a recent interview, founder of Hazelight Studios wrote that his
company --developer of the recently released "Split Fiction" game,
which has been getting quite good reviews - has had a very good
relationship with publisher Electronic Arts, and that he doesn't
understand why it receives so much hate.*
Oh, you innocent summer child, shall I count the ways? Bullfrog.
Origin. Westwood. Mythic. Visceral. Pandemic. Great studios all,
bought out and shut down by the beast.
Not enough? Lootboxes. Microtransactions. Endless live-service
madness. In-game gambling.
There's more, of course. Origin, or the EA App, or whatever that drek
they keep shoving in our face is called. The disastrous debut of
"Spore", with its onerous 5-installations-forever limit. Or 'there's
no way it could possibly run without an always-on online-connection'
release of "SimCity" in 2013.
Shall I mention games like "Ultima Forever", a terrible MTX heavy
mobile game that shat upon the Ultima legacy (followed up with similar
assassinations of the "Command & Conquer" and "Dungeon Keeper" games)?
Or the publisher's insistence, against developers preferences, that
their in-house Frostbite engine be used in games that would have been
better off using something else. Or just all of its half-assed sports
titles, each little more than a minor revision of the previous but
with a more current roster and incompatible with last year's MTX
purchases.
Or maybe it's just how they mistreated their employees, earning the
corporation the 'worst company in America' title over multiple years.
It's constant battles against SAG-AFRTA for not paying its
voice-actors? The disastrous handling of their feud with
West/Zampella? The massive layoffs the company keeps performing even
as its profits soar?
No, I can't imagine why people have such a dim view of the publisher.
It's great that Hazelight has a great relationship with EA, but most
people aren't just looking at 'how a company deals with its partners'
but at the overall picture, and EA does not come out of that
examination smelling like roses. It's earned its reputation.
But besides all of that what have EA done wrong?
On Sat, 22 Mar 2025 08:47:31 +0000, in comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action, JAB wrote:
But besides all of that what have EA done wrong?
They also killed Princess Diana. Or so I've been told.
On 22/03/2025 12:37, Zaghadka wrote:
On Sat, 22 Mar 2025 08:47:31 +0000, in comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action, JAB
wrote:
But besides all of that what have EA done wrong?
They also killed Princess Diana. Or so I've been told.
No that was MI5 or maybe MI6, can't remember now.
On Wed, 19 Mar 2025 15:15:05 -0400, in comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action,
Spalls Hurgenson wrote:
The sad thing is, I still think EA is one of the _better_ triple-A >>publishers... because the rest of them are even worse!I remember back in the C=64 days when I would buy anything published by
EA, because they were *that* good. Of course I would immediately crack
their stupid 10 minute long half-track loader (their proprietary DRM) and have the game load up in 3 seconds with FastLoad.
And for people who didn't crack the endless EA logo loading screen? I
made a fortune realigning 1541 hard drives so it would work. I always
offered the pirate tool though.
But still, Archon, Seven Cities of Gold, MULE. They were amazing.
On Sun, 23 Mar 2025 06:20:05 -0000 (UTC), candycanearter07
<candycanearter07@candycanearter07.nomail.afraid> wrote:
Zaghadka <zaghadka@hotmail.com> wrote at 22:13 this Friday (GMT):
On Wed, 19 Mar 2025 15:15:05 -0400, in comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action,
Spalls Hurgenson wrote:
The sad thing is, I still think EA is one of the _better_ triple-A >>>>publishers... because the rest of them are even worse!I remember back in the C=64 days when I would buy anything published by
EA, because they were *that* good. Of course I would immediately crack
their stupid 10 minute long half-track loader (their proprietary DRM) and >>> have the game load up in 3 seconds with FastLoad.
And for people who didn't crack the endless EA logo loading screen? I
made a fortune realigning 1541 hard drives so it would work. I always
offered the pirate tool though.
But still, Archon, Seven Cities of Gold, MULE. They were amazing.
Wait, why did the DRM take so long?
Not having heard of half-tracks, I did some quick googling and
realized that they were the same thing as Fat Tracks, which is what I
knew them as. The trick was that the copy protection wrote three
tracks data on the floppy disk onto two tracks, something home systems couldn't easily do (it basically fucked around with the formatting and overwrote half of a track.)
[Think of tracks like concentric rings around a disk. Each ring
has a start/end point that is synchronized with the ones below
it. The publisher would write to one track, then before writing
the next, stop writing for half a revolution, then overwrite
that same track from the halfway mark (with a new marker for a
'start' point), then wait half a revolution (so the drive synced
up with the normal formatting again. Essentially, you get one
track with two start points this way. It doesn't allow you to
get more data on the disk, it's just fucking with the
synchronization points on the floppy]
This made it harder for home users to 'copy that floppy' for their
friends, since the program would check for this 'half track' of data
stuck between the two regular tracks, and -not finding it- would halt
the game or application.
I don't know if it was actually slower but I can imagine it was.
Reading that half track was probably almost as tricky as writing it;
you can't just use regular disk routines but had to add the extra
overhead of using your own disk-read software... which was probably an
even bigger hit on the C64, since you then had to rely on the
computer's main CPU instead of offloading it to the floppy-drive
electronics.
[The C64 floppy drive was basically its own separate computer,
which is why it cost almost as much as the C64 itself. This
usually meant a program could just offload read/write duties to
the floppy drive and then get back to doing its own thing on
the C64's main processor, but if you were fucking around with
oddball copy-protection methods that may not have been an option
It wasn't a very successful copy protection method. Apparently users
could, if they made enough attempts, accidentally get their copy
programs to duplicate the half-track, and even if they couldn't, the
routine that checked for the 'half track' it was easily patched out by crackers.
[Written from memory and half-scanned articles on the web.
Errors likely abound. Feel free to offer corrections ;-)]
It wasn't a very successful copy protection method. Apparently users
could, if they made enough attempts, accidentally get their copy
programs to duplicate the half-track, and even if they couldn't, the
routine that checked for the 'half track' it was easily patched out by >crackers.
Shit! You guys think Denuvo is bad? The "scene" *exists in the first
place* because C=64 CP was so gobsmackingly outrageous.
I came from Spectrum land and there, as I presume trying to stop people >copying tapes was hard, they went down the route of physical things you
have to have. Some examples are just typing in certain words from the
manual, colour charts (colour photo copiers, not that common) and the
most dreaded of all - Lenslock. The was a piece of plastic with a
special lens in it that you placed over the screen and then hoped, with
as many fingers crossed as you could manage, you could see what you
needed to type in to start the game. It was a right PITA as if you
actually bought the game then you used this awful method, get a pirate
copy and it was likely to be patched out.
That said, Lenslok's footprint in gaming history is exagerated. It was
only used in 12 games. This was partly because of the aforementioned problems, but also because the cost of manufacturing the lenses added
too much to the cost of the games.
On Mon, 24 Mar 2025 09:03:51 +0000, JAB <noway@nochance.com> wrote:
On 23/03/2025 19:00, Zaghadka wrote:
Shit! You guys think Denuvo is bad? The "scene" *exists in the first
place* because C=64 CP was so gobsmackingly outrageous.
I came from Spectrum land and there, as I presume trying to stop people
copying tapes was hard, they went down the route of physical things you
have to have. Some examples are just typing in certain words from the
manual, colour charts (colour photo copiers, not that common) and the
most dreaded of all - Lenslock. The was a piece of plastic with a
special lens in it that you placed over the screen and then hoped, with
as many fingers crossed as you could manage, you could see what you
needed to type in to start the game. It was a right PITA as if you
actually bought the game then you used this awful method, get a pirate
copy and it was likely to be patched out.
Indeed. It got to the point that at a certain point it became
advantageous for publishers to market their games as /not/ having
on-disk copy protection (instead relying, as mentioned, on manual
look-ups, code-wheels, or even -very rarely- dongles) because stopping
people from copying the disks was becoming so onerous and pointless.
Which is (mostly) where I entered into gaming. I only dabbled with the 8-bits, so I was spared most of the worst excesses of on-disk copy-protection, but I ran smack-dab into the offline variety. In
fact, I can think of only one PC game I encountered that used it ("Lemmings"), with everything else relying on manual checks, etc.
But, honestly, I didn't mind most of the latter. It was, after all, an
era when most manuals were written well enough that you didn't mind
thumbing through them, and often the copy-protection checks were so integrated into the game so that they felt more like a necessary part
of the storyline than an onerous check. And none of them were
impossible to bypass, even if all you had was a pen and paper (and a
little time). So you /could/ pass on a game to your friends, if you
really wanted to, but you'd only if you /really/ liked it, because it
took a lot of work.
[or a connection to a local BBS with a cracks section in
their downloads area ;-)]
That said, Lenslok's footprint in gaming history is exagerated. It was
only used in 12 games. This was partly because of the aforementioned problems, but also because the cost of manufacturing the lenses added
too much to the cost of the games.
But for all that, I still have warmer feelings toward EA than any of
its other triple-A competitors (Activision, Ubisoft, Take2, etc.)
since -for all its ruthless, money-focused actions- they still seem
the most interested in making games, while the others seem just to
want to make products. Although I'll be the first to admit that might
be because I -like others here- have a certain nostalgia for the
company from back when they released games in albums 😉
On Mon, 24 Mar 2025 09:03:51 +0000, JAB <noway@nochance.com> wrote:
I came from Spectrum land and there, as I presume trying to stop people
copying tapes was hard, they went down the route of physical things you
have to have. Some examples are just typing in certain words from the
manual, colour charts (colour photo copiers, not that common) and the
most dreaded of all - Lenslock. The was a piece of plastic with a
special lens in it that you placed over the screen and then hoped, with
as many fingers crossed as you could manage, you could see what you
needed to type in to start the game. It was a right PITA as if you
actually bought the game then you used this awful method, get a pirate
copy and it was likely to be patched out.
I watched videos of Lenslock. I personally could not read the
numbers on the screen. What an awful copy protection scheme.
Fortunately, I never had to deal with it back in the day.
Oh I did and it was just finicky to get it to work. To rub salt into the >wound I thought, hang on a sec I've actually paid to buy this thing
although strictly speaking not really as ú10 was by then the anchor
price for premium games which you can blame Ultimate for with Sabre Wulf.
On Tue, 25 Mar 2025 09:16:17 +0000, JAB <noway@nochance.com> wrote:
Oh I did and it was just finicky to get it to work. To rub salt into the >>wound I thought, hang on a sec I've actually paid to buy this thing >>although strictly speaking not really as ú10 was by then the anchor
price for premium games which you can blame Ultimate for with Sabre Wulf.
The craziest copy protection scheme I had to deal with was having to
plug in this adapter\dongle thingy that came with one of my games to
play it. I thought that was weird, but that has nothing on Lenslock.
On 3/24/2025 7:33 AM, Spalls Hurgenson wrote:
That's about 15 games too many.
That said, Lenslok's footprint in gaming history is exagerated. It was
only used in 12 games. This was partly because of the aforementioned
problems, but also because the cost of manufacturing the lenses added
too much to the cost of the games.
Dimensional Traveler <dtravel@sonic.net> wrote at 14:59 this Monday (GMT):
On 3/24/2025 7:33 AM, Spalls Hurgenson wrote:
That's about 15 games too many.
That said, Lenslok's footprint in gaming history is exagerated. It was
only used in 12 games. This was partly because of the aforementioned
problems, but also because the cost of manufacturing the lenses added
too much to the cost of the games.
Where did the other 3 come from?
On Tue, 25 Mar 2025 14:01:59 -0400, Mike S. <Mike_S@nowhere.com>
wrote:
On Tue, 25 Mar 2025 09:16:17 +0000, JAB <noway@nochance.com> wrote:
Oh I did and it was just finicky to get it to work. To rub salt into the >>>wound I thought, hang on a sec I've actually paid to buy this thing >>>although strictly speaking not really as ú10 was by then the anchor
price for premium games which you can blame Ultimate for with Sabre Wulf.
The craziest copy protection scheme I had to deal with was having to
plug in this adapter\dongle thingy that came with one of my games to
play it. I thought that was weird, but that has nothing on Lenslock.
The most famous game on computer to use dongle-based copy protection
was Ocean's "Robocop 3" (and even that game dropped the dongle pretty
quickly because it didn't offer significantly more protection, but did
raise the cost of the game!). "10th Frame", "B.A.T" and "Leaderbord"
and "Neutral Zone" were amongst the handful of others that implemented
dongle protection. Apparently some games on consoles also used dongles
to help bypass the licensing checks used by Nintendo etc. to make sure
only "allowed" games ran on "their" hardware.
Players, in general, hated dongles. The disadvantages were numerous.
They suffered from hardware compatibility issues with hardware that
usually worked well enough but wasn't close enough to spec to work
with the dongle. Dongles were easily lost. If you had multiple games
with dongles, you either had to swap them out (and thus risk losing
one) or face possible compatibility issues caused by chaining dongles.
Checking for the presence of the dongle could often be slow. They
added to the price of the game. And unlike off-disk copy-protection,
they added nothing to the experience of the game (I mean, sure
code-wheels were annoying, but at least you got to spin the wheel ;-).
So you didn't see many games that actually used a hardware dongle.
Of course, for a while CD-ROM based disk-protection could have been
seen as a form of dongle; keep the disk in the drive or the game won't
run! ;-)
Dongles were _a lot_ more common on application software, because the
price of the hardware device was more easily absorbed into the very
high price of the application. Also, because these apps were more
expensive, end users were more likely to take care of them (as opposed
to kids and their throw-away games). But when you were talking about a
$5000 program, you better believe that you knew where the dongle was! >Furthermore, because the app was likely to be in continued use for
year after year, it was much less likely to get unplugged and lost, as >opposed to a game which you will probably stop playing (and remove the >dongle) after a few months.
All this made dongles a lot more common in business software than in
games. The only software I remember specifically that used a dongle
was Quark Xpress, an early desktop-publishing program, but dongles
were endemic. I recall one instance when an office had a bunch of
dongles (one plugged into the next plugged into the next) that was
easily a foot in length (and the dongles had to be plugged into one
another in a VERY specific order otherwise they wouldn't work).
Dongles are still used to this day; fortunately, most are USB these
days rather than parallel or serial-port based so at least the pain of >chaining is gone ;-)
The sad thing is, I still think EA is one of the _better_ triple-A >publishers... because the rest of them are even worse!
Ever thought about sending your feedback opinions to them directly? I
don't think they will see them here.
In a recent interview, founder of Hazelight Studios wrote that his
company --developer of the recently released "Split Fiction" game,
which has been getting quite good reviews - has had a very good
relationship with publisher Electronic Arts, and that he doesn't
understand why it receives so much hate.*
Oh, you innocent summer child, shall I count the ways? Bullfrog.
Origin. Westwood. Mythic. Visceral. Pandemic. Great studios all,
bought out and shut down by the beast.
Not enough? Lootboxes. Microtransactions. Endless live-service
madness. In-game gambling.
There's more, of course. Origin, or the EA App, or whatever that drek
they keep shoving in our face is called. The disastrous debut of
"Spore", with its onerous 5-installations-forever limit. Or 'there's
no way it could possibly run without an always-on online-connection'
release of "SimCity" in 2013.
Shall I mention games like "Ultima Forever", a terrible MTX heavy
mobile game that shat upon the Ultima legacy (followed up with similar assassinations of the "Command & Conquer" and "Dungeon Keeper" games)?
Or the publisher's insistence, against developers preferences, that
their in-house Frostbite engine be used in games that would have been
better off using something else. Or just all of its half-assed sports
titles, each little more than a minor revision of the previous but
with a more current roster and incompatible with last year's MTX
purchases.
Or maybe it's just how they mistreated their employees, earning the corporation the 'worst company in America' title over multiple years.
It's constant battles against SAG-AFRTA for not paying its
voice-actors? The disastrous handling of their feud with
West/Zampella? The massive layoffs the company keeps performing even
as its profits soar?
No, I can't imagine why people have such a dim view of the publisher.
It's great that Hazelight has a great relationship with EA, but most
people aren't just looking at 'how a company deals with its partners'
but at the overall picture, and EA does not come out of that
examination smelling like roses. It's earned its reputation.
On 3/25/2025 3:40 PM, candycanearter07 wrote:
Dimensional Traveler <dtravel@sonic.net> wrote at 14:59 this Monday (GMT): >>> On 3/24/2025 7:33 AM, Spalls Hurgenson wrote:
That's about 15 games too many.
That said, Lenslok's footprint in gaming history is exagerated. It was >>>> only used in 12 games. This was partly because of the aforementioned
problems, but also because the cost of manufacturing the lenses added
too much to the cost of the games.
Where did the other 3 come from?
If you have to ask you wouldn't understand the answer.
Dimensional Traveler <dtravel@sonic.net> wrote at 01:14 this Wednesday (GMT):
On 3/25/2025 3:40 PM, candycanearter07 wrote:
Dimensional Traveler <dtravel@sonic.net> wrote at 14:59 this Monday (GMT): >>>> On 3/24/2025 7:33 AM, Spalls Hurgenson wrote:
That's about 15 games too many.
That said, Lenslok's footprint in gaming history is exagerated. It was >>>>> only used in 12 games. This was partly because of the aforementioned >>>>> problems, but also because the cost of manufacturing the lenses added >>>>> too much to the cost of the games.
Where did the other 3 come from?
If you have to ask you wouldn't understand the answer.
Well, I definitely won't if you won't tell me :D
On Wed, 19 Mar 2025 15:15:05 -0400, in comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action,
Spalls Hurgenson wrote:
The sad thing is, I still think EA is one of the _better_ triple-A >>publishers... because the rest of them are even worse!I remember back in the C=64 days when I would buy anything published by
EA, because they were *that* good. Of course I would immediately crack
their stupid 10 minute long half-track loader (their proprietary DRM) and >have the game load up in 3 seconds with FastLoad.
And for people who didn't crack the endless EA logo loading screen? I
made a fortune realigning 1541 hard drives so it would work. I always
offered the pirate tool though.
But still, Archon, Seven Cities of Gold, MULE. They were amazing.
On Sat, 29 Mar 2025 09:07:30 -0400, shawn
<nanoflower@notforg.m.a.i.l.com> wrote:
On Fri, 21 Mar 2025 17:13:36 -0500, Zaghadka <zaghadka@hotmail.com>
wrote:
On Wed, 19 Mar 2025 15:15:05 -0400, in comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action, >>>Spalls Hurgenson wrote:
The sad thing is, I still think EA is one of the _better_ triple-A >>>>publishers... because the rest of them are even worse!I remember back in the C=64 days when I would buy anything published by >>>EA, because they were *that* good. Of course I would immediately crack >>>their stupid 10 minute long half-track loader (their proprietary DRM) and >>>have the game load up in 3 seconds with FastLoad.
And for people who didn't crack the endless EA logo loading screen? I >>>made a fortune realigning 1541 hard drives so it would work. I always >>>offered the pirate tool though.
But still, Archon, Seven Cities of Gold, MULE. They were amazing.
Indeed back in the Trip Hawkins era they were a great company. Focused
on making money but also celebrating the developer. Sadly those days
are long gone.
The myth is that Hawkins founded EA based on the idea of promoting the >developer and that the entire "album cover" packaging was to push the
idea of software as 'art' and developers as 'rockstars. I don't doubt
there was some truth to it (if only because the act created the ideal
rather than the other way around), but from what I've read, internally
the company was as ruthless and pushy with its developers as any of
its competitors.
But it made for a nice story and even if Hawkins didn't personally buy
into it, it did help to raise developers from faceless backroom >number-crunchers into human beings and game development into something
that might be an enjoyable career.
Me, I just loved the album-cover form-factor. Had PC gaming fully
embraced that, I might still have all my box-covers ;-)
On 3/28/2025 8:50 AM, candycanearter07 wrote:
Dimensional Traveler <dtravel@sonic.net> wrote at 01:14 this Wednesday (GMT):
On 3/25/2025 3:40 PM, candycanearter07 wrote:
Dimensional Traveler <dtravel@sonic.net> wrote at 14:59 this Monday (GMT): >>>>> On 3/24/2025 7:33 AM, Spalls Hurgenson wrote:
That's about 15 games too many.
That said, Lenslok's footprint in gaming history is exagerated. It was >>>>>> only used in 12 games. This was partly because of the aforementioned >>>>>> problems, but also because the cost of manufacturing the lenses added >>>>>> too much to the cost of the games.
Where did the other 3 come from?
If you have to ask you wouldn't understand the answer.
Well, I definitely won't if you won't tell me :D
Its a way of saying they never should have done it in the first place.
Sort of like saying you could have prevented WW2 by killing Hitler's
parents before he was born.
Of the games I paid for as a youngun, I consider Elite the best, only
rivaled by (you'll probably laugh at this) Zork III.
read leaflet"WELCOME TO USENET!
On Wed, 19 Mar 2025 15:15:05 -0400, in comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action,
Spalls Hurgenson wrote:
The sad thing is, I still think EA is one of the _better_ triple-AI remember back in the C=64 days when I would buy anything published by
publishers... because the rest of them are even worse!
EA, because they were *that* good. Of course I would immediately crack
their stupid 10 minute long half-track loader (their proprietary DRM) and have the game load up in 3 seconds with FastLoad.
And for people who didn't crack the endless EA logo loading screen? I
made a fortune realigning 1541 hard drives so it would work. I always
offered the pirate tool though.
But still, Archon, Seven Cities of Gold, MULE. They were amazing.
ndeed back in the Trip Hawkins era they were a great company. Focused
on making money but also celebrating the developer. Sadly those days
are long gone.
Am 21.03.25 um 23:13 schrieb Zaghadka:
On Wed, 19 Mar 2025 15:15:05 -0400, in comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action,EA went sideways when they struck gold with annual sports titles from
Spalls Hurgenson wrote:
The sad thing is, I still think EA is one of the _better_ triple-AI remember back in the C=64 days when I would buy anything published by
publishers... because the rest of them are even worse!
EA, because they were *that* good. Of course I would immediately crack
their stupid 10 minute long half-track loader (their proprietary DRM) and
have the game load up in 3 seconds with FastLoad.
And for people who didn't crack the endless EA logo loading screen? I
made a fortune realigning 1541 hard drives so it would work. I always
offered the pirate tool though.
But still, Archon, Seven Cities of Gold, MULE. They were amazing.
that onwards, games were secondary, corporatism was primary!
And yes they were amazing in the early 80s, but so was Activision and
Sierra!