Battleangel

Call me complaintive and a lazy non-contributor to the scene but recent events have made me wonder where all this is heading.

Cracked ISO CD / DVD vs CloneCD / DVD As it stands we are seeing a flood of CloneCD releases which is downright awful. I’m sorry, it just is. I don’t use CDs anymore and I can’t play the game unless I do get the image on one, provided I have the hardware to enable Clone CD writing of up to date protections. The only solution left is to burn the ISO files directly to a DVD and mount them from there. And hope that a cracked exe or whatever is made available in the future.
Just look the the recent releases like Half-Life 2, Flatout and Vampire: Bloodlines. All quickly released with no “no-cd” cracks to follow. It’s too bad really. Some people are even going so far as to question if Clone releases are real releases at all or just lazy excuses to be the first to claim the fame. Or if copy protections have gotten so intricate this is to be expected. I guess it depends on the popularity of the game also. Look at Sims 2 for example. Even though the initial release was a Clone, quite a few botched patches followed that may or may not work (like the “fixed images”, what is up with that?), at least people tried.

And I know that many have been requesting Clone releases in order to simplify the application of official upgrade patches. Like it’s really so difficult to keep a backup of a few files or include them with a crack. But that is fine with me. Diversity is good. It’s just sad to see that this happens at the expense of cracks. It’s like when, years ago, people started wanting ISOs instead of RIPs. My view has always been that I don’t care. It’s a false sense of perfection that people are chasing here. Much like with DVD images of movies and FLAC / APE music releases. I’m all for perfection but there has to be a reason for it other than feeling snug about knowing that you have a copy that is 99.9% like the original. I’d accept a RIP any day unless it in some MAJOR way interfered with the gameplay. Many single-player-only games are perfect for RIPs. And if RIPs are out for some practical reason then I’d happily accept an ISO. Only if all else fails would I accept a _permanent_ Clone game, one that I would have to run off of a CD or DVD / keep on disk and mount forever and ever.

Piracy has changed in the last couple of years from being all demos, rips and coding to reproducing perfect copies of a product. And it brings new legal, ethical and practical issues into focus.

I guess early releases are worth the lack of cracks, at least if it’s a product you really, really want. But the development is still troubling. I guess no one likes changes. Cracked ISO releases have after all been the standard format for as long as I can remember.