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Continuing its multiple “Schadenfreudian Slips” columns for Gamasutra, notable and more than a little eccentric German game company Schadenfreude Interactive presents an anecdotal account of the hardships of trying to find the right copy protection.

Schadenfreudian Slips: Copy Protection Racket

A silly story based around modern copy protection for games. What sucked me in and made me laugh was the look at old copy-protection schemes that I had forgotten about.

I remember especially games such as Keef the Thief, which had a large extremely dark brown copy protection manual (dark to deter photocopies), full of long and cryptic words on numbered pages. The game would ask you at many junctures to provide a word from a certain “paragraph” on a certain page. There were previous and other instances of this type of scheme in other games and software, but this one sticks out in my head mainly because I had to strain for minutes to read these black-on-dark-brown letters. By the time I had found the page, killed my eyes, and entered it, I had forgotten what exactly I was doing in the damn game!

Books that are no longer under copyright can now be downloaded in full (in pdf format) from Google Book Search for free.

While this is hardly a new idea (see: the Perseus Digital Library or Project Gutenberg), it is the first time they are in full PDF format. This should preserve the format and style of the pages, not just the text.

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Ok, a lot better. A new video was leaked/released from GC 06.

While not exactly the same spirit as the original game (and no, the original is not TFC), this one has an awesome “The Incredibles” look to it, and the quirky comic fun along with it.

I know the video is heavily scripted, but holy crap it looks like fun!

Especially gotta love the rocket jumping dance number at the end.

The second Guitar Hero related story in as many days! Shocking!

What prompted me to start writing about my exploits in Linux this summer, beyond the fact that summer is almost over, is a discovery I made while exploring Linux gaming. One of the biggest impedance to Linux to a very active gamer as myself is the gaming aspect. Everyone knows that most commercial games are released Windows-only, and have been for years. So during my summer Linux trials, I have frequently been looking to see all that Linux has to offer to my gaming habits.

Today that search led me to Frets on Fire. While perusing several lists of games, I read one that described this as a guitar playing simulation, and that instantly rang the bells in my head that said: Guitar Hero clone. I’ve been looking for a good PC Guitar hero clone, and the only thing I had previously found was Freetar Hero. I had been following the progress of Freetar Hero for awhile, and while it is coming along nicely, the only thing released is a limited song editor. No flashy game, and not much to it.

Today, I stumble across a full game including editor, that runs in both Windows in Linux, and does not need the Guitar Hero controller. Since I was already booted into Ubuntu, I installed it first in Linux. First off, the tutorial voiceover is beyond annoying, but it shows off the game well. Even tells you to hold you keyboard like a guitar and use the F-keys as strings and the enter key as the pick. Cheesy, but it works. It was made more bulky by my Logitech G15, but I could always plug in my old keyboard to a USB port when I want to give it a whirl.

The songs are not any you would recognize, as they seem made just for the game, but they are reasonably fun to play. Each has three difficulty settings. The scrolling song action is very well done, already polished and only lacking in background visuals. You have multiple note scoring, and bright visual indicators of hits and misses. The sounds go all screwy when you miss notes, and they play satisfyingly loud when you nail it. The only things missing from the full Guitar Hero experience are the whammy bar and the tilting action, which I’m not sure can ever be duplicated with a keyboard.

I haven’t goofed around with the song editor enough to give it a good review, but it seemed complete and solid. I’ll have to give it a run with an actual song. And that brings us to a problem, the community for this game is very small, and there are a very sparse amount of songs converted to the game. I’m not sure if the song editor is at fault, the game is too new, or the community is not large enough, but there are less than a dozen songs I found on the message boards. Freetar Hero boasts many dozens, possibly hundreds, even with just an editor released.

I hope many others try out Frets on Fire, looking beyond the cheesy tutorial, and start popping out some songs! I don’t have a PS2, damnit!

update 1: Turns out there are plenty of songs if you register on the Frets on Fire forums. Still not as prolific a community as Freetar Hero, but all they have is an editor, so they may devote more time to cranking out songs. Also, almost all the FoF community songs are on “amazing” difficulty, and most are very tough.

One of many things I’ve neglected to write about is my adventures with Linux this summer. As I was forced (oh so willingly) into having my first summer off in 10+ years, I knew I needed projects to keep from boredom. While drinking mass quantities of tequila may be considered a project to some, I set my goals slightly higher.

I played around with the ideas of writing some Firefox extensions, such as porting PicArray over, or fixing DownloadSort to be able to treat upper- and lower-case extensions the same. I also thought of offering my limited coding skills to the PRMM project. Then I thought of the hobbies I’ve neglected, such as the guitar, painting, movie editing, cooking, and many others. I dabbled around until I thought of the perfect one. (One is more than enough for me and my ant-length attention span.) I decided to make a real go at using Linux as my desktop (for the umpteenth time).

Before I had shot at it from the sidelines. Over the years I’ve installed various distros: Suse, Slackware, RedHat, etc. All of them for various reasons, Suse had a huge native application list that installed with it, Slackware was for “power users and tweakers”, RedHat was for the masses. But this time, I wanted to actually not just putz around with it, but I wanted to use it as much as possible. This is a goal that’s difficulty is inversely proportional to how many things you do on a computer. I happen to do alot. I have a bazillion applications that I use weekly that are tweaked just-so in Windows to my tastes. Not to mention I have tweaked Windows far beyond what a normal user would do. My goal with Linux this time was to attempt to be able to do everything I can in Windows, and hopefully better.

I chose the Ubuntu distro for two reasons, one is: my school (University of Texas) had switched the majority of the Linux machines in the Computer Science area to Ubuntu. First Breezy, and more recently to Dapper. The second reason is that the Ubuntu community seems to be more active, or at least more prolific, and in technical matters, I’ve always found the best help from other users in an active community. So, I go to the Ubuntu site, and peruse their offerings. I look at the live CDs and choose one I think is appropriate to my machine, an AMD64 build of Dapper Drake… my first mistake.

I fired up the LiveCD and played around with it. I was duly impressed; things had progressed much since the last time I had tried Linux as a desktop (I have used it as a web server and FTP server for years, but as a desktop it’s been 3-4 years since I’ve tried it). Ubuntu was sharp and snappy, and the included apps were very impressive. So, I started to look into installing it permanently. I had cleared a bunch of space on one of my non-booting SATA drives, as I had heard there was something akin to Partition Magic that could resize my partitions to allow a Linux install. It turns out it is much better: qtparted. This little utility comes with the LiveCD and will repartition on-the-fly using unused space. No need to defragment beforehand or anything. Not only that, it totally resized and added two partitions in less than 5 minutes. I think it was closer to 2 minutes. I am impressed yet again.

Then I get on to the install. Snappy, quick, and its done. The result was a much faster Ubuntu than the LiveCD, obviously, and time to get myself in real trouble… installing applications to make it my own. AMD64 Ubuntu is dual booted and ready. It loads up on a non-primary SATA drive on the last partition on it, and runs perfectly. Time to screw things up!

More on that in the next installment.

or at least this guy’s health.

It seems he had a particularly exuberant session of Guitar Hero, and while going for maximum points, he managed to cripple himself.

I was face to face with my Arch Nemesis/Very Good Friend/Roommate Craig. It was time to see who could out rock each other while playing Texas Flood.

We were neck in neck in points… I had to do something special. I needed STYLE points. I breathed deep, my rock meter was maxed out and I was going to make this audience feel it. I twisted to the right and threw my guitar in the air! Instead of a roaring audience I heard a loud snap! My knee slid to the outside of my leg and my leg bent sideways as I fell to the ground.

I guess they need to include airbags on those things.

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