With nothing important to do this morning (except for all that studying that I should be tackling), I decided to play a favourite game of mine – 1701 A.D. It’s an excellent RTS-style game from Germany in which you play the role of an explorer in the new world. It is your task to build a successful settlement that supports itself and glorifies the Queen. Think SimCity meets Age of Empires, all rendered in pretty graphics and with engrossing game play that will easily make your entire day fly right by. Unless, of course, you try to install and run the game on Windows Vista:
Alright, so, the installer must have failed. I went and ran DrvSetup_x64.exe from the game disc, and got another fantastic error message:
Well, that’s handy. A Google and a half later, I found a slew of angry posts about Tages copy protection on various message boards. I gather that Tages essentially installs a copy-protection driver to your system that isn’t signed by Microsoft. This is an issue under Vista, and the system refuses to install the driver for security reasons. You can reboot and tell Vista to not require that drivers be signed by tapping F8 at boot and selecting “Disable Driver Signature Enforcement” from the boot menu, but according to these posts, you have to perform this action every time you wish to play the game, which is a big security hole as well as a big pain in the ass.
I found a link to an updated version of the drivers at the Tages website that were signed by Microsoft, and installed with no issues, finally allowing me to run a game that I legitimately paid for instead of simply pirating. While I appreciate the situation that studios and distributors find themselves in regarding piracy, I can’t help but be indignant when confronted with copy protection schemes that punish the honest customer. Between my mother and I, our family has purchased three copies of this game, and every previous installment of the franchise. She wouldn’t have been able to figure out the issue with the drivers. Why weren’t the drivers distributed on the game disc signed by Microsoft? Why did the game not automatically update the drivers after validating a legitimate install? Why was there no post about this issue on the game website?
I have to admit that while looking for a solution, I did consider torrenting a cracked version of the game instead of bothering to fix my legitimate copy, which is funny, because the Tages website states that:
The proof of TAGES™’s effectiveness is undeniable as illustrated on various web sites. All major competitors have been hacked and the hackers have made generic cracks available for free. Anyone can break into these systems and produce illegal copies. With TAGES™ there will never be a generic crack, and there will never be one-to-one copies. It is physically impossible.
An interesting claim, since a quick Google search shows quite a few illegal versions of the game available for torrent. At the end of the day, while I cannot condone piracy, this kind of nonsense really gets me angry. I understand that piracy is pushing developers away from the PC platform and toward the more secure Console systems. I understand that piracy can destroy the user experience of a game; but I demand that if a company is going to take steps to prevent piracy, they do it well, and don’t inhibit the actions of legitimate users of paid copies of their product. You wouldnt knowingly push a game to market that had a bug that made it unplayable – so why do DRM schemes get a free pass?
