I am thinking of buying sim city 4 & its expansions despite its age. Any opinions on whether or not I'd be wasting my money?
I think its worth it. I had it awile back and it was a lot of fun. Plus I have seen nothing but good ratings for the game. It got a 9.2 here http://pc.ign.com/articles/382/382583p1.html
not to mention its dirt cheap now. I might get it again seeing how I can not find my copy. http://www.pricegrabber.com/search_attrib.php?page_id=177&form_keyword=sim+city+4&rd=1
It's still the best of it's kind. My children still spend a couple hours a week on it, building up their city and then unleashing some disaster to destroy it. There is a new one called City Life that just came out that appears to be very similar to Sim City, but it's protected by Starforce so I won't be getting it. Even the demo of it has Starforce on it. I hope the software companies realize that their invasive DRM is driving paying customers away.
Ubisoft has dropped starforce in all future games. That was a very good sign. DRM ----> http://www.afterdawn.com/glossary/terms/drm.cfm Starforce is a copy protection that installes drivers on your computer before you can run the game. It uses the drivers to check your key and your CD rom drive for validation. The problem is that there are 10000 post about how it's been destorying computer hard drives and makeing them crash and so forth. There was a five million dollar lawsuite brought against Ubisoft claiming that the protection was destory their hard drivers. They dropped it in all future games and are currently using SecurRom protection which does not install drivers on your PC.
I can see how destroying hard drives is bad, but why does it do that? Surely its just a simple program which checks for keys and so forth? Or did they try and embed it somewhere they weren't supposed to?
The Starforce drivers are installed at Ring 0, which should only be used by System level drivers such as the Windows Kernel, Firewalls, Antivirus, and the like, not a game. Normally a program will run in Ring 3 (User mode). In some cases there have been reported conflicts with the drivers, something you don't want at Ring 0 when there is a potential for data corruption. http://news.com.com/5208-7349-0.html?forumID=1&threadID=11535&messageID=86205&start=-184 More info there and of course Starforce has a rebuttal on their website. http://www.star-force.com/protection/protection.phtml?c=353 Basically saying that others do it too. My opinion is that if install a firewall or antivirus, yes I want it operating at Ring 0, being able to intercept a problem. I don't want or need a Ring 0 driver on my system just to be able to play a game.
That rebuttle by Starforce Tech has quite a scary list of ring-0 applications. So does it mean that using programs like Daemon tools might be bad? Is it better just to write a CD itself rather than just using its image? how do you find out what games use starforce to protect their product? I think i want to steer clear of those.
There are a few games I've tried running and giving up after the first few min. Some of the games include: Toca Race Driver 3, Age of Pirates, and now this new game (which looks pretty awsome actually) called Rise and Fall. There are tons more im sure. I'd stay away from them though.
i HATE starforce, however how can it "destroy a hdd"? (i can see how it could destroy an optical drive) in the worse case wouldnt u just end up haveing to low level format and re-install windows? (i dont think even starforce could cause a head crash)
