From Twitter: Told the kids "do it again, you'll go to your rooms." Then they did it again. Now they're in their rooms. Really not that complicated. 1 hr ago
My “hardcore” gaming friends already know who Ubisoft is; for those of you who don’t, here’s a brief synopsis: Ubisoft was founded in 1986 by five French-Canadian brothers. They started off as a game publisher in the mid-to-late 80s, and moved to game development in the early 90s. By 2000, Ubisoft began swallowing up other gaming companies. In 2000 they bought Red Storm Entertainment, and in 2001 they bought the rights to games published by Broderbund, Mattel, Mindscape, and SSI. Among other releases, Ubisoft has been responsible for most of the Tom Clancy game series (Rainbow Six, Splinter Cell, and Ghost Recon). According to Wikipedia, in 2008 Ubisoft was “the third-largest independent video game publisher in Europe, and the fourth largest in the United States.”
Another thing Ubisoft is known for is their aggressive forms of copy protection.
First was Ubisoft’s “CD Check”, which I experienced first hand via the Ubisoft title Ghost Recon. The CD Check on Ghost Recon forced players to insert the game’s CD into their PC every time they wanted to play, and leave it inserted the entire time they were playing. Of course a lot of pirates thought this was a pretty dumb idea, so they released a “No CD” crack that removed that feature from Ghost Recon. So basically, if you bought the game you got punished by having to put the CD in the drive and leave it in there, but if you stole the game you didn’t have to put up with that nonsense. Eventually, so many people complained (and the CD Check was causing so many installation problems) that Ubisoft released their own “No CD” crack for Rainbow Six Vegas 2 … except they didn’t write their own; they stole and repackaged one written by a piracy group. Oh yeah, people noticed.
And then a few years later there was Ubisoft’s “StarForce” copy protection, a system that installed hidden drivers and crashed a lot of people’s computers. As you can imagine, a lot of people didn’t particularly care to have their machines destroyed, so they stole and installed cracked copies of Ubisoft games, copies that had the StarForce copy protection removed. If you’re keeping score so far, “people who pay for Ubisoft titles” are 0, and “people to steal them” are 2.
Ubisoft also used SecuRom, specifically in Far Cry 2. SecuRom is a form of DRM that limits the number of times a particular game can be installed and re-installed. It also doesn’t remove itself from your computer, even after you uninstall the game. In 2008 there was a class action lawsuit against Electronic Arts for using it. Did cracked copies of Far Cry 2 contain SecuRom? No it did not. 0 to 3.
In January of 2010, Ubisoft went back to the drawing board and came up with an all new form of copy protection — since, you know, things have gone so well for them in the past. Ubisoft’s all new “Online Services Platform” is a new form of copy protection that requires legitimate game owners to connect to Ubisoft’s servers via the Internet, and remained connected while playing. If your network connection is interrupted, your game either pauses or terminates. Ubisoft has included Online Services Platform protection on Assassin’s Creed 2 and Silent Hunter 5, which was released this week.
In interviews and articles spread across the web, this latest form of copy protection has been touted as being “unbreakable”. And just for the record, calling any form of copy protection “unbreakable” is pretty stupid.
Care to guess what happened?
Cracking group “Skid-Row” cracked Silent Hunter 5 the day it was released.
But wait, it gets better.
Hackers and pirates across the globe have started attacking Ubisoft’s DRM servers this week. Not only has this created a huge PR nightmare and headache for Ubisoft, but it also means that when the servers are down, the people who paid for the game can’t play it. That’s right; if you can’t connect to the server, the game doesn’t work. Once again, the people who are stealing the game(s) for free can play them, while those who paid for them, cannot. When are these morons going to learn?
My favorite PC-based gaming franchise of all time is Ghost Recon, and a new game in the series is slated to be released this Fall. Ubisoft, if you’re listening, hear this: if Ghost Recon: Future Soldier contains one of your stupid new DRM schemes, I will not pay for it. Period.
Stupid February is so short that I didn’t remember to schedule Nasty Pirates night until the last day of the month. “No matter!” cried the pirates! (I mean, they are pirates, for goodness sake; it’s not like they’re tied to a calendar or something.) And so, February’s gathering of Nasty Pirates actually took place in March. (Please don’t tell the other pirates. They’ll be jealous of our flexibility for sure.)
This month’s festivities included a bunch of silly Youtube videos I’ve collected over the past few months, topped off with a few rounds of Pain and Tekken 6, both on the PS3. Food consisted of left-over Italian, and drinks consisted of left-over beer and wine. We also skipped through most of Tokyo Gore Police (stopping only at the “good” parts) and had an in depth discussion on what music videos were like before performers had choreographers.
Over the weekend a package from FedEx arrived on our doorstep. Susan seemed to know immediately what the package was. She and the kids took the package into the kitchen, opened it, and all started laughing. From the living room, I could not see what was in the package. Then the package was closed and Susan informed me that it was a birthday gift for me. That’s great, except it’s March and my birthday is in August. After a bit of pleading the three of them decided to show me what was in the box.
A quick recap: in October of 2008, I visited an incredible privately-owned arcade here in Oklahoma for the first time. In August of 2009, the arcade burned to the ground. The owners had no insurance, and the building and all of its contents were a total loss. There are a lot of people — most people, in fact — who would walk away from this hobby after watching years of work and tens of thousands of dollars literally go up in flames.
But not these guys.
Nope. Instead, these guys have spent the past six months rebuilding. While a new, physical location has yet to be erected, the guys have kept themselves busy buying and repairing games.
It’s hard to tell just how many games the guys have bought over the past six months. I counted close to 150 machines in the warehouse, ranging in shape from “nearly restored” to “gutted carcasses.” To make the actual totals more difficult to nail down, not all the games the guys own are here. Some are scattered around town, in friends’ businesses or their own homes.
I spent a few hours on Saturday with Troy (one of the arcade’s co-owners) as he worked his way around the warehouse. The goal right now is to simply get everything working. Like with car restorations, it’s not uncommon to see “parts machines” aligned in a row. Four Spy Hunters sit next to one another. None of them work at the moment, and Troy says he’ll be lucky to get one working machine out of the four. Further down the row there are two Ms. Pac-Man cabs, two TRON machines, and multiple picked over Nintendo cabinets.
Up against the back wall are a couple dozen machines that regularly appear on collectors’ lists of “Holy Grails.” Next to a working Stunt Cycle sits an original red Donkey Kong cabinet. Only the first 1,200 Donkey Kong machines were red; the next 75,000 or so came in that more familiar shade of Nintendo blue. Most collectors will never own an original red Donkey Kong. This one sits, covered in dust, waiting for its turn to be made over.
A few machines down from the Donkey Kong is a two-player Fire Truck machine. Next to that rests a sit-down Sinistar machine, a cabinet I’ve never even seen in person before. The front of the cabinet opens up like a real car hood, which Troy shows me as he points out the components he had to replace to make the machine live. There are quite a few.
At this point the tour ended and the playing began. With three or four extension cords connected end to end we made our way around the warehouse, trying various machines; a round of Toobin’ here, a few laps of Championship Sprint there. Troy remembers where he bought each machine, and how much he payed for them. As we play the games he tells me what repairs he’s already performed and what still needs to be done. Troy handles most of the electronic work. Co-owning twins Terry and Darry own printing and sign shops that double as personal arcade cabinet restoration hubs by night.
Keep in mind that these games are all being acquired for a personally-owned collection, not a public arcade. The scope is both impressive and overwhelming, and I can’t wait to see the end result.
For ten years (up until I changed jobs last fall) I served as a “Domain Administrator” at work. Among other things, having Domain Admin access gave me administrator access to every server (hundreds) and workstation (thousands) in our domain. Administrator access gave me the technical ability to (again, among other things) connect to any machine that was a member of our domain to examine its logs and browse its hard drive(s).
The key word there is “technical” — it didn’t give me the authority to do so, at least not without cause. In most operating environments, user actions are logged. By default, Windows machines log all incoming connections, which means any time I connected to a user’s machine there was a record of it. Trust me on that one; I once received a call from an angry Computer Specialist demanding to know what I was doing trying to connect to his server all night long. Turns out, I had a scheduled nightly backup process that was attempting to connect to a share that no longer existed on that server. It was an honest and harmless mistake, but that didn’t stop me from having to explain it to ten different people ten different times.
When you have that level of access, users become paranoid that you’re pilfering through their computer, looking at their “stuff”. My “official” answer was always that, well, it wasn’t *their* computer — it was the government’s. Even today, every time I log on to my computer, a big banner pops up and reminds me of that fact. It also states that anything I do can be logged or monitored. People have a sense of personal ownership and privacy when it comes to the computer that they use on a daily basis, but it’s not so.
The “unofficial” answer, however, might surprise you. Unofficially, none of us had time to look at people’s data. At my old job, three of us managed a domain for 6,500 users. None of us had the time (nor the incentive) to randomly select someone’s workstation and browse the contents of their hard drive. People would get so bent out of shape over the fact that I had the ability to peek into their My Documents folder or their network home drive and thumb through their documents, but the reality was we were way too busy to be doing that. And when we did have moments of down time, the last thing I wanted to do was look at someone else’s vacation photos or search the network for small pools of mp3s.
One thing I learned while serving as a domain admin is that there are two answers to every question — the technical answer and the (for lack of a better word) the political answer. For example, this question came up a lot: “Can you reboot Server_X?” If Server_X was not one of mine but existed in our domain, then the technical answer was “Yes” and the political answer was “No”. It took me a long time to learn where that line was and I’m not sure I ever mastered it. Every network administrator has been in the position where they had the technical ability to fix a problem that politically they probably shouldn’t be dealing. What do you do when a server has locked up, users are yelling at you because (A) they can’t work and (B) no one can get ahold of the program manager, technically you have the ability to reboot it, and politically it’s not your problem? There was always a technical and a political side to everything. Technically, yes, I could have looked at people’s hard drives. Politically, um, no. Not a good idea.
Changing from “specifics” to “generalizations” here (I made that distinction because I am no longer talking specifically about where I work), there probably are people or at least scripts that look at your data. All large and most medium-sized companies at this point monitor the network traffic that flows through their firewall — and by traffic I mean both what comes in and what goes out. E-mail, instant messaging, and web surfing, unless you take the necessary precautions, flows in plain text across the ether. That means it can be read by anyone between Point A (you) and Point B (the destination). Don’t get too paranoid though — those guys are busier than I was, and typically only have time to deal with the squeakiest of wheels. Depending on the size and layout of your network, there are other people that have access to your data as well. Chances are the SMS and Antivirus admins of your company know more about what’s on your hard drive than you do. And, if those guys are anything like I was, I suspect they too stay busy enough that going through your old Excel files is the last thing in the world they have time for.
I had planned on writing a couple of blog posts yesterday, but instead I spent the majority of the night trying to remove a virus from my computer. I’m not even sure how I got it, but I did. Hours of scanning and manual removal later, I think it’s gone. Posting will resume tonight/tomorrow.
I’ll let Weird Al say what I don’t have time to say this morning.
I have a great ear when it comes to music. It’s not as much my ears as it is my memory. When I hear a song being played too slowly or too quickly, I notice it immediately even when most people around me don’t. Obviously this used to happen more in the days of vinyl when not every record player turned at exactly the same speed, but it still occasionally happens today.
I also pick up on different versions of songs — again, sometimes when others don’t. The Black Crowes released two different versions of “Hard to Handle,” for example. One has more horns than the other. I can easily tell them apart, yet when I mentioned it to Susan she said she had never noticed it. A quick check on Wikipedia turns up the following: “Two versions of the song exist, the original album version and the hit single remixed with an overdubbed brass section.”
Similarly, there are three different versions of Whitesnake’s “Here I Go Again” that get radio airplay. There’s the 1982 version from their “Saints and Sinners” album, the 1987 version from the band’s self-titled album, and the 1994 version from the band’s “Greatest Hits” album. To my ear they sound like three completely different songs, and yet when I mentioned it once to a self-proclaimed “Walking Encyclopedia of 80s Music,” he said he hadn’t noticed.
Sometimes, the changes are so minute that nobody seems to have noticed. The bridge to Collective Soul’s song “Shine” has lead singer Ed Roland saying the word “Yeah” twice. In the music video that aired on MTV for years, he said “Yeah” three times. It’s very obvious to me, but no one I’ve ever mentioned it to before ever noticed. It’s not even mentioned on the song’s Wikipedia entry. But I will swear to you, it’s true; they’re different.
A month or two ago, local radio station 94.7, formerly “The Buzz,” became “The Brew.” Along with the name change came a format change, and the station stopped playing rock and metal from the past two decades and now focuses on 80s hair metal and arena rock, which is alright by me. Although I listened to more than what The Brew plays, everything The Brew plays, I listened to. I don’t know that I’ve heard a song played on the station that I haven’t at one time or another played air guitar to.
One day The Brew played Guns N’ Roses’ “Sweet Child of Mine.” The version they played had been so edited that it was almost jarring. “Did you hear that?” I asked Susan. “Hear what?” she said. “They just cut out half the song!” I said. “No they didn’t,” she replied.
Now here’s the thing, and it’s definitely an O’Hara thing — it’s not enough to be right and it’s not enough for me to know I’m right. YOU have to know I’m right. And I’m telling you, I was right.
We’ve heard the song played on the radio a couple more times since then and every time I mention a section has been shortened, cut, or removed, Susan tells me I’m nuts and that I’m remembering things wrong.
Last night while driving, I was ready. When that memorable riff started broadcasting through our car’s radio, I had a plan ready. I grabbed my iPhone, switched to the stopwatch application, and started timing about 10 seconds into the song.
The results?
The version being played on The Brew was approximately 3:45 in length. (My timer said 3:30. I say I missed the first 10 seconds and Susan says I missed 20, so I split the difference.)
According to Wikipedia there are two different versions of the song. The original album version runs 5:56 in length, while a shortened radio version is 4:12. The version I’m obviously used to hearing is the album version. That’s the version The KATT (another rock radio station) plays as well.
If Susan was right and I missed 20 seconds (putting the length at 3:50), that’s still 22 seconds shorter than the radio edit mentioned on Wikipedia.
But anyway, yeah. If anyone was keeping score, I was right.
The third annual Oklahoma Electronic Game Expo (OEGE) will take place April 10th at Oklahoma City Community College. I’m not going to be exhibiting or talking at the show this year, but I will most definitely be stopping by!
Below is an ad for the show that will be appearing in this month’s issue of Videogame Trader Magazine:
Recognize the kid in that ad? If not, allow me:
It took me 30 years to get published in a video game magazine. Mason did it in only 8.
Whenever people see my collection of arcade games, one question I invariably get is, “How much electricity do those things use?” It’s fairly easy to estimate; since most arcade games utilize a CRT tube and a power supply comparable to those found in most home computers, an arcade game uses “about” the same amount of electricity as a home computer with a CRT monitor.
What I’ve found over the years is, most people don’t believe me. Although it makes logical sense, some primal part of our brains thinks that arcade games should use more power because they’re so much bigger. And so, over the weekend, I decided to find out exactly how much electricity an arcade cabinet consumes.
For those that missed my post last week, I got a Kill-A-Watt for Christmas, a device that tells you exactly how many Kilowatt hours a device uses. Last Saturday I plugged the Kill-A-Watt into the wall, plugged my Centipede cabinet into the device, and let it run for almost 24 hours.
The cabinet actually drew much less electricity than most modern home computers do. Over 768 minutes, my Centipede only used only 1.46 kWh of electricity, an average of 0.11 kWh. That means this particular cabinet costs me 18 cents a day, $5.53 a month, and $67.27 a year if I were to keep it turned on 24/7. Since I only turn my machines on to play them, these things cost me essentially nothing to run. Even if I were to fire up all 25 games at the same time, I’m still looking at using only $4.50 a day in electricity. I have a few machines that have larger monitors, so I’ll probably run another test in the near future to see if that makes a noticeable difference.
For comparison purposes, I also ran a test on my PlayStation 3 last night. With the unit turned on but idle (ie: not actively playing a game, which means both the hard drive and DVD motor were idle), the PS3 used significantly more electricity than my Centipede arcade cabinet. Over 58 minutes my PS3 used .16 kWh; that’s .17 kWh, which converts to .27 cents an hour, $8.02 a month, and $97.61 a year. The PS3 actually used 45% more electricity — and again, that’s while just turned on and idle. Maybe this weekend I’ll run some tests that compare my game consoles in all three states (off, on but idle, and in use).
But yeah, there ya go; my Centipede cabinet costs me approximately 1 cent/hour in electricity to run.
(It’s for sale, btw. $200. Has a minor RAM/graphics glitch. Fix it, or replace the PCB for another $100 on eBay.)
The year was 1997, and I had fallen in love with a local (Spokane) band named Oil Filter. The band spent the summer of 1997 recording their debut (self-titled) feature length CD, and by this point in time we had established both a personal and working relationship. Throughout 1996 and 1997 I had helped the band lay out their t-shirts, set up a rudimentary website, and put together a basic promo pack. As recording wrapped up on the band’s CD, Matt (Oil Filter’s lead singer) asked me if I could layout and design the band’s CD package for them. I of course said yes.
For the cover, Matt requested a picture of the earth with the band’s name carved out of rock floating above it. This is what I came up with:
All of the artwork for the CD was done with Corel Photo Paint 5, which was comparable to Photoshop in that time.
Matt pretty much gave me cart blanch for the inside layout. I chose powerful pictures that (I thought) related to the song topics and then modified their colors before applying a vignette to each one. For example, for the song “Cleve”, I decided to use a picture of a welder. Here is the original photo I found on the Internet:
Then, using some simple color swapping techniques, I ended up with the following:
Each of these photos were then shrunk down to nearly thumbnail size. The above picture is less than 1″x1″ in size in the final layout. This is what it looks like:
Originally Matt had insisted on handwriting all the lyrics out, but I convinced him that using a handwritten font would work out better. I don’t know if it worked better, but it was a heck of a lot easier from a layout perspective.
Here’s another example; below is a picture of a flood I found online:
With a bit of editing, that picture became this one:
And, so on and so forth. Of the CD’s 16 songs, 10 had lyrics and so I ended up making 10 pictures. Ultimately I laid everything out using Pagemaker 5.
For the back cover, we ended up using a picture of a solar flare with the song titles listed on the right hand side. We also found out late in the game that the CD tray would be clear, so we came up with a pattern to lay underneath it. The picture looks kind of like a spoke wheel made out of bones; in reality it was a picture of the drummer’s arm, modified using a kaleidescope plug-in effect. I’m probably the only person in the world who knew what the picture really was (until today!).
The day before we were to mail in the final artwork we were informed that whatever format I had used was incompatible with what the printer needed. I don’t remember the exact details (maybe a DPI issue?) but I remember we were so distraught and frustrated that we had considered just printing color copies out and mailing those in. Around 11pm the night before our deadline, Matt and I were working frantically at Kinko’s trying to get the pictures and layout converted. In the end we were able to pull it off.
If you ever run across a used copy of Oil Filter’s debut CD (most likely if you live in Spokane), I’m listed twice in the credits: once under “Visual Media” and a second time as “All original art: Rob O’Hara and Oil Filter”. The “visual media” referred both to the disc’s layout, and another project I was working on. Around that time I had written an experimental program that would flash pictures up on a screen while the band played. I lacked the programming skills at the time to pull it off so what I ended up with was very crude. The whole thing was batch-file driven and called pictures that I had converted to executable files. The whole thing was scrapped and never got past the beta stage. It would have been cool if I could have pulled it off.
When Matt asked me what I was going to charge the band for all of this work, I told him what I wanted up front. Prior to this CD, Oil Filter had released two independent cassette tapes. The vocals on both of those cassettes are difficult to decipher and were considered to be somewhat of a secret. I told Matt that I would layout the entire Oil Filter CD in exchange for a complete set of lyrics to both Oil Filter cassettes. He agreed on the condition that I never share them with anyone. We shook hands and, true to his word, around the time I completed work on the CD Matt delivered me several yellow sheets of paper with hand written lyrics to every song on Oil Filter’s first two cassettes.
In the spring of 1998 I left Spokane and moved back to Oklahoma City. Not long after that, Oil Filter broke up. I am 98.3% sure the two events were unrelated.
(While digging through some old CD-Rs yesterday afternoon I ran across a directory containing the entire Oil Filter CD project — thus, this post.)
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