Tom McDonald has been covering games for countless maga-
zines and newspapers for 11 years. He lives in the New Jersey
Pine Barrens.T
he past few months have been pretty thin
for new PC gaming releases, leaving me
wandering the web in search of new and bet-
ter ways to waste my time. The Troy mod for
Rome: Total War did the trick for a bit, but it
ultimately sent me looking deeper into the
wonderfully weird world of fringe gaming.
There are entire subcultures of people on
the net using computers to simulate strange
and possibly illegal things. Pure flight sims
have always baffled me. I can’t understand
going through the trouble of taking off and
landing an aircraft without killing someone
or blowing something up in between. Various
train sims sustain a loyal online community,
which I guess is a logical extension of the
rail-fan hobby. I still spend most of my train
time channeling Gomez Addams.
But trains, planes, and automobiles are
mainstream compared to Ship Simulator 2006
( http://www.shipsim.com ) and 18 Wheels of Steel
Haulin’ ( http://www.scssoft.com ), which cater to
folks with a secret need to sit at home and pre-
tend they’re either a water-taxi captain or long-
haul trucker. These are jobs I wouldn’t do for all
the cheddar in Vermont, but somehow, reduced
to a screen’s size and given simple but effec-
tive 3D graphics, they leave the realm of the
banal and become quixotic little adventures.
Both feature gameplay that largely
revolves around picking stuff up, bringing it
someplace, and then dropping it off. They’re
not likely to sustain the interest of people
without a passion for the subject matter, but
they don’t have to. They’re made by enthusi-
asts, for enthusiasts, and they can still provide
an hour’s diversion for the mildly curious.
Strangely, these games gave me hope at a
time when I was down on PC gaming. These
games would never exist on consoles. Fringe
gaming, whether weird text adventures or
historical battles or bike messenger sims, are
solely the domain of the PC. They bubble up
from below, driven by the enthusiasm of fans
and programmers and show us that PC gam-
ing is a vital well that’s far from dry.Wandering
the Fringes
GAME THEORY
THOMAS
MCDONALDAt this year’s CES,
Warner Bros.
announced its
solution to the HD
format wars: optical discs that can hold dual-
layer Blu-ray on one side and dual-layer HD
DVD on the other. Dubbed Total HD, the discs
would free consumers from being shackled to
one type of player. Of course, the dual-format
disc’s usefulness will depend on studio partici-
pation. Expect Total HD releases from Warner
Bros. in the second half of 2007.Bridging
the HD
Divide
Another Blow
for AACS
Hot on the heels of
BackupHDDVD, a utility that
circumvents the copy-protec-
tion in commercial HD DVD
discs, BackupBluray has been
released to do the same for
Blu-ray media.
The hacks exploit AACS
encryption—the core protec-
tion technology found in both
formats (in slightly different
implementations)—which
was painstakingly developed
at much time and cost to
protect against just such a
breach. (While backers of Blu-
ray have touted that format’s
additional protection, called
BD+, the feature is appar-
ently not present in current
Blu-ray releases.) The utilities
are just part of the equation,
however; a user must provide
necessary crypto keys to rip
the unlocked content, and
evidence suggests those
keys can be found in the
unencrypted memory of soft-
ware players—CyberLink’s
PowerDVD and Intervideo’s
WinDVD have both been
implicated. In fact, on its
website, the AACS Licensing
Authority is placing the blame
squarely on poor player
implementation.
While you can bet that
studio execs and the AACS LA
are reeling from the relative
speed at which their digital
rights management was com-
promised, they weren’t unpre-
pared for the scenario. The
AACS system was designed to
be “self healing.” Any new disc
pressed after vulnerability is
discovered will either not work
on a player that has failed to
abide by the AACS Compliance
and Robustness Rules or the
player will be automatically
updated with new encryp-
tion mechanisms. How long it
takes to “fi x” broken players
remains to be seen.
One thing is for sure, you
can expect a long, protracted
struggle between consumers
and content providers.When PCs Attack
At this year’s World
Economic Forum,
a panel of Internet
experts surmised
that as many as one-
quarter of all comput-
ers connected to the
Internet are being
used in botnets. Botnets are networks of PCs that have
been compromised without their owners’ knowledge.
They’re used for dastardly deeds, such as sending
spam, spreading viruses, and mining passwords, and
could, say experts, threaten the survival of the Internet.MaximumPC
Podcast
You too can listen to the
Maximum PC editors as they
discuss the latest issues con-
cerning power users ( and hear
Senior Editor Gordon Mah Ung’s
weekly rant about everything from PopTarts to annoying
Acrobat Reader updates).
To subscribe to our podcast, you need iTunes
( http://www.itunes.com ) or another podcast aggregator, such
as Juice ( juicereceiver.sourceforge.net ). In iTunes, go to
the music store, then search for Maximum PC. In Juice,
go to the Subscriptions tab, click the “Add new feed”
button, and enter our feed’s URL: http://feeds.feedburner.
com/maximumpc/133 7. Yeah, that’s right, 1337.10 MAXIMUMPC APRIL 2007
quick start THE BEGINNING OF THE MAGAZINE, WHERE ARTICLES ARE SMALL