'!-E THEORY BY THOMAS L. McDONALD
Tom -CDoNalD
TurNs
Tom McDonald has been covering games for countless magazines and
newspapers for years. He lives in the New Jersey Pine Barrens.Y
ou’re crawling on your belly
through thick underbrush.
The enemy knows you’re
in there somewhere, and you
can hear his bullets— phut phut
phut —pummeling the ground as
he tries to flush you out. You wipe
the sweat from your forehead, and
slowly raise the sniper scope to
your eye. You have him in your
sights, closed in so tight you can
practically touch the scar across his
right eyebrow. He’s a goner. You pull
the trigger...and miss.
Frustrating, isn’t it? That’s
the idea. If you weren’t playing
a pirated copy of the game, you
wouldn’t have missed.
Rather than try to create new
copy protections that get cracked
moments after release, Macrovision
(in conjunction with the developer
Codemasters) is taking a differentapproach with a scheme the
company calls “Fade.” Game discs
are embedded with what appears
to be a series of random scratches,
but these hash marks actually
create a particular pattern that
the software looks for before the
game begins. If you try to copy the
game, your optical drive’s built-in
error correction will remove the
“scratches,” making the copied disc
(as well as disc images intended for
online distribution) identifiable as a
duplicate. At first, gameplay is as it
should be—after all, the developer
wants you to get hooked. But in
time, what should be easy field
goals gradually become impossible
to hit. A Porsche 911 suddenly
begins to handle like a bread truck.
And, hopefully, the frustrated
software thief will become an eager
consumer.TurNiNg 0irates INto 0romoters
Macrovision’s latest copy-protection scheme hangs pirates
on their own hooks1uiCK Start
MAXIMUMPC DECEMBER 2003
There was a time when the
technical obstacles to creating
dual-layer recordable DVD
seemed so insurmountable that
manufacturers simply threw up
their hands in defeat. But Philips
and MKM (Mitsubishi Kagaku
Media) have since demonstrated
a working prototype of the dual-layer media which is allegedly
compatible with DVD-ROMs and
set-top players. What’s more, the
two companies expect drives and
media to ship early in 2004!
At 8.5GB, the capacity of the
write-once, dual-layer DVD+R
discs will be slightly less than that
of 9.4GB commercial dual-layer
DVDs, but we’re so exhilarated
about
pairing the
media with
DVDXCopy ,
we’re
willing to
overlook the
discrepancy.DouBle 9our DVD 0leasure
Dual-layer recordable DVDs are on the way
The secret to the recordable dual-layer disc is a
semi-transparent reflective layer that allows the
laser to read the top layer reliably, but still refocus
on the layer beneath it. Not actual size.Laser beamT
he very first words of this column, written back
in March 1996, were “I hate Myst .” I know that
because I’m a pack rat and have every column
I’ve ever written, and I’m telling you this not to prove
what a snotty writer I was at 27, but because this is
my 100th column. I’m expecting my gold watch any
day now.
Anniversaries may be meaningless milestones,
but they do offer nice round numbers that give us a
chance to look back. That first year I wrote about
things like Close Combat’s physics model, the anti-
gaming crusades of Joe Lieberman (who, strangely,
is now the only Democrat who doesn’t immediately
trigger my gag reflex), MMX (I am not explaining this),
Battlecruiser , Peter Gabriel’s Eve (nice guy—he’s
bald, you know), and other things that have vanished
into the mists (or is that mysts?) of memory.
The best part about writing for magazines (aside
from the money, of course) is that your work is out
there, right away: It doesn’t appear a year after you
wrote it, as with books. The worst part is that your
work is, ultimately, the Kleenex of the writing trade.
There is no chance in hell anyone, ever, will want to
read my opinions on Hunter Hunted (“a tired retread
of a platform shooter”) again. Even I don’t remember
the thing.
But I’m happy to have been part of this thing
called Maximum PC from the very beginning. I like
the magazine and the people involved. I get nostalgic
because I can trace this very column back to the
beginning of my career sometime around 1990, when
I joined a flagging magazine called Game Players
PC Entertainment just as my friend and editor Steve
Poole was turning it into a success. That magazine
became PC Gamer , which begat CD-ROM Today under
Lance Elko’s firm guiding hand, which begat boot ,
which begat Maximum PC , which brings us back to
here. I wrote aggressively throughout the 1990s—a
transformative time for computer gaming—and I
enjoyed it.
And I still do, though I write less now. I’ve pro-
duced two kids (with the help of my lovely wife, of
course) in addition to the 1000 or so stories I’ve filed,
and they take much of my time. I’ve become cynical
to some extent because I’ve seen it all before. My
free time is more precious now, and a game has to be
damn good to earn a chunk of it. Very, very few do any
more, but the ones that do ( SimCity 4 Rush Hour and
Jedi Academy being the latest) still remind me why
I got into this hobby in the first place. I’m glad these
things can still entertain me. I’d hate to lose that.
And you know what? I still hate Myst.