Commentary
Foil Pirates--Punish the Customer
Companies add copy protection to their games to discourage piracy. In many cases they simply prevent the legitimate consumer enjoyment of their product. Such was the case of Impressions Zeus, published by Sierra early in the year 2001. The game itself ran fine, or at least the demo did, but when many users bought the final product, they found they could not play the game due to various errors that would occur most generally as the game attempted to load past the start-up screens.
Some users reported seeing the opening Zeus video sequence once and never again.
Eventually Sierra Impressions admitted to to their SecuROM protection scheme and offered users a fruit salad of suggestions which ranged from updating the firmware on their CDrom device to BIOS upgrades of their system boards to actual replacement of the CDrom drive itself.
Never did they acknowledge
that their copy protection scheme is anything but a user problem which
resulted in trying to run this "modern game" on old/outdated
hardware. Sierra/Impressions is by no means the only company engaging
in such practices.
www.gamecopyworld.com, a site known for posting files that defeat "CD in the drive check schemes" had available the zeus.exe file that bypassed SecuROM afflicted users and allowed them to play the game without further trouble.
Copyright ©2002 www.SteamChip.com
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