Jump to content

Tanavin

Member
  • Posts

    35
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Posts posted by Tanavin

  1. HL2 was the first, last, and only. So many problems and when I called them on it they banned my account. I won't have forced updates that break my game. Won't allow malware like that to snoop through my drive looking to see what else is installed and then block me from playing because my ISP was down. When you get burned that bad, you stop gaming on PC.

    I've insisted that Steam users are either ignorant as to what Steam is doing to the system, or they are new to the platform and need everything done for them. Then just to be safe I played both Portal games on PS3 offline just so it couldn't phone home.

    Sorry you had a bad experience, but you realize HL2 was more than a decade ago, right? Steam as a service is worlds different than it was then. I was very much like you back then, wouldn't touch Steam with a 10ft pole taped to another 10ft pole. But I gave it a shot several years later. Once I bought Osmos, Defense Grid, and Torchlight for essentially the price of two frappuccino's and had a delightful experience I was sold. No more spending all day rummaging through a half-price books for an obscure title that may or may not be complete.

    Sure Steam itself is a layer of DRM, but it's DRM that provides benefits in exchange. That's win-win and the difference between DRM that's just there to make your life difficult. And the content is more portable than any console. If my hardware dies or becomes obsolete I don't have to worry about backwards compatibility or re-licensing. The machines I play on change all the time, and I never miss a beat. Once a new console generation comes out, you just have to hang on to the old hardware and pray it doesn't die. The cost / benefit analysis for the games themselves is staggering.

    You can't seriously judge others using Steam if your experience is so outdated. Your claims on constant update breaking and malware is just unfounded in modern Steam.

    I have a large collection of physical media and console games as well as Steam and Gog. Guess which gets more attention? Steam.

  2. Unfortunately things don't work like that, I kind of had the same mindset coming into this. Maybe someday archive.org will become that.thats why I decided to do something about it myself. My personal goal is to get every EGM in our database. Instead of asking other people to do it for me, I'm taking all the steps (with help) that I can to get that accomplished. I initially donated all my magazines to scanners on the site, then purchased magazines to get scanned, then started scanning myself. Why, because unless you take a personal stake into getting it done, it probrably won't get done. I personally have no problem with my scans being hosted elsewhere. I've told OGM they can host any of my scans. I've also proposed in the past uploading all,our scans on archive. Which will possibly be happening. But unfortunately a lot of scans sites are very territorial about their scans. So I understand respecting that. It's bad etiquette to just steal someone else work and host it as your own. Especially considering the work that goes into making these scans. A better approach would be working out deals with other sites to share scans. Or convincing scanners to host their work at our site in addition to others.

    I've mostly lurked over the years, so I've had no idea there would be or has been drama over scan ownership / distribution. I find it somewhat amusing that the drama exists at all, because you can't exert ownership rights to a scan of an unlicensed work. That's not how copyright works. For true preservation to happen, ownership can't exist.

    The whole reason any of us are scanning is in spite of copyright, because we know waiting the 75 years for the copyright of (in many cases) a defunct company to enter the public domain threatens the survivability of the material to begin with, and there's no other viable alternative. But to then entrap such preserved content within someone else's perceived distribution rights is certainly the definition of irony.

    But I understand people spend time on things and want some recognition for their efforts. Recognition and ownership are separate things though.

    It's true that preservation efforts like scanning take a lot of time. That's why the community size should not be divided; this is the essence of crowdsourcing. When the size of the crowd is artificially truncated (by drama over scan ownership) the real objective - to preserve - is actively undermined. In other words, a smaller crowd simply will not have enough time.

    Now all that being said, I'm not trying to rock the boat here. Just making a point. If I have a good scan of something that I don't have permission from the scanner to distribute, I'm not going to upload it. Though any of you are of course free to ask for them. I'll just help out rounding out the cover gallery and indexes as I have time. I also have an intact rather large collection of PC Gamer, that I would donate as others have time to scan them.

  3. Sean697, I understand not wanting to be a repository for someone else's stuff, but from strictly a preservationist mindset making a collection whole should be an important secondary objective beyond just high quality preservation of what is found. While it's true you can always go to another site to piece things together, sites do go down, and history unfortunately gets lost. Time is our enemy, with each passing year the rarity of the classic mags we have yet to preserve no doubt increases, especially the less commonly known ones, whether due to someone else's negligence, indifference, or accident. The best way to preserve is to make sure such content is in as many hands as possible.

    • Like 1
  4. E-Day: That's a good point; I will inquire about permission first and see where that goes. In the meantime, have plenty of covers for the db.

    kitsunebi77: Agree about the linking, unwanted traffic can be a problem. Was thinking if we should be more proactive about acquiring permission and mirroring some stuff, provided they meet basic quality standards, especially for things that we're unlikely to get up here anytime soon.

  5. I have a number of problems with Steam, but the main one is simply, "What happens when Valve turns off the servers?"

    Might sound absurd right now, but Valve is under no obligation to keep those servers running (Section 7B of the Steam Subscriber Agreement lays this out, for those who want to read along), and they can choose at any time, for any reason, or for no reason at all ("WORK STOPPAGE, COMPUTER FAILURE OR MALFUNCTION, OR ANY AND ALL OTHER COMMERCIAL DAMAGES OR LOSSES", again for those playing the home game) to turn Steam off. So, what happens when they do? Or what happens if someone else comes in and destroys their infrastructure? Don't worry, they'll make it right...right?

    Nope.

    7B further covers Valve by stating nobody can hold them responsible even if they openly admit responsibility for doing so. ("EVEN IN THE EVENT OF VALVE’S, VALVE EU’S OR THEIR AFFILIATES’ FAULT"). The IT guys throw a ferocious bender one weekend that results in the server farms going up in flames? Eh, sucks for you consumers, but we've still got your money and you can't play your games until our actuaries determine how cost-effective it will be to put everything back together again.

    I understand your concerns, really do. And I can totally understand why you want to stay away from that model, more power to you. Choice is a good thing. But I think any of these doomsday cases are highly unlikely.

    Any properly designed elastic computing structure can be restored through all manner of disaster scenarios - so the scenario of a server farm and all it's data permanently and irrecoverably going up in flames isn't plausible. Modern server infrastructure simply eliminates those scenarios. You can have service interruptions, sure, but complete loss of data. Nope.

    The scenario of Valve going under, or being bought out, or whatever manner of corporate evil you might want to imagine is certainly more plausible. And you're right about what the EULA states. But EULA's are not absolute, they exist in a legal gray area, expect the law to develop over time as challenges are made and the world transitions to digital. If Steam were to go under and leave some 125 million users up a creek without a paddle, you can bet there will be litigation from some of those, regardless of whatever the EULA claims. In a case that would affect so many with clearly identifiable damages I could easily see action to release server code to reverse engineer the service dependency, i.e. "jailbreak" the software. It might be a mess and take some time, but it certainly could happen.

  6. Loss of discs is only part of it. Steam is just a terrible platform. I tried it once and ran into more problems than I should have for a single game. I don't care what price they offer, it's not worth the hassle. Hell they tried to bribe me with free copies of Portal for years and I still refused. I eventually found the game on PS3 and paid for the copy.

    Curious what year it was when you tried Steam that one time. Because early on it was certainly different, but there's some off 125M+ customers so they're doing something right.

  7. I agree with you here. With a lot of these games requiring check-ins online with these DRM servers what if they decide they don't want to maintain them anymore?

    This has already happened with countless games. And there are a growing number of stories where diligent fans have brought such games back to life.

    http://kotaku.com/how-star-wars-galaxies-fans-brought-a-dead-game-back-to-1751840627

    The enterprise technology that powers the modern corporate world will eventually give consumers much more power to do this kind of thing far more easily (including reverse engineering server side code). Virtualization is one such example, where now anyone can easily encapsulate a physical machine into a file, and replicate or re-purpose in any number of interesting ways. The tech used for cloud infrastructure allows instantiation of not just physical machines but entire network infrastructures, replicating as needed. Leveraging these types of technologies to preserve entire networks much like we might preserve an iso image or a pdf will happen sooner than you might think. Technology is moving quickly.

  8. Surprised at all the vitriol over Steam. Considering at the price point you can buy games at during the infamous sales, it's worth the trade-off over physical ownership.

    The consoles will always be one step worse from a DRM standpoint because they are closed platforms - walled gardens. They are indeed simpler, and the hardware is substantially cheaper. But most of us who are hardcore PC Gamers already have a solid PC because we do work with it as well.

    Just look at PC gaming revenue: http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/01/dont-look-now-but-the-pc-is-the-worlds-biggest-gaming-platform/

    The numbers in the article are buoyed by ftp MMO's, but they also don't include retail sales. Not trying to prove superiority over anything, but rather that PC Gaming is a thing, albeit it might not be your thing. BTW, I play console games too, but lately not all that much.

  9. Hey campers,

    Been around quite some time, but haven't logged on much. I've actually got a good collection of scanned mags / covers in excellent quality for quite a few of the missing issues on the site (especially several of the Amiga mags - I used to have an Amiga 500 and a 4000/040 back in the day).

    My question is that I did not do these scans myself, although a few of them are from originals I provided. Was reading the rule about self-scanning, wondering how strict you want to be about that for issues that are completely missing.

    I also did find some very old posts about the CGW museum scans, with complaints about their quality. While I understand they are not perfect, surprised we're not at least mirroring/linking in the interim (and marking accordingly). By the time they appear in better quality, we may very well all be dead.

    Not trying to claim glory for someone else's hard work, but rather see value in making sure preserved issues are in as many different places as possible - if only to ensure their survival.

    If you think that is amenable I could certainly contribute some of those Amiga mags (again scan quality may not exceed some of the CGW content). Barring that I suppose I could at least upload the cover images?

    Let me know your thoughts.

  10. The screens just keeping getting better with each new generation, and that makes worlds of difference. Just go with a DS, unless you're trying to collect specific variants. I saw one of the golden Zelda GBA SP's at Nintendo World in New York. On display in the mini museum upstairs.

  11. Hi, I'm Peter Graves... and I graduated... from the University... of Minnesota.

    Seriously, glad to be here. Like many of you, I've been deeply concerned with the preservation of gaming/computer history. Thankfully technology has provided us an alternative to constantly explaining to our wives why the gigantic file cabinets full of old mags can't go in the garage.

    I've been on a personal quest to have "less crap" in my home, and the work you guys are doing here is to be commended. Very much appreciated.

    I want to help however I can. There alot of different people out there trying to do the same thing. We need to band together.

    A couple of links some of you may or may not be aware of:

    DLH's Commodore Archive An amazing scan site for Commodore/Amiga fans. Commodore Magazine, Amiga World, etc.

    CGW Museum Computer Gaming World Museum, 1st 100 issues of CGW!

×
×
  • Create New...
Affiliate Disclaimer: Retromags may earn a commission on purchases made through our affiliate links on Retromags.com and social media channels. As an Amazon & Ebay Associate, Retromags earns from qualifying purchases. Thank you for your continued support!