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From: zerkle@iris.ucdavis.edu (Dan Zerkle)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Awesome! Now I am Pi**ed!
Message-ID: <8004@ucdavis.ucdavis.edu>
Date: 21 Nov 90 19:33:21 GMT
References: <36787@nigel.ee.udel.edu> <21740@well.sf.ca.us>
Sender: usenet@ucdavis.ucdavis.edu
Reply-To: zerkle@iris.ucdavis.edu (Dan Zerkle)
Followup-To: comp.sys.amiga.games
Organization: U.C. Davis - Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Lines: 35

In article <21740@well.sf.ca.us> farren@well.sf.ca.us (Mike Farren) writes:
>fhwri%CONNCOLL.BITNET@cunyvm.cuny.edu writes:
>>[...] it's not the first Psygnosis game that she's gotten WAY
>>too many returns on. Why, oh why can they be such good game programmers
>>and such LOUSY producers?
>
>Who says they're good game programmers?  Won't run on a 3000, won't run
>reliably on a number of different configurations, can't be put on a hard
>drive, can't be backed up, can't be multitasked -- all of these say to
>me that they are LOUSY game programmers.

All of the "features" you describe are symptoms of rabid copy
protection (although non-multitasking has other causes, too).
I would suspect that most publishers have a bank of programmers that
do the copy protection stuff.  I think that people write the games and
get them finished before putting on the protection.  For instance,
back in the glory days of the C-64, Electronic Arts had a standard
copy protection scheme that they stuck on every game, even though the
games were written by a lot of different authors.  

Personally, I detest copy protection, mainly because I own a 3000 and
there are certain games (like Dark Castle II, Shufflepuck, Beast I,II)
that I would love to play, but are so *&^%ing full of ^%$*ing copy
protection that they won't even ^%$#ing load, much less install on my
&^%!ing hard drive.  $#@!.  I even hated copy protection back when I
had my C64, because it made programs take EVEN LONGER to load.  One in
particular (mail order monsters) took about 10 minutes or more.  Also,
the protections schemes would bang the heads on my drive.  Grr.  Of
course, the protection didn't do any good, because I had some nibblers
that would copy practically everything.

Followups redirected to comp.sys.amiga.games...

           Dan Zerkle  zerkle@iris.eecs.ucdavis.edu  (916) 754-0240
           Amiga...  Because life is too short for boring computers.