Come and download some adventure games!

[Marek]

Hi! You look like someone who could use an adventure game!

This is actually a blatant plug, but over at AdventureGamers.com we've just introduced a download portal just for point-and-click style adventure games. It's a collaboration between the site and a company called Lezard Electronic (which takes care of the order processing and logistics). This is something that I worked on a lot during the past 2 months and it's great to have it finally online. More details are in this article.

There's currently 23 titles on the shop, including three games you can't find in stores yet: Darkness Within, Sherlock Holmes vs. Arsène Lupin and Cleopatra: A Queen's Destiny. The latter two probably won't see an English-language retail release until 2008, so they're pretty much exclusive to Adventure Shop.

More titles will be added to the catalog over time. We hope to have the Ankh games, the Longest Journey series and Bone on there pretty soon, and with more to come.

[BigJKO]

Just saw this over at Kotaku this morning. Congrats on the opening, it all looks pretty spiffy and nice.

[elmuerte]

how does it work? is it infected with some kind of DRM? or just an online verification of the serial during install?

[Marek]

Just a serial number. No DRM.

[Wrestlevania]

That's fantastic. Hats off to Marek and the rest of the Adventure Gamers team.

[toblix]

Just a serial number. No DRM.

...And also Starforce and a limited number of downloads and activations.

edit: Apparently, like with Bioshock, the number of activations can be reset by getting another serial number from a company that will exist forever.

[elmuerte]

...And also Starforce and a limited number of downloads and activations.

well that's clearly digital restriction management

[Nachimir]

Starforce!?!?

[Mel]

I downloaded a game from Adventure Shop and I had to do a manual activation of it (and saw a StarForce logo on the website where I got my activation code).

When I played the game, I never saw the StarForce screen like I did when I played CDs that used that protection (i.e. the game launched without any 'we're checking that it's authentic' screens).

I'm not really sure what role it's playing but I haven't had any problems playing the game.

[Marek]

I wasn't ware of any of the games using StarForce. I'll look into this tomorrow.

Most likely it's just a developer having forgotten to remove the logo somewhere, though. StarForce works by actually checking a physical property of a physical disc that is usually lost when copying and burning it, so that wouldn't even make sense for a download.

[Wrestlevania]

And also Starforce.

That isn't possible without having physical media. The point of StarForce is that it sits, hypothetically speaking, between the disc ROM hardware and the OS software ROM drivers.

[toblix]

I seem to remember even demos being released with Starforce. Anyway, my comment was based on installing Runaway: Dream of the Turtle. When running the game for the first time, it told me that it had to install "protection drivers". Clicking the "driver FAQ" (or something like that) button took me to a starforce page describing how to upgrade and uninstall Starforce, which, of course had to be done by downloading external utilities.

edit: I checked my installed services, and now there's a service called "Runaway 2 Drivers Auto Removal (pr2ah6cb)" which is described as such:

This service automatically uninstalls Runaway 2 drivers after Runaway 2 is uninstalled. After the drivers are uninstalled, the service uninstalls itself as well. If Runaway 2 is reinstalled, the drivers as well as this service will be also reinstalled at the first run of the application. This service is not constantly operating and does not use memory. It is launched automatically on operating system startup and unloads itself from memory after completing all tasks described above.

[toblix]

I'm guessing maybe some "fake" driver has been installed to emulate Starforce or something, I dunno. I just thought I'd mentioned it since I actually expected an old-school serial key based activation. The serial key I got I entered into the "protection driver" setup dialog.

[brkl]

Why does it need to unload itself from memory if it doesn't use memory?

[toblix]

You ask too many questions, consumer.

[Marek]

Update: some of the games use StarForce, specifically StarForce Frontline, which is a version of StarForce that will activate games by verifying a serial key. That's a different piece of software than the one that caused such a ruckus about two years ago.

Developers can choose whatever basic protection they want to include in the games, but nothing that will cause problems with your computer.

[Wrestlevania]

Update: some of the games use StarForce, specifically StarForce Frontline, which is a version of StarForce that will activate games by verifying a serial key. That's a different piece of software than the one that caused such a ruckus about two years ago.

That's unfortunate that the brand prevails in this instance, even though it's a completely different technology. Is there a way to quietly remove any StarForce logos from the page layouts?