Age of Rifles and other classics…

[Gusington]

^The same exact thing happened to me with Distant Guns 

[em2nought]

Old codgers who play wargames don't steal your digital property, they're more likely to buy two of everything just so they have a backup than they are to steal it. 

[CaptainKoloth]

^The same exact thing happened to me with Distant Guns 

I could not agree more. It is the most hateful and intrusive DRM I've ever seen, and I own Steel Beasts Pro PE (to be fair to SB, once you pay the exorbitant price and get the USB dongle, it "just works" (TM)).

If they just threw Jutland and DG on Steam I think they'd get a (by grog standards) massive new following, but they still insist on selling it through their forgotten, broken "Stormpowered" platform. It's simultaneously hilarious and kind of sad.

I think it's inevitable that company will disappear soon, and all trace of these games in playable form with it.

[ArizonaTank]

^The same exact thing happened to me with Distant Guns 

I could not agree more. It is the most hateful and intrusive DRM I've ever seen, and I own Steel Beasts Pro PE (to be fair to SB, once you pay the exorbitant price and get the USB dongle, it "just works" (TM)).

If they just threw Jutland and DG on Steam I think they'd get a (by grog standards) massive new following, but they still insist on selling it through their forgotten, broken "Stormpowered" platform. It's simultaneously hilarious and kind of sad.

I think it's inevitable that company will disappear soon, and all trace of these games in playable form with it.

Because of this conversation, I decided to try to play Distant Guns, that I had not touched in years. The Storm Eagle Studios website is still up and running, and my account was still there. So far so good. But after that, hell broke loose.

I installed the game, and then the Stormpowered DRM took over my computer. The screen started flashing on and off, and I could not stop it. While the screen flashed, I could not run or do anything...it was scary. Reboot brought no relief. Task Manager still worked, but Stormpowered was spamming processes faster than I could turn them off. Fortunately, I had installed it on an external drive. When I unplugged the drive, the flashing stopped. Still, I spent many hours last night cleaning up the mess on my external drive.

I don't think Stormpowered is intentional malware, but it might as well be. I suspect it just doesn't run well on Win 11. Anyway, based on my fresh experience, I would recommend that you stay 'distant' from Stormpowerd.   

[Jarhead0331]

^Wow. Thanks for taking one for the team.

[Grim.Reaper]

^The same exact thing happened to me with Distant Guns 

I could not agree more. It is the most hateful and intrusive DRM I've ever seen, and I own Steel Beasts Pro PE (to be fair to SB, once you pay the exorbitant price and get the USB dongle, it "just works" (TM)).

If they just threw Jutland and DG on Steam I think they'd get a (by grog standards) massive new following, but they still insist on selling it through their forgotten, broken "Stormpowered" platform. It's simultaneously hilarious and kind of sad.

I think it's inevitable that company will disappear soon, and all trace of these games in playable form with it.

Because of this conversation, I decided to try to play Distant Guns, that I had not touched in years. The Storm Eagle Studios website is still up and running, and my account was still there. So far so good. But after that, hell broke loose.

I installed the game, and then the Stormpowered DRM took over my computer. The screen started flashing on and off, and I could not stop it. While the screen flashed, I could not run or do anything...it was scary. Reboot brought no relief. Task Manager still worked, but Stormpowered was spamming processes faster than I could turn them off. Fortunately, I had installed it on an external drive. When I unplugged the drive, the flashing stopped. Still, I spent many hours last night cleaning up the mess on my external drive.

I don't think Stormpowered is intentional malware, but it might as well be. I suspect it just doesn't run well on Win 11. Anyway, based on my fresh experience, I would recommend that you stay 'distant' from Stormpowerd.   

Just curious, what kind of specific mess did it leave on the external hard drive that required hours of repair?  Haven't seen a game or drm do that before, so just curious what it physically did to the drive that took that much work. Sounds scary for sure.

[CaptainKoloth]

+1. Always a great start for a software review. "I don't think this is intentional malware, but..."

But hey, at least they deterred that one pirate while alienating 1000 legitimate potential customers.

[Gusington]

RIP Distant Guns 

[ArizonaTank]

Just curious, what kind of specific mess did it leave on the external hard drive that required hours of repair?  Haven't seen a game or drm do that before, so just curious what it physically did to the drive that took that much work. Sounds scary for sure.

I connected the drive to a laptop. Since the laptop did not have Stormpowered installed, there was no flashing screen. I then deleted the Stormpowered directories, but to make certain it hadn't dropped a virus or malware somewhere else, I did a full scan.  It is a 6TB drive, so the scan took 'many hours'. The scan found two viruses, but I don't think they were attributable to Stormpowered per se. 

My theory on what the DRM was doing is that it was trying to phone home, and wasn't able to connect. Could be a million reasons for that. But it would fail, then three seconds later it would try again. It seemed to be creating a new process every time it tried to do this. I could watch the process list on Task Manager grow and grow.

Its really nasty behavior came from the fact that every-time Stormpowered retried to connect or whatever it was doing (every three seconds), it would stop and  blank out whatever I was trying to do. So within the three second window, I could open up "setup," to do an uninstall, but I never had time to get to "apps" to do the uninstall. Stormpowered would blank me out. Scary that a bad piece of software can do that in Windows.   

If I had accepted the standard install option, and let Storpowered install to my "C" boot drive, I would have been truely hosed.

Not to get too techy...but hell, I'll do it anyway. Under previous versions of Windows, I could have done a safe boot at startup. That would have let me stop Stormpowered before it got loaded. But I learned that Microsoft, in their wisdom, removed that feature in Windows 11. Supposedly, Windows 11 is smart enough to go into the safe mode automatically. Well, maybe I got the Windows 11 dumb version, because it was not going into safe mode for me..  Windows 11, does have a way to get into smart mode once you have started Windows, but that was no help since I couldn't run anything before Stormpowered would blank me out.

[SirAndrewD]

But hey, at least they deterred that one pirate while alienating 1000 legitimate potential customers.

These games were so niche I doubt they even deterred one pirate.  There's no way any scene hacker would spend time trying to crack and release these games, and if they'd actually wanted to I'd wager they could easily disable the DRM.

They had a much higher chance to create a situation like Spore where the DRM was so bad people would get the pirated version over the paid so they could actually play it. 

The biggest victims are people like myself and others here that actually own Distant Guns and Jutland and can't play them. 

[CaptainKoloth]

But hey, at least they deterred that one pirate while alienating 1000 legitimate potential customers.

These games were so niche I doubt they even deterred one pirate.  There's no way any scene hacker would spend time trying to crack and release these games, and if they'd actually wanted to I'd wager they could easily disable the DRM.

They had a much higher chance to create a situation like Spore where the DRM was so bad people would get the pirated version over the paid so they could actually play it. 

The biggest victims are people like myself and others here that actually own Distant Guns and Jutland and can't play them. 

And just out of curiosity, I checked, um, "certain websites". And the great irony is, the game IS cracked. So it didn't even stop the piracy. It just made it impossible for legitimate customers to play, which of course is the traditional (and true) criticism of intrusive DRM. The sad thing is, in this as in other instances, pirates are ironically the only source of preservation of games where there is literally no way to play or buy them legally anymore.

[Jarhead0331]

And the great irony is, the game IS cracked. So it didn't even stop the piracy. It just made it impossible for legitimate customers to play, which of course is the traditional (and true) criticism of intrusive DRM. The sad thing is, in this as in other instances, pirates are ironically the only source of preservation of games where there is literally no way to play or buy them legally anymore.

Sort of like firearms legislation.

[JasonPratt]

I for one am impressed at the true groggy focus on this thread! -- a 'dongle' was mentioned, and yet the discussion stayed focus on topic!   

[JasonPratt]

More importantly than dongles: that list of released games includes fricken DARK LEGIONS! -- arguably the best implementation of Archon-style gameplay. At the time SSI also held the D&D license and I could have sworn this was part of it, but apparently not?

[JasonPratt]

Okay, on the other hand, I KNOW "Fantasy Empires" is D&D. Specifically, it's an adaptation of the classic board game (and RPG module) Red Arrow, Black Shield -- with the specific plot elements for that game removed for copyright reasons (probably). I doubt the live-action fights hold up today between units; it was rather wonky and gamey and easy to exploit even back on its release. But the board-level gaming was a little reasonable. A lot easier than setting up the map on my bed, getting out all the pieces, loading a program I had written in BASIC to enter battle information for random rolls and calculations... and then taking everything down again with paper information for how to set up someday.

Having said that, I'm pretty sure I recall that the unit setups in FE were not quite as detailed as in RABS, and I am totally sure I recall that my brother and I 'solved' the game: whoever could start or take a certain corner area on the map (I think northwest?) would always have too much advantage not to win.

Note that reviews indicate the UI is a little too primitive in some places (such as saving games), and that even on modern super-computers the tac battles can easily chug a lot! -- which the video promoting the game ACTUALLY INCLUDES FOOTAGE OF! At least they're being honest?