On CD-Checks

I've heard of problems with them for years. "Grr!" people say. "I hate all this copy protection! This anti-piracy stuff! I lose my game CD and then I can't play, even after I've legitimately bought and installed my game! Grr argh!"

I felt some sympathy for those people, but there were other arguments that were more persuasive for me. After all, I'd never lost my CD - not really, not for any game I gave a flying dang about. (I think we have something like three copies of Diablo II. I don't know why.) Anti-piracy protection not really doing ANYTHING to stop piracy? Sure, that's a good reason to hate it. Anti-piracy protection being nearly impossible to uninstall (even after you uninstall the game it came with) and cooking people's disk drives? Yes, that's bad, certainly.

But now I'm looking at my perfectly lovely Civ IV installation, yearning to play... with my Civ IV original disks lent to my aunt (for reasons that really do make sense, I swear!) and expansion disks mysteryvanished. I've been toying with the notion of downloading "cracks", but they seem like a pain...

Grr! Argh!