Trackmania Nations: Free Game!
Saturday, January 28th, 2006 - 3:03pm
The folks behind the Trackmania series released a new one yesterday as freeware called Trackmania Nations. 90 tracks plus online multiplayer, all for nothing. Played a bit of it, its pretty fun, very very arcadey, lots of crazy jumps and the like, works great with my wired 360 pad too.
My days of not taking you seriously have certainly come to a middle.
Whoa!
My Gamercard
Gotta Love Free,
But, from their website:
Is Authentificate a word? I'm gonna google it!
Politely rude. Briskly vague. Firmly uninformative.
Decided not to install this. Also, in the spirit of full disclosure, this is why:
From the EULA:
This is not 'free.' IMO
Politely rude. Briskly vague. Firmly uninformative.
OH NOES! ADVERTISEMENTS!
My days of not taking you seriously have certainly come to a middle.
Whoa!
My Gamercard
*grin*
Apparently my eyes are a commodity. I value them quite highly. I'm not getting a cut of this action, and I own other racing games that don't measure how long a banner is pasted in front of my face.
*shrug*
Using this evaluation method, and a healthy grant from their advertisers, the game will gradually devolve into floating banners. /humor
Look, I'm not saying it's a bad practice. I'm saying I try not to support it because I don't like it. At least it's free, unlike SWAT 4. I'm still upset over that. The point is: Nothing BEFORE the EULA informed me that I'm essentially going to be playing a dynamic banner ad.
Still, it looks fun!
Politely rude. Briskly vague. Firmly uninformative.
I have been a big fan of trackmania. It is great fun at LAN parties. Though both of the retail versions come with Starforce which makes in a pain at LAN parties too. Compared to Starforce, advertisements are not that bad. Downloading now.
Thanks for the link.
Free sounds good to me. If I want to kill the ads I'll just tell my firewall to kill it's internet access. No biggie.
XBLive: Thin J
PSN: Thin_J
I don't imagine master craftsmen leaping away from completed projects and shouting "Done, motherf*ckers! - 1Dgaf
Just for reference, you drive in this giant arena, and the ads are just on the banners around the arena, much like a normal arena would have.
My days of not taking you seriously have certainly come to a middle.
Whoa!
My Gamercard
I don't mind, as long as they don't hand over the information to third parties (and it seems they don't) and it's only in-game advertising. Downloading it as we speak, thx for the link!
Roo: "Just to cheer you up if any of the above made you sad: Boobies."
Koning_Floris, on my online 'skills': "Stinking is a skill too!"
I am too busy looking at the track to actually have noticed there was ads in the game!
WoW Profile: Haruspex / Medivh Server
We played this for like 2 hours after work today. To be frank, I don't mind the SForce protection or ads. There's quite an amount of content in there, let's not even talk about the track editor - and it's simply fun.
EDIT: Just saw this on another forum:
I'm in the process of downloading these now, too.
Why would a free game need Starforce protection?
"Even though that place should only be fifteen or twenty minutes away geographically, in actual practice - between the hours of four and seven - Redmond might as well orbit the Earth." - Tycho, Penny Arcade
Yes, I fail to see the logic behind this. A demo at least kinda makes sense.
The only possible reason I can see is that they are considering the idea of actually selling this game.
Xbox Live: StaatsM
I'm sure they don't want any kind of unprotected executables flying around. Just to make sure nobody finds a way to use the Nations one to somehow work their way around the TM or TM Sunrise protection mechanism.
On GameTab the #4 top article titled "Do NOT Download This Game!" is about this very game and starforce. There is a link there to a boycott starforce site where I learned that starforce installs an invisible 'device' (thus the reboot). You can actually see it in Device Manager if you turn on 'show hidden devices' and look under the 'Non Plug and Play' section of the device tree. Handy way to determine if you have this virus, er copy protection.
They're calling it malware. I'm a bit torn as I really hate starforce, but quite enjoy Trackmania...
It is the habit of every aggressor nation to claim that it is acting on the defensive. - Jawaharlal Nehru
Is it possible that starforce is acting as something like punkbuster to ensure people don't circumvent the advertising?
It is the habit of every aggressor nation to claim that it is acting on the defensive. - Jawaharlal Nehru
Regardless, there's several variations of the starforce removal tool out there.
Download the game, hunt down the starforce-free (ie: cracked) .exe that we all know was probably available 5 minutes after the game was made available, and then remove starforce.
I don't see what the big deal is.
XBLive: Thin J
PSN: Thin_J
I don't imagine master craftsmen leaping away from completed projects and shouting "Done, motherf*ckers! - 1Dgaf
Yupo. I installed the game, then ran the starforce uninstaller. The game still ran. No need for a crack. I did only test single player however.
Uninstaller available here => http://www.glop.org/starforce/
It is the habit of every aggressor nation to claim that it is acting on the defensive. - Jawaharlal Nehru