I never bought BV, but now I'm finally starting to think I might actually be interested in it. However, I have zero interest in uninstalling the game and installing the UC instead, that sounds like a huge hassle and I don't want to do it. Can I still buy the pre-UC version of BV from somewhere?

Ebay. You may have to keep searching for awhile until one comes up. That's where I'd look first.

Amazon?

Ebay?

Disc copies didn't stop getting sold just because the UC came out.

If it's available on Amazon, even used, that's great and I'll take it if it's not too expensive.

The first result of the link I posted has an affiliate selling a new copy supposedly.



The difference between a used copy and a pirated copy is that there are no enforced criminal penalties for buying used copies where as piracy there is.

I'm sure everyone has bought a game and then, say, installed it on multiple computers in their house so that multiple family members could play it. This matters when it's a company installing business software for all their employees, but no one seriously enforces it for games.

Honestly, it's probably a good thing we have Steam now. It makes it a lot clearer what is and isn't kosher when it comes to installing games. Hell, with Steam, it's actually more of a pain in the ass to pirate the game than it is to buy it.

My suggestion: buy a copy advertised as new from Amazon (after checking the vendor's reviews to see what their reputation is like), then return it if it shows up and isn't new. Easier to get a refund than if you were buying it from a random person on eBay.

Which is exactly why most games developers are moving to digital downloads rather than selling disks. Even if you buy a game in the store, all you're buying is a piece of paper with a key to unlock a download. It's much, MUCH easier to control their content that way and, yes, makes pirating much more of a pain in the ass by comparison. Which, IMO, is a far better way to discourage piracy than things like SecuROM, which tend to just make things more of a pain in the ass for people like me, who (fully) legitimately purchase the game.

There's illegal, and there's immoral. By no reasonable standard is the resale of legally-purchased games immoral.

And it's not worth EA's while to pursue people who do so, or they'd be embroiled in a huge ongoing lawsuit with e-bay and its vendors and customers. Buy it used, don't worry about it. "Everybody does it" is a bad defense; but "the game wouldn't be worth the candle to the potentially interested party" is pretty good security in a case like this.

Yes - that's another big reason I like Steam/digital downloads, companies no longer feel compelled to unleash malware on their above-board customers. I can't even ever remember a time when there wasn't some way to circumvent the state-of-the-art DRM, anyway.

One of my favorite Indie developers recently started releasing special edition versions of his games on Steam and it made me so happy, because the first time I bought his games the disks had to be snail-mailed in envelopes from Germany and it was just a much better experience buying the new versions, and I was actually happy to pay again.

Getting the UC does require a few things a player has to do - but it is really not such a big hassle, and somebody would have to hold a gun to my head before I use a disk version again I have used UC since it came out - something happened to my pc , I had to reinstall and I broke my BG disk shortly after - and then there was the UC option
I have used it on Windows 7 and moved over to Windows 10 without too many problems as well.
Some of the UC updates have made it easier as well, I believe.
The UC runs really well too.

Well that...that escalated quickly.

Not really, @Charmful ( )- I never intended to go back since the beginning I have solved little problems as they came along here and there, but the last time I had to download and install was when Windows 10 came out - and my backups were safe, and they worked straight away too And the UC, as @Smorbie1 once said, runs like butter

It really IS kind of immoral, though. Let me put it in writing terms. Someone buys one of your books, Peni. They don't read it, but they make a photocopy of it to keep and read later and turn around and sell your book to someone else for, say, half of what they paid for it. You/your publisher get no money from that subsequent sale of your book, yet BOTH people -- the person who originally bought and copied it before reading it AND the person who bought the used copy -- got to read it. So, basically halving your/your publisher's profits because the person who bought the used copy isn't going to go out and buy a new copy in a store. Granted, no one's probably going to DO that, in the real world, but the analogy remains. It's the problem that we in the music industry had when people bought CDs, copied the CD or ripped MP3s, then sold the disk without also erasing their MP3s/destroying their copy.

Is it illegal? Yes, technically. Is it enforceable? Hell, no, especially not back before you could easily download music online so CDs could be taken out of stores. We are still vulnerable to this in many ways, although things like Spotify have helped to reduce the impact. Is it immoral? Well, yes, I think it is. Not in the "cardinal, mortal sin" sort of way, but it's not nice to the people who make these things that people enjoy. They think they're sticking it to "THE MAN" -- and, given recording labels, specifically, and the way they often treat artists, they sort of are, but I don't know about other industries -- but often they're really sticking it to the people employed by THE MAN. And that's kind of a sucky thing for them to do. That being said, TS2 is out of production, so buying used TS2 games isn't hurting anyone at this point. The same couldn't be said when the game was still in production, though.

Ah well, it's past my bedtime, so I gotta quit yammering on. It's fun, though.

There are people that sells their games for other reasons, I would think - perhaps they prefer to play action games now, perhaps they have a huge box full of disks and have the UC now (I gave mine away, well at least those I had double copies of) - but from what I understand, EA is really milking the TS4 players. So I am with Rosebine here

That's not what it's like, though, Icad. I am not hurt by people selling used copies of my books, and I don't know any authors who don't buy used books. The resale of books is factored into the economics of publishing, and the only restriction placed on it is the resale of returns. In the real world, nobody photocopies entire books that they can get any other way; and there's an elaborate framework of "fair use" rules governing how much of a work may be reprinted, quoted, or copied under what circumstances. If a teacher wants to use a short story in class, of which her school possesses only one copy, she has guidelines to follow for how to go about this in a legal manner for educational purposes, without having to go through the whole rigamarole of contacting the copyright holder. If an educational company, however, wants to use the same short story in its materials, it has to jump through all the hoops and negotiate the rights to do so.

Piracy is a Bad Thing because of its economic impact on creators, publishers, and media sellers, which boils down to: If you refuse to pay for it, you'll lose it (because the creators have all either starved to death or had their creative lives killed by soul-sucking day jobs). The worst piracy is not committed by individuals, but by corporations, as when a publisher obtains (in any way) a copy of a work and brings out its own edition, nabbing 100% of the profit from that edition and thus stealing the fruits of the labors of everyone involved in the original publication. Note that they do this on the assumption that people are willing to pay for the work in the first place. Individual pirates are people who wouldn't have paid for the work under any circumstances, and are seldom worth pursuing.

Resale of games, books, records, and so on, and other properly published, hard-copy intellectual property is not piracy. The publisher, seller, and (eventually) the creator have all been paid for the sold work exactly as often as they expected to be paid for it. The physical copy is now the property of the buyer, and they can do as they like with it. This is a well-established fact of the market - for traditional forms of publishing. Electronic forms of publishing, though they've now been around for quite some time, are still a bit of a gray area, partly because the technology is still evolving.

And software of all kinds, when made available in physical forms like disks, are a particularly vexsome area, as the industry's corporate culture wants to control everything and has yet to come to terms with the fact that it's impossible. In practical terms, elaborately paranoid efforts to foil piracy in the form of impossibly complex and tedious licensing agreements, DRM software, and NDAs for everybody are not only countereffective, but redundant. The important thing to protect in the Sims 2 is the source code, and that is adequately protected already. In no way, shape, or form does buying a used Bon Voyage CD impact EA's control of its intellectual property.

Torrenting a new game is clearly and obviously wrong, as well as illegal, and in any case runs a high risk of getting an inferior copy. Torrenting an old game that can't be bought normally anymore, especially if the company is being a jackass in its customer service, is a grayer area from a moral standpoint - I myself would still not do it. Buying a used copy of the game harms no one and is illegal only in violating a badly-written, unrealistic contract that nobody ever reads. Anyone trying to enforce that license agreement would make bad headlines.

Mind you, EA's collective judgment in many areas is sufficiently reality-blind that there's no guarantee they won't decide to waste their time and money enforcing the clause. But it really is a pretty safe bet.

On the moral side your own conscience is your best guide. If you think doing something is wrong, don't do it, regardless of how many reasonable-sounding people on the internet tell you it's right.

Guys please no talk of piracy. It's against site rules.

Well I could make a funny remark...

But meantime I am cooking supper. If all mentions of piracy aren't gone by the time I get back, they will be.

never mind, have time while boiling water

I don't think that's always true, even in the publishing industry. I heard a story from an author once, who had noticed her sales had gone down for her series (so her publisher was thinking about discontinuing it), and also noticed that there were a lot of pirated copies of her last book floating around. So she insisted that the publisher not release electronic copies of her next book for review, and they eventually agreed. Then, a little bit before release, she created an electronic copy of the first few chapters of the new book, and appended an essay about how pirating hurts authors, and had her brother release it to as many torrenting sites as he could find, advertising it as the full book. As a result, no one could find a pirated copy of the full book, many more people bought the book than had bought her previous books, sales went way up, and her publisher kept the series. So I think even individual pirates do matter in some situations. She didn't have to do anything particularly baroque to combat this piracy, either - she just didn't release electronic review copies, and released a fake pirated version of her own.

Please no more mentions of certain things here thanks!