I bought a game yeterday called Sacred, which is simular to Dungeon Siege and Diablo, After installing it, I clicked the icon on my desktop to play it and the CD drive began to spin and it said "verifying CD" , then after 10 sec it said "disk verification error" and the game wouldnt run.

After a visit to the Sacred website and their forums, I discocered many people have the same problem because the game scans your PC's registry and wont run if it finds any software which might aid in defeating copyright protection, like Alcohol 120% for example.

I was not happy with this because I would have to uninstall Alcohol to play the game.

I went and downloaded a NO/CD hack which supposedly allows you to play the game without the CD in the drive, and it worked until I got past the games menus and started a new game. on the screen where you start to actually play the game, the screen went black and did so every time I tried to play it, I returned to the game forums and discovered this was another forum of copy protection, I guess the game scans its own files and if it decects any altering it turns your screen dark.

These guys are serious about copy protection I guess. So I removed the NO/CD hack and put the original exe. file back, and uninstalled Alcohol and the game ran fine, but what a crock of crap! I shouldnt have to uninstall anything to play a game I bought!

If anyone knows a way around this please let me know, for now I have to leave Alcohol uninstalled until I am done with this game.

Yes unfortunaly several game companies do this to prevent illegal backups, if you find this practise rather dissapoint, the only way is to return the game back and complain!

(in reply to bum4evr)

Unprofessional behavior.

(in reply to emperor)

I dont think you can return a game once you have broken the seal on the box, I got it at Best Buy and I read their return rules on their website and it says you cant return software thats already opened. I would return it if I could, they game is not very good anyhow.

(in reply to Iggy)

Well if it doesn't work becuase they tinkered with it so bad you can't run it with any other copy software installed I'd return it as defective and get my money back. It's none of their business what else you have on your machine unless your making 500 copies to spread around or something. We used to have fair use laws that allowed you to make a backup of anything you owned.

(in reply to bum4evr)

I sent an e-mail to Best Buy explaining all this, the site says it takes 2 days to get a reply. I asked for a refund.

Another thing I just discovered is in the games "read me" file it says:

Q: The game is not starting, what am I doing wrong?

A: This can relate to a number of reasons:
It could be due to a fault in the copy protection. If you have Virtual CD-ROM Drives active, these should be deactivated (like Nero, Daemon-Tools etc.)

A "Fault" my ass, I tried re-installing Alcohol just now and didnt start the program or set up the virtual drive, Sacred still didnt run and I will now have to uninstall Alcohol again to play the game. They have already had 4 or 5 patches anyway by now so if this was a "fault" they could have fixed it by now. So now they lie to people too, Im really loving this company now :(

(in reply to Dartman)

Try this: install alcohol again, and after installation open alcohol and go to file,options,virtual drive. Here you will see some text boxes, one named "Vendor Identification" (default value "AXV") and another named "Product Revision Level". (default value "2.0B").

Change these strings to something else (that does not contain the original strings).
Hit Ok, follow any instructions alcohol gives you, reboot if instructed.
After that, check and see whether your game runs with alcohol installed.

Another thought that crossed my mind while writing is the order of appearance of your CD/DVD drives (Virtual or not).
If Alcohol's virtual drive appears in windows explorer before the other CD/DVD drives in your system, then go to alcohol,file,options,virtual drive,drive letter and change the drive letter to something high (X,Y,Z for example).

Good luck!!!

(in reply to bum4evr)

My opinion is this:
Go to www.megagames.com and bookmark it.
Download the NOCD crack for sacred and never buy an original game again unless you need the serial key for online multiplayer games.
They should get what they deserve.

(in reply to scuba_steve)

he already got the no cd hack file and nothing happened carlito...
so,just finish the game without alcohol installed and then as Leibniz said...
anyways it is preety buged too,so it will eventually get to your nerves once more before u use it
as a frisbee...

(in reply to Leibniz)

I already tried the NO/CD patch from http://www.gameburnworld.com and it was able to get past the disk check but it was not able to get past their secondary copyright protection scheme which turns then screen dark if the software detects any change to its files. Im not sure how that secondary one works, maybe it just checks the file size of the exe file, cause the NO/CD hack changes it.

Best Buy e-mailed me back and said I could not get a refund :( Oh well, I guess I just wont buy anything made by that company anymore. I can live with copy protection and being forced to have the CD in the drive, but thats BS when you have to un-install stuff to play this game.

(in reply to fernandes)