The past two months have been pretty hectic for the gaming scene, especially for the folks involved in cracking game copy protection mechanisms. During this time we saw the public launch of UBISoft’s new hyped up DRM system (bundled with games such as Assassin’s Creed 2 and Splinter Cell : Conviction), creating frenzy among release groups who simply hacked away at it, trying to break this supposedly unbreakable protection. We saw leading names such as Razor1911, RELOADED and SKIDROW each claiming to have cracked the protection and there was quite a bit of E-drama and flame wars between these groups. Either way, the cracking scene was more alive in the past two months than it was in the first few weeks of 2010. If you want to see how scene groups fared and competed against each other during this time, check out the latest two editions of The Game Scene Charts (TGSC), a pirate magazine that rates and ranks groups of crackers based on their ‘performance’.
March 2010 rankings saw SKIDROW top the charts with their recent flurry of new games releases. SKIDROW, founded in 1990 as a release group for AMIGA console games, returned to the scene in 2007 as a PC cracking group. Initially releasing mostly budget games, SKIDROW have now proven themselves to be a team of top crackers and reverse engineers capable of cracking complex DRM. Legendary RELOADED and GENESiS follows SKID in TGSC’s March rankings.
April 2010 rankings are very much similar. SKIDROW grabs the first spot, RELOADED second and the only difference is TiNYISO moving a few spots up the ladder to claim the 3rd place. Unlike SKID and RLD, TiNYISO deals with budget PC games that are relatively unknown to the public.
Download
You can download TGSC issue 41 and 42 from Defacto, a site we featured on a previous article.
[Click Here] to download Game Scene Charts Issue 41 (March 2010) from Defacto.
[Click Here] to download Game Scene Charts Issue 42 (April 2010) from Defacto.
If you are looking for older editions, Defacto has the complete collection of TGSC magazines since Issue #1 (September 2006) on this page
