Shacknews has posted a story about how the real time strategy game Earth 2160 won't work if you buy it from Steam. The game refuses to launch and instead returns a generic Steam error. Shortly after posting the story, the game was pulled.

Similarly, the last of the Battlecry series of real time strategy games, Warlords Battlecry III (pictured), is apparently broken when you buy it from Stardock's online service, Impulse. The Impulse version triggers an anti-piracy measure so that every spell or attack with a less than 100% chance of success will fail. Furthermore, every treasure you discover is an Elven Ring of Greed. Clever way to frustrate pirates. It reminds me of the notorious "Fade" anti-piracy measure used in Operation Flashpoint five years ago, whereby the accuracy for guns would get increasingly bad until they were effectively useless. There's speculation that Ubisoft built some sort of crash into the PC version of Assassin's Creed, which would trigger when players of a pirated copy arrived at one of the later cities. My favorite anti-piracy urban legend, however, is documented in this awesome Game Trailers clip from the Japanese RPG Earthbound. It's worth watching the whole thing.

But back to the main point: It's great that older games are finding homes on newer digitial distribution services like Gametap, Good Old Games, GamersGate, Impulse, and Steam. Hopefully situations like Earth 2160 and Warlords Battlecry III will continue to be rare and these folks will do their due diligence to make sure the games work as advertised. Earth 2160 has been broken since February and Battlecry III has been broken since at least January, with no official word on a scheduled fix for either game.