Worms had the black on red printing, but it wasn't the only one. One of my friend's old dos games had deliberately wavey, grainy, and low contrast printing of its codes, and you had to experience severe eye strain just to start the game. You had to enter three codes correctly, and quite often you would make a mistake just because you couldn't read the printing which you had paid for.
I remember one friend spent a night with his girlfriend, with her reading the Worms codes, and him typing, just to avoid that annoyance.
Yeah, that's what I buy games for, 'cause they're so much fun to use.
Another great piece of security design was the old Cubase on the Mac. One had a copy protected validation floppy, which one had to use as a key to unlock the program. The floppy could only be used twice, being re-enabled when uninstalling. The obvious problem was the event of data corruption. After one good crash, and a corrupted floppy, one of my friends was given just terrible customer service, and accused of being a thief despite having registered his software. So, he just cracked his copy. Is it wrong? Back in those days, there were also hardware dongles, which quite often caused other programs to fail, including some music software that a lot of people really wanted to use together. So, people just did the naughty thing, so they could use the software they paid for.
Again, I can understand the reasons for all this, but when pirated software runs better than originals, then the attempted security measures have just failed.
One time when my PC crashed (think it was a bad power surge), half my software wouldn't work anymore. The clock had been set to some ridiculus date, and licences I had paid for stopped. Unfortunately, when I corrected the clock, the licenses wouldn't re-validate, and I had to re-install, re-configure, and defrag my hard drive.
Well, I don't have a solution, but some attempts of software companies really just work against them.
