I made that topic yesterday asking for help getting a retail version working and I said that I specifically wanted retail and not FSO.
I'd say my reason basically goes along with the last two posts... since I'd never played FS2, I wanted to experience what everyone else experienced when it came out. I'm not picky about graphics and I play old games all the time... so I wanted the genuine "old school" experience of playing FS2.
My other reason fr wanting a working copy of FS2 Retail is because I'm a regular member of the community at
Speed Demos Archive (SDA). SDA hosts hundreds of videos of speed runs for all types of games - where a speedrun is a completion of a game as fast as possible. The forums at SDA are where people get together to talk about, plan, and produce speedruns. Each run usually takes a massive planning, strategy, and practice effort to get a good product, and then runs are verified before being posted to the site alongside the runner's comments. Many fans of games don't understand speedrunning because they don't see the interest in blowing through a game that was meant to be appreciated more slowly and with cutscenes, etc. The point of making a speedrun is to answer the question: "I wonder how fast that game can be beaten." SDA is a very friendly community, and everyone there works together to produce good speedruns. Sorry for the lengthy description, but I just wanted to make it clear what SDA is all about to avoid miscommunication.
The second reason I want a retail version of FS2 is because if a speedrun is done for the game, it will almost certainly need to be done on the retail version. That's what makes SDA fair for speedrunners around the world is by having a verification process, and in general SDA only hosts runs of things that were released retail, rather than internet-community-created mods. That's nothing towards the SCP... that's a blanket rule that also applies to games like Oblivion or Starcraft or other heavily modded games. Often runs done on a different console even are put in different categories if any differences exist.
SDA certainly allows for categories within a given game. Some games might have a default single segment run, a hard mode run, and a segmented 100% run. For FS2, an run of FS2 Open could be done in a seperate category perhaps. If the runner and the verifiers concluded that there were no differences that affect speedrunning, then the FS2 Open run could replace the retail one.
I've done 3 speedruns of Star Fox 64 and 1 for Star Wars Starfighter. There haven't been many space shooter / space sim games on SDA, and I'm trying to encourage more of them. I'm considering FS1 and FS2 for future projects, and there has been some random discussion/requests for them at this point in the SDA forums.
Sorry for being so long-winded, but that's another example of why anyone would mess with retail. Like Turey said... to insure retail behavior hasn't changed with new additions to the code.
