I paid for Puzzle Quest 2 on android like a decade+ ago. It is a local single-player game. It has a validation check when you open the app. That check fails because this game is ancient and the servers are offline.
I want to replay the game I paid for. I have the APK from an APK site. It’s even been pulled from steam to push their crappy p2w pq3. Anyone have tricks to crank an APK and bypass a server check? I’ve decompiled the APK but am in a bit over my head.
with sonic runners, they had to reverse engineer the whole server infrastructure. i’d say the chances of you patching out server checks without decompiling the entire game are low.
but i’m not any kind of programmer, so i’d love to be proven wrong.
I’m a few kinds of programmer, and that’s pretty much it.
I wonder if in this case you could just mimic the OG server and return a 200. Could just do that with a hosts file change. Although if it’s looking for anything else from that verification endpoint then decompiling would be the answer.
Try lucky patcher to remove licence verification. It’s a very hit&miss tool; but when it works it does well.
I’m currently also looking at decompiling android apps and understand a bit of smali. If you send me the apk I might look into it.
If you want to do it yourself, I recommend apktool_m on android. It includes all tools required to decompile the app. It can even show a partially correct java code in apps that are not obfuscated.
I think the local copy I have (on a literal old samsung S3) is the same as what is downloaded from here, with the game cache files: https://sbenny.com/games/puzzle-quest-2.html
I was NOT able to make that work on my current OnePlus, even with the cache files. It fails a validation check on launch.
I bought roller coaster tycoon classic for mobile a few years back. When I upgraded my phone, it suddenly vanished because apparently Pixel 7’s and later are 64-bit only. I’ve heard I could root my phone and somehow restore access, but that seems like a pain and I’ve become pretty reliant on Google’s call screening service to block spam calls.
Just ridiculous that I can no longer play a game a purchased for arbitrary reasons.
Reminds me of when I was a kid and played mono monsters 1 & 2, so sad they shut it down and due to tutorial requiring you go to the shop you get stuck and unable to proceed.
