When Skyrim came out, me and my friends had the crazy idea that pirated copies should have started off with your execution as usual, but instead of being interrupted by a dragon, just always ending in your death no matter what.
Theo Snelson I had a friend who when came online I saw it said [redacted] playing half-life 3 when I paused my game like a bitch , and messaged him he said he was not playing anything while being offline and sent a fucking Lenny to me >:U
You guys left out Sonic 06! The pirated version of that game had weird glitches and terrible load times that pretty much stopped players from...What? Your saying that was the finished published game? Oh... Well shit
"It's not a bug in your game, but a bug in your moral code." Rocksteady staff member, when a person with a pirated copy of Arkham Asylum asked about the "bug".
sonic in the classic games: taps his foot while looking at the player impatiently. in sonic CD, if you do nothing for 3 minutes, sonic pretty much gives up and literally jumps off the map, causing an instant game over
You know they'd forget Seiken Densetsu 3 in that list, because that game has a little bit of personality in characters' idle animations. Hawk trying to busy himself, Carlie being well. Carlie. OutsideXBox tends to forget the good stuff on occasion, as if it's tradition.
very mad guy Sonic was my immediate first thought for idle animations lol Also in a PS1 version of Tetris Plus there was an "explorer" that you could help get to a door to escape the level of you cleared the correct block pattern before the ceiling came crushing down on him. But anyway if he got trapped between two blocks for too long he would tire out and fall asleep with a huge snot bubble coming from his nose lol was always amusing to me.
No mention of Serious Sam 3? If you pirated that game, a giant pink human-scorpion monster would chase you around forever until you died. And he's invincible. Fun times.
Earthbound. 5 layers of piracy protection and the last one triggers during the final boss, Giygas. It freezes the game, deletes your save files and resets the game. That just hurts.
I found this entire video hilarious because I was going to do my College research paper on Copy Protection/Anti-Piracy Methods in games. Let me inform you of my personal favourite discoveries: - Puggsy: After you defeated the boss at the end of Junior Mode levels (said boss had reduced health if pirated), instead of a "Well Done!" screen with cheerful music, you'd get a relatively eerie screen which said "O.K. that's all the levels of Puggsy your allowed to play, now go and play a cartridge version of the game instead of this silly copy. Until then.......bye. Travellers Tales 93". Yes, the "your" typo is from the game, and there were really that many "..."s after "then". - Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2: If it detected you were playing a pirated copy, the game would play normally for all of three minutes, and then all of your stuff would explode, so you'd lose pretty much immediately. - Chrono Trigger: You'd be allowed to play the game until you first had to travel back in time. If your copy was detected to be pirated (or Game Genie/Pro Action Replay cheats were being used) the warp sequence would never end, meaning you were effectively stuck. You could work around it with turning off cheats, but for pirated copies? Not so much. - Earthbound: Dear lord, Earthbound. If a pirated copy was detected earlier on, it would just give you an anti-piracy message and end there. If you got past that, the game could still detect it was pirated BECAUSE you worked around it, and would spawn a LOT more enemies than usual, and in places they shouldn't even spawn, making the game tremendously more difficult. If the player STILL pushed through, this is where it gets cruel but karmic. The game would freeze after the first part of the final boss, making the player need to reset. When the game was reloaded? ALL save files would be deleted. Spyro: Year Of The Dragon took a similar approach to this, and my god, I still love it so you should look it up if you're interested. Finally, as a bonus to one already in the video, there was a well-known incident when a pirate accidentally outed themselves for the Batman: Arkham Asylum "glitch". When they complained about the "bug" on the official Rocksteady message board, the devs responded: "It's not a bug in the game's code, it's a bug in your moral code." I could have gone into more detail on how some of it works, but decided that'd probably be boring. Plus, this comment is WAY too long as it is. Enjoy my specific line of knowledge, internet. This is what College does to you.
One of the best things I read about those kind of anti-piracy measures was one user who reported the 'bug,' much like that Arkham Asylum player did, and was told it was because he was a filthy pirate, and that he should just buy the game. He responded with "Ha ha, let's call that 'Plan B'." I mean, that just makes you want to go "Fuck off."
@Gaming Master Anthony, yeah i think they kinda get in your way so much it becomes impossible to play the game. lol There was also one about killing a cow spawning this ridiculously difficult enemy that gives you no reward for beating.
Sure, let's forget "Games for windows - live" system that is no longer supported.. And then you spend half a week searching to make your old games you bought (Rip Fable) just playable. always online is a nightmare and should have never existed in the first place ( hence why we do not see them a lot nowadays)
You didn't mention that it took a bit to show up but then it would follow you even between levels with its endless, invincible assault. And again, pirates went to forums to complain about a glitched enemy and many luls were had.
Edward, I'm one of those people. It sounds like a fun (if frustrating) challenge. Would probably make a pretty good drinking game at lan parties too. Every time you die to the scorpion, take a shot and vacate the chair.
I liked Nintendo's answer to Pokémon Sun and Moon pirates; let them play, but as soon as they connect to the internet, ban them from all online features and the Nintendo eshop. Best part was people complaining how they were never going to buy a Nintendo product again. Newsflash; that's what got you into this mess!
drinnik You can complete the game without internet though... I'd think they'd do something like make all of your Pokémon Lvl 1 forever but I guess that Nintendo is more vengeful than that
drinnik Yeah, but at the same time the "pirates" then just got handed the game to them for free by Nintendo themselves lol. "Oh damnit, a lot of people have been pirating Pokemon as of late, we need to fix this now! Hmmm.... I know! We'll just let them pirate it, still be able to play the fi'll game which no glitches, or anything like it (same as if they had paid); and then we'll just not let them give us money!" That's some brilliant work done by Nintendo and Pokemon their, what an idea. Yes reprimand those who downloaded and/or obtained your (or any) game illegally, but you as a business don't do so by literally not allowing the person to spend any money on said game; it's very counter productive.
It's not just that. There's a part in Batman: Arkham Asylum where you need to glide and grapple over the Joker toxin filled room. Pirates can't glide or grapple, so they just keep falling into the toxin and dying over and over and over again. It's pretty hilarious, really.
And under DRM protected games, since they can't detect pirated copies otherwise. It gets even better when two weeks after release discovered that due to a bug in the system, it also affected all legitimate copies, and most of those people they had claimed were pirates on their forums were actually legitimate customers affected by a game-breaking bug in their DRM... Oh. the irony!
PJ Emrey: There's a few companies always jostling for that position. As I recall, Comcast and E.A. have each held that particular dishonor at various times, and they're both regulars on the Top 20 list.
When I was in elementary school my Grandma bought me a CD-Rom copy of Kings Quest VI that didn't even come with the physical manual, therefore making it impossible to solve the puzzle cliff unless I found another person with the game to copy their answers from (I did find that person). Makes me wonder if KMart was selling bootleg games or what.
I was reminded of a game I had as a kid, "The Island of Dr. Brain". The first puzzle involves finding and getting to the island, which you do by parachuting out of plane. The catch is, the island's location varies: you're given a symbol which corresponds to a specific longitude and latitude found in the manual. Enter the wrong coordinates and you jump out of the plane and parachute into the middle of the ocean. King's Quest 6 also had some anti-piracy measures. The game came with a manual, "Guidebook to the Land of the Green Isles". A lot of it was just background lore (it was a fun read as a kid), but there was one section of the game where the manual was necessary. Basically, your character had to ascend the "Cliffs of Logic", a sheer cliff wall with puzzles carved into it consisting of secret codes, riddles and phrases that could only be found in the guidebook. Answering correctly caused steps to appear, allowing you to climb up to the next puzzle. Answering incorrectly caused the steps to disappear and you'd fall to your death. There was also another section, a labyrinth filled with death traps, which had a subtly drawn map in the guidebook. I didn't catch on to that, though, and I managed to get through the labyrinth through trial and error.
You mustn't forget "Crysis Warhead", which replaced the pirate's ammo with chickens that dealt no damage. The only way to beat a pirated game was to be determined enough to kill every soldier, tank and alien robot that crosses your path with the only effective weapon left to you: your fists.
tbh, if they were that determined, I would've given them a free copy as clearly money is an issue in their household. I mean, I cant think of any pirate that would be so dedicated to keep on playing a broken game. The only people who would go through shit to finish a game are hardcore fans.
Anyone who even thinks about playing any Soulsborne game without a controller is a heathen and should burn. Unless it were for some kind of masochistic challenge run- which i think we can all agree would be hilarious.
+I am Johu *after being caught.* And their claim is the worry about your battery life. But it's nothing compared to what one can find when casually looking through your own browser or one of the webpages that you're used to:\
I remember a game from the same era having a code sheet with black ink on dark brown paper which was impossible to photocopy. There was another that had you look up words in the game manual, which required pirates to photocopy the whole manual.
Worms from the early nineties had the black glossy text on black matt paper code sheet, but a friends dad had a scanner that could read it if you adjusted the contrast. nostalgia :-)
First Elder Scrolls - Arena had one of these "write a word pfrom page something etc" at the end of tutorial level. Problem is i bought TES Anniversary but it didn't had manuals for Arena and Daggerfall, so i ended up on the old internet looking for specific words :)
I found one that is common for non-pirated and phone games. Gameplay Tickets. Start a level, spend a ticket. Restart a level, spend a ticket. Out of tickets, wait for a day, or feed them money.
Rakan O I prefer the normal way with advertisements. Look at choices or cliffhanger on the mobile store. On any story you have to pay to get diamonds for a good option or even to just change your clothes into something nice. Its ridiculous. :(
Jamal Howourth yeah that is annoying but I thought they were talking about games like candy crush and shit like that where you can play buy then wait for like an hour or so to get the energy back to play again or you can just throw you credit card at it for energy
Wouldn’t be surprised if sims 5 just comes all pixilated, and there is a 70 dollar dlc to make it more detailed pixilation, and then another 150 dollars after that to get rid of the pixilation.
Actually, they’ll charge you 10 dollar for every single pixel. The minimum resolution will be 1080p so that’s 2,073,600 pixels. Times 10, comes down to 20,736,000 dollar for the base game.
I used to work for a visual novel localization company that was having a lot of trouble with 4chan pirates. The programmer was able to make alterations in the Western release that sensed if a game had been hacked, and usually just put up a screen saying so if anyone tried to play a pirated copy. But for "Boob Wars" (yes, this is a real game they put out and it's exactly what you think it is), the programmer instead made all but the big sexy ending available to the player. Once they got to that point, a new scene was written in where the main character was chastised for piracy and lamented that he should have just paid for the game, at which point the game ended. It got so popular that not only did people buy the game legally, they asked the company to make the "pirate ending" accessible in legal copies so they didn't have to break the law to see it.
I'm pretty sure I've seen it too, but I can't seem to find it... Edit: Scratch that. I was referring to one of Rooster Teeth's top fives. Thought Outsidexbox had made it, for some reason.
The richest, Whatculture, Top 10's and fuck knows how many other top I have on my sub list, I see duplicates atleast 1-2 times a week, you'll learn to stop asking that question soon and to just take them as they come
It's also worth mentioning that some games asked you to *turn to page 122 for example* and read the 3rd word on the forth sentence in the second paragraph, meaning *you would have to photocopy the entire manual to a game* , that would at least cost you a few bob in paper and printer ink.
when i think "sims" and "pixel", i can only think of something hilarious that happened when i played the sims 3. my sim was a firefighter, but sometimes he would not switch to his uniform when going to work (he would spin around like he changed clothes, but would still wear the same clothing). if he just got out of the shower, he would stay naked with no pixelation. i could no longer play with a straight face after that
Wait... how do they look like without the pixels? Did EA actually bother giving them... y'know, private parts? Since they're censored all the time, I would guess they have no reason to give them those.
This is less "7 Ways Developers Tried to Stop People from Playing Their Game" and more "6 Anti-piracy Measures in Games + 1 Anti-child measure" Honestly what I was initially expecting from the title was those whole "Hey, you should take a break" things that games nowadays do And by "games nowadays" I mean only Nintendo games And mobile games, but those only say it cause they want your cash
that stupid brain training game on nintendo ds comes to mind... so many puzzles and games etc but could only unlock them one per day... but you could get around by changing date and time on the device.. was so stupid.
Apparently, if you pirated Witcher 2, the hot scene where Triss magically disrobes and you get to see her glorious, erm "enchantments" turns into an old hag instead.
Yes, that's a brilliant way to prevent piracy. No one's ever lost their booklet before. Hey there's the disc for my original The Sims game that my parents bought when I was 14 ... Where's the booklet? Side note: when I was growing up, my parents copied all our games and music onto new floppy discs and cassette tapes (later CDs). Why? Because they wanted to be sure my brother and I wouldn't break, wear out, or scratch the original. They wouldn't even have known where to get a pirated version if they tried and probably still couldn't find one.
Wait. If developers know which players have pirated the game, then why don't they just make the games literally unplayable. Like literally you start the game and nothing happens just a black screen with no noise? This has really confused me!
My guess is that the groups that pirate these games don't necessarily test the game rigorously before releasing the cracked version. Something that stops the game from working outright would be noticed, whereas an introduced bug might not be. This would then be far more inconvenient for the players of the pirated copies.
Max Chatterji well, pirating is illegal, so, one way to catch a criminal is to trick him into committing that crime, and I doubt you can "accidentally" pirate games. they would rat themselves out by complaining about that specific bug. besides solving a problem is better than pushing it off for later
No, no, the Serious Room ending occurs when you type cheats into the console. The narrator then puts you in a sealed room and tells you to think about what you've done. Forever.
The other way the sims series has tried to stop people playing their games is to release awful, tacky and badly thought out cash grabs, bowling stuff anyone?
I actually liked bowling stuff. Fitness stuff was dumb because it added absolutely nothing new. Literally every single thing in that pack was already there except the rock wall, which nobody gives a crap about
Oh, I know of a few ways what developers prevented you from playing the game without being battered and/or inconvenienced. Example would be how you would be hunted by an invincible monster in Serious Sam 3. Certainly gave a survival-horror experience, but still fairly inconvenient.
I recall having had at least one game where you needed to put a piece of red plastic over the codes pages in order to read it. The commonly available black and white photocopiers at the time could not produce a useful image of the code page. without the filter, they would give you a light grey square. and with the filter, it would be a dark grey square. And back in the floppy era, some manufacturers used custom disk formats, which would would break the game if you tried to copy it onto a normallly foratted disc.
That was also a common thing for hint books back in the day. You'd have the red filter so you could reveal only the particular hint you needed in order to progress through the game.
I remember my brothers and I memorizing the answers to the questions to get into Leisure Suit Larry as kids. Sometimes it took several tries, but getting in was an accomplishment. We were too young to understand much of the content, but the parents were generally okay with it.
Given the graphic quality of the day, you really had to _know_ what it was to understand it anyway. It is not like today when any kid can google some random letter combination, press "images" and find HD quality pornographical videos about it.
If you wanted a company that was notorious for it's anti-piracy policies, Konami was well known for doing that in the 90's with many of their NES games. For example, If you bootlegged Bucky O'Hare, then the difficulty would be permanently stuck on Hard Mode where a single hit could kill you (alternatively, this can also be enabled if you put in HARD! as the password). or TMNT 3 where the boss fight with normal Shredder would be pointless since Shredder was invincible if the game was pirated.
The sims does pixelate the "nudity", but if you have a mod to remove the pixelation, you will find that the sims are as smooth as a Ken doll. (Unless you mod that too!)
+outsidexbox My personal favorite was Star Tropics, and the letter you had to dip in water. or The one where on the back of the instruction booklet it showed a pair of jeans which had 100+ paint splotches on it. You would have to identify the color of a particular paint splotch. That is something black and with copy machines couldn't do. It would also be impossible to color it in your self as the darker colors would show up black and you couldn't color over them.
The problem with these schemes is how often their execution results in them triggering for legitimate user. The Batman one in particular *plagued* legit users. What's worse, these users - legitimate customers who *bought* the game, would go looking for support, only to be insulted and accused of stealing. In a few cases, the DRM scheme would trigger for legit users, but *NOT* for pirated users, because the pirates found it and quickly patched it out, meaning that *the only people who actually COULD play the game were the people who pirated it.*
When I played Mirror's Edge and I couldn't jump anymore, I was honestly looking around the internet on how to fix this bug. When I didn't find anything, I eventually stopped playing it. Had no idea that it was an anti-piracy trick.
Pirates got around in less than a few hours. Its more like "stupid things devs wasted time on fruitlessly that also affected non-pirated versions so people who actually did buy the game are the ones that got fucked over."
Have anti-piracy measures ever hurt people who legally bought the games? I imagine either through used copies or bugs. And I'm asking on like a major scale not just no user manual to let you know the way to solve puzzles like in King's Quest 6.
Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box (Professor Layton and Pandora’s Box if you’re in the UK) has a mandatory puzzle where the only way to solve it is to take out the paper train ticket attached to the manual and look at the information on it to find something not written on the in game one. Of course, being a DS game, it was possible to legally buy it from the eShop before it shut down and get a digital copy, so you would be unable to progress through the game if you did.
I remember my friend complained about Mirror's Edge when they first got it. They couldn't get past the tutorial. "She won't jump, this game is so broken!" It was priceless. They never did admit it was pirated.
Well, personally, from games that tried to stop you from playing them in really weird way, I have two Metal Gear games in my mind - original Metal Gear from MSX, and Metal Gear Solid 1. On the Metal Gear, when you were about to find out who's the commander of the Outer Heaven Fortress, Big Boss called you and said that mission is aborted and you have to turn your console off, so you wouldn't find out that he's the commander (although MGSV implied that Venom Snake was commander of Outer Heaven, while the real Big Boss was in Zanzibar by the time of it, still, I believe that it wasn't planned by Kojima back in the MSX times). Sure, it haven't stopped you from playing, and it wasn't about the piracy, but it tried. However, Metal Gear Solid from 1998 tried to stop the pirates - by implying that Meryl's Codec number that was required to progres in the storyline was on the back of the disc case with game. Internet wasn't that common thing back in the 90's, so people had problems with it. You could still shoot in the dark and you would've finally guessed or simply borrow a disc case from friend that own his copy or something, but game still tried.
Passtheremote - Lol Mantis took me forever anyways. Eventually after losing a ton of times, I got the codec message telling me to change controller ports. Blicz B - I don't ever remember this out of the 5 times that I have beat the game. Did it say it on pirated copies or something? Out of all of the times that I played it, I never had to look at the case for reference while I played it.
The comBat (sorry) in Batman: AA was completely simple, yet fun in how you can just keep going with satisfying finishers, then when AC, AO, and AK came out, they did absolutely everything they could to stop you doing that, having to do fucking impossible button combinations all at once with about 100 enemies all with half of them being brutes and guys with Stun batons.
thesupersonicstig They started to add in way too many different enemy types that it made it a bit too hard at times and not as enjoyable or as badass as the original game. It's understandable though.
Actually, the piracy feature in Game Dev Tycoon is either not really an anti-piracy action, or it's really badly implemented, since it triggers in the legal Steam release occasionally as well.
My favorite story about how a game stops pirates from pirating it is Stardew Valley. How does a one-man indie farming simulator go about stopping people from playing it illegally, you ask? Well... ...the base game was simply so charming that people who illegally downloaded it would feel guilty and, of their own free will, go buy the game legitimately. That, and other Stardew Valley players would begin buying copies for people who couldn't afford it and would otherwise have pirated it. It's my favorite story for a reason.
MadFad7 Because if there's a game out there that every single person needs to have a legit copy of it's a soccer management simulator with a full roster of real athletes with completely accurate physical...... likenesses and attribute scores comparable to their real ....... Sorry I kept falling asleep while I was writing that.
First off, that's presumptuous. Yes, I am indeed an American but I would say the same thing about a football (or baseball, basketball, hockey, chess, you get the gist) management game. IMHO pure sports management games are a snoozefest and if I wanted to stare at charts, statistics, and ponder points like prospective player position preferences ad nauseum I would play fantasy 'insert sport here' online with other people or create my own Excel spreadsheet. Second, I may not be a hooligan level fan but have always enjoyed soccer - and every other sport I listed, plus more - whether I was playing or watching. Side Note: I'm partial to Italian Serie A soccer, specifically AC Milan... can't even begin to explain why or how that happened. And third and most importantly... *you're
Of note, America is one of the only countries, if not THE only country to call Football "Soccer", while American Football doesn't make much sense namewise. The excuse is the ball length but why would you name your sport after the ball length?
It is also regularly called soccer in Canada, not just America. The name has nothing to do with ball length, rather it's based on its origins, which were soccer and rugby. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_football#Name www.answers.com/Q/Why_is_American_football_called_football&altQ=Why_is_American_football_called_'football' For the record, the term soccer originated in England, not the USA, and showed up in the 1880s as an Oxford "-er" abbreviation of the word "association". The name soccer was tossed around Europe until rugby and association football became two distinctly different sports with different names. The name just stuck for America harder than it did across the pond.
Two examples i can think of are in Earthbound and Gyakuten Kenji 2. In Earthbound, if you try to play a pirated copy, there ends up being an overabundance of enemies making battles ridiculously hard, and if you make it all the way to the end of the game, Pokey will "turn off the Devil's Machine" as he usually does, only for the game to crash and delete all your save data. Guess pirates really can't grasp the true form of Giygas' attack. In Gyakuten Kenji 2, also known as Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth 2: Prosecutor's Path in the fanhack version (ironic for this discussion...) the game wen out of it's way to discourage pirates of the original Japanese version by replacing all text in the game with the language of Borginian, from the fictional country of Borginia that gets referred to in both AA4 and AAI, and replaces all the evidence pictures with Xs. Better go study up on your Borginian if you're part of the smuggling ring.
You guys should do a video on games that don't let you cheat. Undertale has a hilarious "cheater ending" for people who mess with game files, and it can't be the only game to be mean/funny to players who try to cheat.
Serious Sam 3 had an anti-piracy measure where some super-powerful enemy spawned in that you had no chance of defeating. Iirc Croteam even updated it several times, doing so whenever pirate groups managed to remove it, so the pirates either had to stick with older versions of the game or go through the trouble of hacking the binaries all over again.
