Top 6 in-game Piracy Punishments | News and Reviews

Franklin Garcia 4 years ago 3 min read

If you’re one those game pirates (we hope that you aren’t), you may have experience some glitches in a title that you might have downloaded or bought from pirated game kiosks. It may really be a bug in the said game, but most of the time, it’s actually a title feature specifically made for pirates out there. We will be enumerating the top in-game piracy punishments, check these out:

Self-destruct! (Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2)

For a strategy game, the most important things in Red Alert 2 are the buildings and its units. Unfortunately, EA’s anti-piracy developers targeted both. Upon playing thirty seconds of the game, pirates would watch helplessly as everything they owned simultaneously detonated in a awesome game-ending explosion. It’s actually funny, but also disappointing. In my opinion, thirty seconds is such a short time. For best trolling purposes, they should have detonated everything at least fifteen minutes of progress so their efforts would all go down the drain.

Slow motion all the way (Mirror’s Edge)

In a game that focuses on speed and momentum, what could be more infuriating than a forced, slow down of pace? For pirates who played the game, they will have a struggle halfway through the tutorial stage. When Faith passes a certain point and the product detects that the game is cracked, she begins to slow down, step by step, until she moves like a snail. At that point, you would not be able to jump the ramp. Check out this video.

Black Phantom Monstrosity (Dark Souls)

Dark Souls’ motive was not to stop piracy, but to have some laughs with the game’s pirates. For those who got the Japanese version of the game, their game will be invaded by max-level black phantoms. Anyone who thought they will be one of the first players to play the game, instead found themselves facing a monster with over 19,000 HP.

Fall of the Dark Knight (Batman: Arkham Asylum)

For those looking to play Batman: Arkham Asylum illegally, then you may get the same experience in playing the original game, but it cannot be completed. The developers disabled Batman’s important cape-glide ability for cracked versions of the game. Some gamers filed an online complaint to the game’s forums stating

“Batman tries to open his wings again and again instead of gliding. So he falls down in a poisoning gas. If someone could tell me, what should I do there”.

The developers replied to the confused gamer saying

“It’s not a bug in the game’s code, it’s a bug in your moral code”.

The pirate’s eye (Alan Wake)

Some developers are actually merciful when it comes to their game being pirated. Alan Wake is one of them. The developers just added an eye-patch to the character. The patch adds some bonus attribute to the game’s insomniac protagonist, though the lack of depth perception could give him trouble when targeting demons of the night.

To confirm that it is one of the game features, the developers posted this in the Steam forums:

“The crack detection didn’t do anything evil (like sending over the user’s email or IP address details) and didn’t degrade gameplay in any way. You just got the eye-patch and a loading screen tip encouraging the user to buy the game.”

The irony (Game Dev Tycoon)

Game Dev Tycoon is sim type of game in which you are to create your own game studio, manage its resources, operation costs and staff, and the actual release of your product to the world. The pirated version of the game lets you get that far, but not any much further. Upon releasing the game, pirated will come to a problem that the game will lose profits because of piracy. The problems will worsen until your studio will close due to bankruptcy. Such irony, isn’t it? Well played Game Dev, well played.

Any experience on how a game crashes when cracked? Share it with us on the comments below!