GBAtemp Exclusive What is your favorite anti-piracy message?

I want to remind all that, if Earthbound's anti-piracy measures are so unique, its thanks to Iwata. He re-made the code from scratch. He surely didn't fucked up with piracy

 

Hey, look: More anti-piracy pigs. Coincidence? I think not.

 

I myself don't think I ever stumbled into an anti-piracy measure or what, as far as I remember, but I've read on tvtropes about some amusing one, one of them being the game pratically imploding in Red Alert 2

at 4:44

 

Man, I remember that I couldn't play Crash Bash on my modded PSone, despite the disc being legit. Every time I tried to play it the game showed a screen saying SOFTWARE TERMINATED. CONSOLE MAY HAVE BEEN MODIFIED.

 

Idk hard toe choose

 

Let's see if anyone remembers this little beauty.

 

FFCC if I'm not mistaken

 

For me it's always been the Arcade Machine warnings that I get before playing them on MAME.

Something about seeing that they're only meant to be played in Japan, their year and a sense of accomplishment from making sure I have a copy long after most of the machines are kaput.

 

Spyro on PS1 is definitely memorable and makes the game not only impossible to 100% complete but even to finish the game.

 

Eh, it's a topic that's been done to death, I'm afraid. Came here to mention Zak McKraken and Full Extent of the Jam, and they're already here.

That's a new one, though. Just Shapes and Beats is a darn nifty game; it's a pity it's still so expensive.

 

#freeshop-help on Nintendo Homebrew Discord

 

Game Dev Tycoon wins hands down just because it is hilariously meta.

I prefer the ones that do crazy crap though, like Serious Sam 3

Skullgirls has a pretty hilarious message though. It'd ask what the square root of a fish is, and it made a bunch of idiots out themselves as pirates when they'd ask what it meant. Quality stuff that is.

 

My favorite was Escape Velocity, where an NPC would periodically remind you to buy the full version during the trial period. Once the trial was up, he would just do a strafing run on your ship which was almost impossible to escape from.

 

Does it just give you that message right from the beginning if you're playing a pirated copy?

 

I had more anti.piracy problems with legit games that I ever had with pirates due to stupid copy protection needing stuff like having the CD on even if you fully installed the game, asking you to solve a puzzle every time you started the game and so on.

 

that mario party DS anit-piracy shit on youtube is scary has hell it's like a mix between five night's at freddy's and sonic.exe

 

I was immediately thinking of game dev tycoon and that serious Sam 3 situation. But in terms of schadenfreude, nothing beats this one:




For those unfamiliar : the wii homebrew channel has this kind of protection, iirc if you start messing around with the actual IOS'es (that the wii uses, and I think the hbc as well) instead of 'safely' using cIOS'es in empty places on the thing. Basically : if you modded it wrong.
I was fairly new to gbatemp, but 'sort of knew' how having a wii worked. Yet pretty soon I was one of the 'experts', simply because many were way more clueless of the process and what it does.
There was a time where every other week someone popped in with a message like this. And then things went short if like this :
Noob: halp! My homebrew channel is upside down!
Us: okay... You need to obtain fresh IOS'es from nusd and use a wad installer to re-install <a bunch of IOS'es> to fix this.
Noob: huh? IOS? Wads? I just wanna play games!
Someone : what guide did you follow to hack your wii?
(on hindsight, I suspect at least some just asked this out of schadenfreude as well)
Noob: some obscure YouTube channel that hasn't been edited in years, with files from some site.
Us : yeah... That's your problem.


(note : I've got to admit I've ran into this myself when first messing with Sneek. But this was more a hobby project than anything else so it was somehow both frustrating and hilarious at the same time )

 

did you have the CD version or was it part of a game pack with other games? the codebook and manual would have been on the CD. when i first played it i got it as part of a pack of other games in a long sleeve of plastic cd covers there wasn't any manual for any of the games. so when i encountered so called puzzle i thought the game was broken and took it back to the shops. they than explained to me that there is a codebook on the cd you must use. and i was like: