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Pirate Batman and you'll drown in poison gas
If you try to play the pirated version of Batman Arkham Asylum for the PC, you will plunge into a room filled with poison gas.
Not in real life of course. The ESA doesn't have that kind of power. Yet. But this is how Eidos will stymie people who don't have legitimate copies. When Batman leaps into the air, his cape will open, but it won't stay open to let him glide.
The first time you have to do this is to cross a room filled with poison gas. You have to glide to a platform where you can get a line of sight to throw your batarang at the switch that activates a vent, clearing the gas out of the room. But with a pirated version, you will plunge into the gas. This won't kill you, however. One of the slick things in Batman Arkham Asylum is that when you miss a jump, you can simply press a button to rescue yourself with a grappling hook, and then try the jump again. Imagine the frustration at your repeated failures to glide, bat-like, to your destination! Or check out this thread on Eidos' forums.I've got a problem when it's time to use Batman's glide in the game. When I hold
By Mazzoleni at 8:57 AM ON 09/16/09
genius
By Seth at 9:34 AM ON 09/16/09
Darkstar One had something really similar in its copy protection, it basically turned the game into a demo that you couldn't proceed past the first mission in the storyline. A creative approach to copy protection.
By cogadh at 10:41 AM ON 09/16/09
DS1 had Tages copy protection. It didn't restrict the game to being a demo, it progressively removed or failed to load bits of the game which meant gameplay got more and more buggy until the game would finally crash. The bad part was, it would do this if you simply forgot to put the disk in the drive before you launched the game, but it never warned you about it (i.e a "please insert disk" prompt). So in the end, legitimate owners of the game ended up restricted by the copy protection on the game while the pirates who had already cracked Tages were playing it flawlessly.
This Batman issue is just the copy protection cracker missing one of the "hooks" the copy protection scheme had. Now that they know about it, its only a matter of time before they correct the problem and produce a new crack that doesn't have this problem (if they haven't already). Its definitely a funny result of the copy protection scheme, but in the end, it will be just as useless as every one that came before it.
By Jerky at 5:37 PM ON 09/16/09
Reminds me (for some reason) of one of Madonna's album releases a few years ago. All the pirated versions were just 10 tracks of her yelling at you about the evils of music piracy.
By Nitex at 8:56 PM ON 09/24/09
Odd, that never happened to me.
By polymath at 1:02 AM ON 10/20/09
hmmm they could probably get away with making the game for little or nothing with ad space and product plugs. Its not like you can pirate consumer products. Other wise I would have started hacking grocery stores and car lots a long time ago.
polymath:
hmmm they could probably get away with making the game for little or nothing with ad space and product plugs. Its n...More »