Tricked Batman Pirates Find Game Impossible
The publishers of the PC version of Batman: Arkham Asylum are quietly laughing among themselves as their novel anti-piracy solution causes a pirate to break cover – for gaming tips.
An unsuspecting poster on the Eidos forums started the ball rolling with what seemed like a request for a tip on the game, spelling mistakes intact….
“I’ve got a problem when it’s time to use Batman’s glide in the game. When I hold <Space> , like it’s said to jump from one platform to another, Batman tries to open his wings again and again instead of gliding. So he fels down in a poisoning gas. If somebody could tell me, what should I do there?”
Keir from Eidos posted in the thread with the solution;
“The problem you have encountered is a hook in the copy protection, to catch out people who try and download cracked versions of the game for free. It’s not a bug in the game’s code, it’s a bug in your moral code.”
Oh oh, busted….
to be fair that is both ingenious and terribly funny. and at least it was put in place by the creator and not the publisher. im sure you got enough gameplay out of it to see whether it warrants purchasing or not.
Haha, genius and hilarious, if pirates really do what they claim to and use it as a “try before you buy” service then it isn’t going to be a problem.
If they really wanted to be mean they would just put an extra level in where batman has to type in his true identity and all the stuff he has torrented.
Hehe :D Smart move :) Unless by mistake it effects legitimate users as sometimes happens with those systems.
Also funny that now for crackers it will be a pain to figure out what is real game and what is anti-crack protection as this solution kind of mimics itself as a game element :D
That’s funny the PC version isn’t even out yet.
I’m sure the poor guy hung his head in shame and threw himself off a balcony. Or just went back to work perfecting the crack. It’s a cute non-story.
Oh, what a shame… now the pirates have to wait a bit longer to get a working crack. Remember Sacred 2 and how it was fuucked out with about three levels of such “protection”. Remember Mirror’s Edge. Remember alot of such examples in the past. Good luck all the crackers and fuuck all of those who think in onther way.
Mhmmm. Fair enough.
It won’t be long before it’s a fix in their code with a patch or something….
Simon.
the biggest problem i forsee with this is people who use no-cd cracks for all their legitimate games due to the fact that keeping track of game disks can be frustrating at times
It’s not really a win for them if the PC version was leaked early is it?
Oh btw we’ve cracked it.
I remember, back in the day of the Amiga, there was a copy protection scheme where the game would say “p122 paragraph 4 sentence 3 word 8″, and you would have to consult the manual to know what word it is, and enter that word to continue. Also, trying to circumvent that protection would bring up the message “Killed by a software pirate!” when you tried to play it.
Another nifty scheme was on this old game called Femme Fatale, where you had to enter in the measurements of this woman’s silhouette.
But this, this here, this is the best protection ever. Have a problem, contact the forums, B&. Priceless.
Pirates will circumvent it for sure, but it is a novel way of copy-protection, one that isn’t about stupid activations and DRM…
this title is completely worth purchasing, too bad my rig is on the fritz – I’m thinking about getting the slim PS3 just* for this title.
If they start producing some decent content – I’ll have no problem working a few extra hours.
The problem solved-fix available.
shoulda said nothing and laughed as more and more come by saying the same thing, let it all build up for a while, then give them the finger with the answer
I have an early copy though! It is buggy as hell! Maybe the glide is some DRM scheme but the grapple bugs are in quite a few of the retail copies that got sent out to stores early… I mean WTF!
embedding copy protection triggers like this in games is not uncommon, there were a few in gtaiv for instance.
the updated crack appears to fix grapple/glide problems so i guess the last laugh is with the pirates….
OMG so owned. eidos you rock
That is WAY more fun than simple copy protection! I have to say that it is totally genius. Although I never develop nonfree software, I would put in pranks for pirates if I did.
well, that is quite worthless idea, since it is possible to bypass it with cheats or savegame
usually there are enough such natural bugs in games anyway so one artificial bug wont change much
Obviously, the problem is with the moral code of the developers who want to stop file sharing in the name of their profits. You either make a good game and come up with other schemes of getting money, or else do not release at all. Releasing games with anti-features is nasty, just like any proprietary software.
@ lverona
I lol’d – I h8 paying for crap, I always support good work. It’s kinda hard to make a living working for free all the time.
Releasing games with anti-features is like releasing DVD’s with encryption, it backfires. people get dis interested and move on.
very few people can afford games, it usually ends up on the used shelves anyway – why not make it 9.99 to begin with? $40 is a heck of a lot of money – that feeds me for a week – which is about how long the game lasts. so that’s 200 bucks a month just for something to do? That’s a huge rip off.
Hah, IIRC Operation Flashpoint did something similar, After about a hour of playing your accuracy would start to decrease to the point where you couldn’t hit anything.