• Spyro Had One of the Coolest Anti-Piracy Measures Ever
    10 replies, posted
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4GYSeXLr5sY
Ah I remember playing through the game like that. I paid no attention at all to the warning message and I just thought the game was bugged a little after that I still managed to get to the final boss and have fun though, so I guess it wasn't that good a protection.
This probably explains why this was like one of three legal Ps1 games we owned
Jesus Christ, tormented souls play pirated copies of Spyro in the deepest pits of hell.
Do this today and the game would have been bombarded by negative reviews, intrusive protection, detriment to game preservation, impact on performance and waste of budget. Reading into the Gamasutra article this anti-piracy measure would've spelled hell for the development team if they were any more complex. Times have changed huh.
If I recall, Earthbound has a very similar final DRM measure. Reaching the final boss of that on a cracked copy of the game boots you back to the menu, deleting your save data along with it. I do wonder how effective these measures actually were, as people still got to experience the entire game barring the finale. But they must have been quite fun for the developers to implement.
I was just about to mention Earthbound, it's actually more hardcore than that. It also greatly increases the random enemy encounter rate, and dumps enemies into zones that they don't belong on top of that to make the game more tedious to play. So you struggle through the entire game constantly assaulted on all sides by way more enemies than intended, THEN it deletes your save file when you fight the final boss.
Hahah holy shit, I only really ever learned about the save file part as that's particularly evil. But cranking the difficulty up that hard does take it to a new level. I salute the poor souls who actually managed to make it to the final boss.
People don't complain about DRM when it doesn't impact them (typically.) When a single player game requires Always-Online connections, or questionable DRM implementation might have a suspicious impact on performance (or wild disk usage) people have every right to get upset. Denuvo might have a very bad rap, but it tends to get outright removed from games once cracked/after a few months. It's usually in the contact itself. DRM is really only there to protect the initial big sales.
As a kid, i made it to the end boss several times and always got my saves deleted. First time i thought it was part of the game and i had to do it all over again. After that i assumed the game was just flat out broken and tried another copy where the same thing happened. Then i just gave up until i got older and realized what it was. I also remember the eggs dissapearing all the time and having to keep re doing the levels. I remember the crashing and other glitches as well. I dont seem to recall my language changing or some of the bugs he mentioned but i cant fully remember now. Good times.
what are you on about, who'd ever review a pirated copy btw developers still do this, remember how garry built that one error message into gmod that only came up for pirates and perma'd everyone posting about it
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