Mere hours after Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: Ring of Fates hit store shelves today, pirated copies of the game appeared in the shady corners of the internet, posted for all the picaroons out there to download and transfer to their flashcarts.Twenty minutes or so into the ARPG, however, many of those pirates found themselves greeted with this "Thank you for playing!!" screen and unable to progress. Players have the option of restarting the game from the last save point and playing on, but the screen reappears at random intervals. Clever!
Why not lock pirates out before even loading up the game, you ask? Well, this way, they can try out Ring of Fates, eventually reforming their criminal ways and buying it if they find the experience enjoyable. Also, anyone dumping the game for distribution wouldn't notice this bit of programming unless they played a significant portion of it first.
Though this method isn't 100% effective, as some brands of carts are unaffected and hackers will likely find a workaround by day's end, it's certainly cute! Pirates should feel thankful that this isn't even half as malicious as Earthbound's anti-piracy measures.
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_thumbnail.jpg "Dragon Quest IV")
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 3)
3-11-2008 @ 3:27PM
pas said...
Nice turn ! Hopefully this will make devs coming back to the DS that didn't even think of developing cause of the piracy question before.
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3-13-2008 @ 6:01PM
sifer2400 said...
its only a matter of time b4 it gets cracked/hacked/patched MUAHHAHAHAH U cant beat pirates X )
3-11-2008 @ 3:48PM
RaiDesu said...
Way to make everyone carry a cart around, just to play this game. O_O
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3-11-2008 @ 6:18PM
Roto13 said...
Try not to break your back.
3-11-2008 @ 3:50PM
jsutcliffe said...
As a complete aside: Is this worth getting solely for the single-player experience? (I have no DS-wielding friends, woe is me!)
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3-11-2008 @ 3:51PM
ryan_90 said...
Actually it's not anti-piracy as many including myself first thought, its just a bug in the firmware that makes the game skip back to the ending, which would obviously take you back to the loading screens, anyone with an emulator has surely experienced this, it would happen in starfox 64 everytime you pushed the start button, so its simply a flaw in the R4 and M3 Firmwares although i should just say R4 since M3 is just a copy of the firmware, A fix should be out within the next few days anyways.
Truth is theres in absolutely no way Nintendo can stop the piracy since its impossible for them to tell if your using a flash cart or not, they both operate in the exact same way.
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3-11-2008 @ 3:57PM
yoshimans said...
Great work square enix. I really like anti piracy measures because piracy sucks. I was a pirate in the past but I stopped.It just feels ...wrong,downloading games is way too illigal for me now.
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3-11-2008 @ 3:58PM
rk said...
If ryan_90 is wrong, and is an anti-piracy thing, I give the hackers two days, tops, to figure out a workaround.
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3-11-2008 @ 4:04PM
Ryan said...
It's not anti-piracy trust me, There were similar games were going through a certain door or doing a certain thing just crashes the game but these have all been fixed now.
If it really was anti-piracy then why is it only the R4 and M3 it doesn't work on, there are about 10 different types of backup cards out there
3-12-2008 @ 2:28PM
ssrgc said...
You have to look at the difference between the flash carts. For instance- R4 and M3 Simply patch on the go. M3 Real does not need to. If you look around you can verify this. People are not having a problem playing it on their M3 Real, while they are on others.
3-11-2008 @ 4:15PM
KamenRiderTakoyaki said...
Bah, so I have to buy at least TWO copies of this game for my family?
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3-11-2008 @ 4:28PM
ssuk said...
I expect a R4DS patch in the next few days to sort this. Hell, there were patches for completely obscure games on the R4 recently, so this should be resolved very quickly.
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3-11-2008 @ 4:41PM
Synergistic said...
The anti-piracy on Earthbound was brilliant.
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3-11-2008 @ 5:14PM
mintsauce said...
Since we've established that this is not an anti-piracy measure, perhaps the story can be taken down, or at least amended.
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3-11-2008 @ 5:53PM
HeyYouGuys said...
That hasn't been 'established'. The only thing that has been established is it works on flashcards that don't modify the ROM.
3-11-2008 @ 6:44PM
Eric Caoili said...
the discussions i've been following on the topic haven't yet come to a 100% conclusion on whether this is an anti-piracy measure or a "firmware bug." if it turns out to be the latter, i'll let you guys know.
3-12-2008 @ 2:32PM
ssrgc said...
Their is code that was put in for the specific purpose of reading whether or not the ROM gets patched as you load it up. If it detects patching, it implements a timer.
Whether or not this is viable to call anti-piracy is up to you. I plead the fifth.
3-11-2008 @ 5:34PM
John B. said...
Despite the fact that this is apparently not an anti-piracy measure, its still a good opportunity to speak my mind: where are developers getting the figures that so many people are software pirates? Out of my 10-15 friends that own a DS, 1 of them has a backup card, and he doesn't even use it for piracy - its just convenient to have all of your games in one place. 1/10 is probably still a high number because of the type of kids I hang out with (tech majors) - the average joe probably doesn't even know what a flash card is.
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3-11-2008 @ 5:39PM
Raru said...
Does anyone know where I can get the lil USB to DS cart adapter so I can copy all my carts over to my R4 card?
3-11-2008 @ 5:42PM
John B. said...
Theres a really good one here -
http://www.internetisseriousbusiness.com/
Its where I buy everything from. Good prices, fast shipping.