Top 10 Games that Trolled the Cheaters & Pirates

In many games, there are always those enemies that are irritating from how hard they are to kill. You got the Iron Knuckle from “The Legend of Zelda”, the Regenerators in “Resident Evil”, and the Xenomorphs from “Aliens vs. Predator”. Developer Croteam took this piece of game design and cranked the difficulty to “Holy crap, this is impossible”, literally. If you are caught playing a cracked copy of “Serious Sam 3”, you will be hunted down by an unkillable Arachnoid. While frightening at first, he will quickly get on your nerves, only provoking you into wasting more ammunition. And we thought the Beheaded Kamikazes were a pain in the ass…

This game is all about speed and precision. Owning a pirated copy encourages some honesty, too. Illegal copies of “Mirror’s Edge” contain an intentional bug in the game where our protagonist, Faith, will slow down before making big leaps across buildings. It’s almost as if she’s having second thoughts on her career path as courier. Think you can just chance your jumps or find a way around it? Fat chance. Quite a number of jumps are crucial for maximum speed in order to progress, making this game practically unbeatable. Just chip in the twenty-five dollars. It’s better for everyone.

If “Doom” has an Ultra-Nightmare difficulty, we cannot describe what “Earthbound” has in store for pirates. Cracked copies are bugged with a near-impossible difficulty curve, where it doesn’t matter how good you are at the game because it will make sure you never finish. From the moment you start playing, the number of enemies you’ll encounter increases to absurd levels, even in area’s that shouldn’t have them. If you somehow manage to make to the end (and find the time to trudge through all the battles), right at the climax of the story, the game will freeze and force you to reset the game. What you’ll come back to will be all your save files deleted, that’s brutal.

One franchise that has fallen victim of frequent cheaters is FromSoftware’s “Souls” series. As if the game wasn’t brutal enough, cheaters have been known for invading other players’ games and kill off their characters with status-afflicting weapons. Now, cheating isn’t a crime, but that doesn’t mean we can’t treat it as such in the game industry. Many games have what they call “prison servers”, and “Dark Souls 2” follows suit of that. However, there is a twist. Bandai Namco will let you keep your crummy, game-breaking weapons, but the only people you can encounter invasions from are other cheaters. Did we call this a prison? Sounds more like a private hell.

Croteam strikes again in this puzzle game about an android on a quest to enlightenment. Between maze running and locating sigil pieces, you’ll get to enjoy the phenomenal high-speed thrill of…elevator rides, which serve as points of relief in-between stages. Pirates, beware because Croteam is just as cruel as our irritating arachnoid friend. Cracked copies are equipped with a trap. At some point during one of the elevator rides, the elevator will stop with no chances of escape! As usual, pirates took to the forums and tried to make it sound like legit copies were getting this bug. Nice try, guys.

Before we found the assortment of bugs in “Batman: Arkham Knight”, we got to experience an anti-piracy bug in the first game of the Arkham series back in 2009. After taking out a room of enemies, you must glide across while avoiding the poison gas. For pirates, this challenge is too damn hard since the ability to glide is non-existent. Upon discovering this, one pirate made the idiotic mistake of revealing himself by going to the official Eidos message board and asking about the bug. The answer he got was a simple phrase that fits with this entire list, “It’s not a bug in the game’s code; it’s a bug in your moral code.”