Pirates of Cariwiiean: Red Rings of the Sixaxis

There's a brick and morter on the other side of town that sells "used" games that only work on consoles bought at their store.

They have lots of import titles.

I moded my old XBOX and my friends to run XBMC

I know the original Xbox had the shit modded out of it, and lots of people took advantage of it. I'd imagine most of those answers were for the Xbox. The Wii's "Homebrew Channel" is pretty popular too, I think.

Bonus points for the thread title.

My friend (seriously my friend, I'd have no clue how to start) had a modded XBOX like seven years ago or so, in order to play import games. He said the downside was that you couldn't use XBOX live though.

I'd need to see a breakdown of what gen of games these people have pirated before planting my jaw in the floor. The process to pirate, say, Call of Duty or Bioshock is such an unwieldy pain in the ass, you'd HAVE to be hardcore to even think about it, but downloading an emulator and a copy of Dr Mario takes all of 5 minutes, minus time for the Google search.

I would bet that most of the "Yes" answers came from the PS1/DC/XBX era. I know, personally, my *friends* ran pretty wild during that time, and it wasn't too tricky. The Dreamcast didn't even require a modding or anything.

I'm clueless about anything current-gen.

Of course, if you include the DS, well, that's a pretty simple workaround. I've heard.

I still have my old Xbox that has XBMC running on it. I just use it as an audio jukebox now but it also plays copied games (Or rather games running off the hard drive).

I have copied Dreamcast games, though I came to that console well after it had died. You want a how-to guide on that? Go download a game, burn to CD and play. That's it. Amazing really.

Big confession time, I have at one time owned an Xbox 360 that played copied games. And yes I played copied games on it. I really have no excuse other than I was struggling to find work at the time and I wanted to play games. It is a pain in the ass though (In that if you want to be 'safe' then you need to perform checks on everything you download or buy, and even that isn't foolproof given that no one really knows how MS detects these things).

I imagine the numbers will go up now that J-Tagged 360's become more popular.

I'd never do it in fear of an update bricking right on my face. Besides, I've already pissed away hundreds of dollars on Wii/XBLA/PSN games, why start now?

Used to have some "copied" games of harder to find, out of print stuff when i was younger; however, now I pretty much own every game or even remake of a game I pirated in the past, even if it wasn't a big list at all.
I didnt own a PSone and used an emulator to run games on my PC, but most of them were originals to begin with.
(You try getting your hands on an original Valkyrie Profile disc in South America decades ago!....it getting released on the PSP was a conscience god send).
Ever since I got my PS2, my pirate days have been over, and im ashamed of my younger, sleazier self.

I modded an Xbox in a fit of pique after a break-in to my apartment cost me my original Xbox and a shitload of games. I didn't have insurance and there was no way I was going to be able rebuild my game library. This was before Xbox Live was even a factor. Bought a solder-free mod chip in a group-buy with some guys from work. Did my homework, cracked open my Xbox and installed the chip, dropped in a 120 gig hard drive, flashed the bios and I was off to the races.

In retrospect, I wouldn't do it again... simply because it changed my approach to gaming dramatically. I became a game collector and not a game player. When there's no inherent value to the game you're getting, it lessens the entire experience. I would download a torrent of a game, burn it to disk or transfer it across the network to the Xbox, play it for 5 minutes to be sure it worked, and move on to the next title in my collection. I would download titles I had no interest in just to pad out my binder. On the flip side however, I did get exposed to games I would normally never have seen. I played Red Star and Metal Wolf Chaos on my Xbox and neither of those titles ever saw a retail release here. Plus I played a lot of titles (however briefly) that I would never have paid money for.

Nowadays I do all my PC gaming through Steam and I only buy legit games for my consoles. I'm much more selective in what I play and I tend to finish most games I buy.

Ill admit without shame that I have over a hundred SNES and Genises roms on a disc somewhere. I just cant justify the money to ebay some of those games just for a half hour trip down memory lane.

Never pirated or modded any of the recent consoles though. Never had any desire either. But chances are in 10 years if they make things more easily available I will download original Xbox games like I do the roms.

And PC I've probably pirated a few games here and there. Only ones that come to mind are Roller Coaster Tycoon and Age Of Empires.

Actually you don't and it really isn't hard, especially for the 360. Basic windows skills are required and the ability to follow instructions. Some basic google skills help as well. You need 3 programs to pirate for the 360: Utorrent, Winrar and burning app like img burn. All free. And the super duper ability to insert a blank dual layer disk into your dvd burner. That's it. It's that fucking easy.

I prefer my ps3 generally speaking, partially because the 360 hardware is such a lemon and the ps3 being (so far) the only console in the history of the universe not to be pirated/fully hacked. So I can enjoy most of my online games without the worry of people cheating/hacking. I stopped playing online games on my pc because of this problem.

I had a modded PS1 and PS2 but really I only did that to play import games and games that were slow to be released in the UK. I modded my PS2 to play Devil May Cry cause the US version came out a bunch earlier than the UK version, plus it was NTSC and ran slightly faster. Then, I moved to the US. I did MOD a Xbox but it was old and we didn't play it anymore so I thought it might be a decent media server. It was ok, but I got my PS3 so now pretty much everything is defunct.

Except it's still more profitable to make games for the 360 rather than the Ps3, even though a developer creating a game for the ps3 market is guaranteed (as of this date) not to lose a single cent to piracy. Go figure. What Microsoft and 360 have up its sleeve is xbox live and cheaper development costs for games companies. People ain't hanging onto the 360 because of its robust hardware that's for sure.
I've mentioned this before and there's no hard data behind this assumption, but I'm of the thinking that some amount of piracy actually helps console sales and gets the system into more homes, and that conversely makes more people buy the system because its the most popular piece of hardware out there etc etc. Rampant piracy certainly didn't harm the ps1 and ps2. However it did K.O the dreamcast (partly) and PSP. Maybe because it was so easy to hack and pirate on those systems and the others like the PS1 & 2 actually required most people to pay money for the mods. Anyway, thats my two-bit assumption. Feel free to tear it apart.

I modded both my PS1 and PS2 back in the days, in both cases mostly to play imported games (I remember modding my PS1 after having to wait an excruciating 4 months for the Euro version of Resident Evil 1 to come out). Never pirated a game on the PS1, though I had a friend download and burn me copies of Symphony of the Night (after I stupidly sold my purchased copy) and the Japanese only Hokuto No Ken). With PS2 though, I must have gotten around a dozen games this way, what with having access to a fast Internet connection and limited student income...Nowadays though, I can afford most of the games I want, and my playing habits being what they are (ie I tend to buy more games than I generally finish), I don't really have an interest in pirating even though I have systems on which it is easy to do so (DS and PSP).

I used to play pirated games all the time ... but I was 14 years old and it was on my Commodore 64.

Nothin' since then.

I admittedly have NES, SNES, Genesis, and Sega CD emulators and ROMs on my computer. The catch, though? They're all for games I own. Problem is my NES needing 45 minutes of CPR just to beat Battletoads in half an hour, my Genesis and SNES buried in parts unknown of my mother's basement, the Sega CD missing the retarded metal piece to make the two systems link properly. Rather than go through that hassle, I have copies on my computer. For those purposes, ROMs are a godsend. I still have old MAME ROMs sitting on a disk somewhere, but except for The Simpsons and the 4 player X-Men game, virtually everything I had on that thing has come out for XBox Live

8-bit computers really were the Wild West for piracy. My dad used to come home from work with a bag of pirated floppy disks. I think the phone company was some kind of Atari computer black market.

I knew a kid who lived on the other side of the little town I grew up in. He was a couple years older, and we weren't really friends, per se. But this kid's bedroom was ground zero for C64 bootlegs in my town. A good friend who lived on my block and I would buy a pack of blank disks, ride our bikes over to the bootlegger's house and spend hours just hanging out in his room while he copied all of the newest games for us. To this day, I have no idea where they originated from. But by 1988 I had probably 200 games for my C64, about 10 of which I actually paid for. The kid across town even set me up with a program where I could make copies of my copies.

If someone asked me how to pirate a Xbox 360 game, I'd just stare at them as if they asked me to perform open-heart surgery using a butter knife.

Yeah, we had about the same ratio of cracked:riginal games. Although I'm pretty sure we also had a ton of unpublished "garage" games written in BASIC, etc. too. The XNA "Indie Games" on XBLA reminds me a lot of that.

One of my favorite video game industry stories is from Tim Schafer, who in his first interview with LucasArts, unwittingly mentioned the pirated title for Rescue On Fractalus ("Behind Jaggi Lines") when listing his favorite LucasArts games.

I pirate all my PC games.
There.

Reason? Economics. An original pc game here costs upwards of $200. An Xbox costs $2.000. and XBox games can only be imported from the us, at a cost of $350 each.

Would you guys pay that much for a game?

Tati, I totally understand, Argentina has some wacky import tariffs.

Yeah, nothing for me since the Apple 2 (Kareteka!)/early PC (Conan! Battle Chess!) eras except for the occaisional No-Cd crack or some iffy workaround at LAN parties.

Once I got back into console gaming with the original xbox, the thought of console game piracy never crossed my mind.

But these stats don't surprise me.

Thats fucked up, Tati; here in chle prices arent as unfair...have you tried ordering online from here or using any friends/relatives living here?
Also, there's always Steam, Direct2Drive and other optins for PC, obviously.