Top Secret Files of a Mental Fugitive, Exposed

I remember those high school days before I actually had an Internet connection back home and I would just like to buy a new CD-ROM, install a new game and play it for hours and hours. It was the twilight of CD-ROMs back then and the dawn of the new DVD-ROMs, so the main problem was, aside from having a relatively slow computer, we just had a CD drive, not a DVD one. However, I still managed to play a lot of good games back then, mostly RTS, like Rise of Nations, Civilization 3 or Empire Earth. Not to mention some obscure titles like American Conquest: Divided Nation or Sudden Strike: Resource War. I have no freaking idea of what's popular in those days that aren't MMORPG, so I just visited the store with the money I got from saving up my allowance, browsed for games, chose a decent-looking one, bought it, took it home, installed the game, said to myself "fuck it" and hoped for the best. Since I'm a fan of the RTS genre, I usually wasn't disappointed with the titles I chose, so overall, I was a happy little gamer kid. Although sometimes, the game wouldn't work or install, so I have to go back to the store and exchange it for another copy.

But how did that happen?

The answer is very simple, but since I need more article filler as always, let me elaborate, so bear with me. The game copies I buy came from many different sources but they all looked the same. No, I'm not talking about box sets or jewel cases or keep cases or anything that's professional-looking. The ones with keep cases are console games, not PC games. Instead, they were wrapped with cloth-like CD cases and the CDs themselves, the covers are printed and pasted on carefully with manual work, instead of it being decals. That's right, the games themselves were pirated, I was aware that they were but I had no idea back then how they do it.

So yeah, I pretty much let myself be conned into buying games that could just be downloaded from the Internet when I was a kid.

But I am not alone in being "duped" by pirates. There are also many people out there that bought CDs of music that can be downloaded in batches from sites like PirateBay. Or anime from the likes of Tokyo Toshokan or NyaaTorrents. Hell, you can also use YouTube to get a song you like, use an online converter and voilah, instant music track. In fact, pretty much every media can be directly downloaded, torrented, streamed or shared in the Internet. Still, you can see in the streets here, stalls of movies and anime in paper cases and sold to the public cheaply for the price of around a hundred pesos or maybe lower. Since many people here either don't know how to get them from the Internet, have no time or are generally just impatient, they just opt to buy that stuff from the pirates. And it wouldn't be a stretch for me to say that almost every town or city here have stalls of that sell pirated media. In other words, this country depends heavily on piracy to get their fix of movies, music, anime or games.

However, as I am lacking money nowadays and have nothing better to do, I decided to try my hand in torrenting a game. I mostly relied on DDL freeware I can get from the Internet last year, before discovering the wonders of uTorrent. But still, I wasn't contented with that. No. Aside from the fact that there are a few interesting-looking freeware games out there, I always wanted to play the games that I never really got a chance to play properly before when I was kid. So to make the long story short, because I'm starting to feel lazy, after learning to torrent anime episodes, I decided to ask some people on how to, well, install torrented games. In the ISO way.

After a day of patiently waiting for the damn thing to finish downloading, the moment of truth came. I have Daemon Tools Lite installed in my computer. I have the ISO file now. I just need to run the fucking CD image in my virtual drive. And so I did. Everything is ready. Here I go, here I go.

Then the Autorun activated. I pressed the install button and custom installed it. Directed it into the :F Drive. It asked for a CD key, so I looked it up on the Internet. It had one. I entered it eagerly, excited and nervous at the same time. AND IT WORKED.

Then, the installation process, marked by that slow-filling bar in the installer window. I was so excited, hoping that it wouldn't fail on me. And after a few minutes of grueling and torturous waiting for the process to get done, it did so.

And a desktop icon appeared, that metal tricorner hat captioned "Age of Empires 3". I double clicked it. IT RAN.

And after adjusting the graphics options, everything worked well. And I played the game. I HAVE OFFICALLY PIRATED AGE OF EMPIRES 3. AND I AM NOT ASHAMED TO ADMIT IT, RUNNING THE RISK OF BEING ARRESTED.

So there, looks like I am now capable of pirating almost every media possible.

One small step for a slacker, one giant leap for me as a casual gamer. And one step closer to the prison cell.