Rayman 2's Anti-Piracy Protection

i just keep admiring the art direction in this game. it's old, but it doesn't look dated at all. it looks intentionally simple. the low res textures don't look blurry, they just look stylized (and pleasantly so). everything is just so well made and go together flawlessly. timeless art direction. kinda miss this stuff with newer games.

As many protections this game contains, I think they kinda missed the opportunity to make a specific one for Cave of Bad Dreams by removing the option "No Treasure for me!" and have only "I want the treasure!" available.

Ironically enough as a kid I had a pirated version of this game and it worked fine, so its another case of developers going so hard on piracy that they actually hurt legitimate users.

It's hilarious, how the efforts to harm pirates have always, from day one, caused more harm to official customers than the intended targets. I remember this game, I'm glad I didn't have any of these issues.

I remember that both me and a friend bought same release of this game (i think it was the 'Ubisoft eXclusive' edition). Both on my pc with my disk and on his pc with his disk, the game would always end up showing this anti-piracy head just when the battle with Foutch would start. I remember seeing some glimpses of him in the corner of the screen and I remember that I would constantly hear the dying in lava sound effect. We would spent complete afternoons finishing the level in different ways to figure out if we were doing something wrong. Also we would get our parents (English is not our native language) to translate the text and try to figure this out together with them. It was long before we had access to the internet so at some point we had to quit trying and accept that Rayman 2 ended at the start of the fight with Foutch. 2 years later we found a classmate that was able to complete the game with his copy and we were amazed to finally see the 4 or 5 remaining levels in the game. Now after 22 years I finally figured out what was going on back then. It angers me that Ubisoft was already messing with my gaming experience around 22 years ago.

holy crap, this has been buggin me for 20 years! I had a perfectly legal copy of this game and the pirate face happened to me, every single time at the exact same point, me, my brother and my parents were so confused, we thought the game originally had 2 discs or something and we needed to switch, but we only had 1 disc, we even had a big fight at the store because we wanted our money back, because it made the game unplayable for 12 year old me, and we didn't had internet back then, so we didn't know about a patch, this is such a revelation to me, the big conundrum finally solved

Really interesting that they put in so many lines of protection. Just making the first cage unbreakable would have been enough to stop any regular player.

Imagine getting a pirared copy from a relative or something for your birthday when you where a kid without knowing it is pirated and getting relatively far into the game just to get stuck because of a missing platform you don't even know is supposed to be there. That must be so frustrating.

So Ubisoft really hates your guts if you didn't gave them any money Todays Ubisoft takes your money and still hates you

I thought this would just be riding the "scary anti piracy screen" meme that got started by Mario Party DS, didn't expect an actual serious in-depth video. Well done!

Crazy how they went through the hassle to modify parts of every maps. They really didn't want you to make ANY progress as soon as a copy was detected as pirated

12:42 At least the web is working unlike in the 3DS version...

1:22 YOOO! I got that pirate head as a kid, and everyone in my family was confused as to why. Never realized it could've been because of piracy! (We had made a copy of the DVD and lost the original, so that's why it showed up.) I remember almost completing a difficult keg-flying segment even with the pirate face present, and I was so mad that I hit the wall. It's nice to know that I probably wouldn't have been able to finish the stage/game anyway. Very interesting video!

They really liked removing things from the SET Data for these measures didn't they? Jesus the fact that they were hiding traps all the way to the very end of the game. They REALLY didn't want pirated copies to be played.

8:28 Fun Fact that "Broken Purple Lum" it's the same model of Yellow Lum from PS1 version

11:45 "This is fine" Then he slowly realizes the situation 11:47 "Oow! My feets are burning!"

Okay, this actually solves one of my childhood experiences with the game since my dad just pirated the PC version. The Head never popped up and the only effect that triggered was broken exit #7 around 6:19 Naturally that was the end of my playthrough but it's nice to finally have closure on that.

Had no idea this game even had anti-piracy measures, so this is very interesting! It's almost funny how many things they changed to make sure the player couldn't progress, even though just a few of them would be enough for any person to stop playing.

A very interesting video, I had no idea there was more than just the pirate head! Well done

You know what would've been funny? If the text below thd pirate head said a comical threat. Nothing scary, but something silly like "You are an inferior pirate! Surrender yourself now!" Or "Thd only pirates we want are ones of metal! Your flesh is weak!"