Though the game requires little interaction from users, School Days engages the player through a plot that they are given opportunities to change the course of during play. The story, a dramatic slice-of-life, follows Makoto Ito, a high school student who becomes the ambivalent love interest of several girls during his second term, and the effects this has on himself and his relationships with other characters. It was later ported as a DVD game and for the PlayStation 2 (PS2) and PlayStation Portable (PSP). Will shame and humiliation work where DRM and the law has failed? I don’t know, but I am most definitely amused.School Days is a Japanese visual novel developed by 0verflow, released on April 2005, for Windows as an adult game.
Fortunately for those who find themselves front and center on the Wall of Pervos, removal is apparently possible but users must first click a button acknowledging that they did in fact try to download the game illegally. Most of the site is in Japanese but at least one screen of text is in English (and hugely NSFW) and it’s a good bet that everyone involved wishes they’d paid a little more attention to what they were doing.Īdding insult to injury and also possibly providing a little legal protection for the perpetrators, it turns out that the fake installer actually explained exactly what it was going to do in its terms of service, which of course nobody ever reads. Once it has what it wants (it’s unclear whether the survey has to be filled out to trigger the trojan, or if it just goes ahead with whatever it can gather on its own) the information is uploaded here. When the fake Cross Days installer is run, it first gathers information from the user’s computer and then presents a survey asking for further details. As with virtually all games these days, Cross Days ended up on various file-sharing sites unfortunately for many would-be pirates, one version making the rounds is, as the saying goes, a trap: A viciously creative trojan that uploads detailed private information about the downloader and a screenshot of his or her desktop to a public website.
Unsurprisingly, many such titles feature erotic content, including Cross Days, which was actually delayed so the developers could incorporate support for the SOM, a hands-free USB sex device. While not very popular in the West, visual novels, sort of a “Choose Your Own Adventure” series of stories for the digital age, are big business in Japan. What’s worse than getting busted for piracy? Getting busted for pirating a erotic “visual novel” by having your name, IP address and a screenshot of your desktop posted online for all the world to see.
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