I seriously don't even know what you guys are talking about. I'm not joking. I think you might be missing the whole f*cking point of all of this.
Anyway,
While I'm not a coder, a hacker, a translator, a bootlegger, or a customer, I think SamIAm's strategy is far too scorched earth.
The idea is to educate noob fans that there is a world outside of eBay, and that nonprofit motives made this translation. The universe doesn't exist so that every single minute thing in it can be commodified and flipped for as large of a profit as possible. Tobias is not a content creator, an artist, or anything respectable as far as I know. (It would be pretty funny to find out that he cures cancer in babies for a living, but I'll take that risk. I assume he's a bank teller or a used car salesman or some other blood sucking parasite.) Rayforce took the money make from SO1 and used it to make SO2. Tobias will take all the money he makes from SO2, much more per copy that Rayfoce did, and buy a series of new televisions and XRGBs, each larger than the one before. He won't make SO3, he mainly just makes a cardboard jacket and a bullshit hype story for the games and makes far more money off of them than the original publishers could have dreamed of. He is the bad guy, not the 19 year old lawyer children that buy this crap. Punishing the dumbass that bought the thing shouldn't be on the agenda. Making them fight jacked up bosses or deleting their save isn't going to do anything but piss them off. They aren't going to plow half way through the game, get completely f*cked by malicious code, then suddenly be converted by the experience of having wasted 20 hours and $60 and then start all over again by locating the patch, appying it, and then playing through the first half of the game again.
It's like someone said, "We need to help the homeless!" and proposed the idea of just going to the local soup kitchen with a flamethrower and burning the whole place and everyone in it to the ground.
The idea, at least as I see it, would be to educate the noob as to where these things come from. The youth of today are so totally bought into a reality of everything being manufactured and for sale but at the same time also possessing nearly zero understanding of how it's made or where it comes from. It's highly unlikely that they make or create much of anything in their own lives. They don't know how how games are made or modified or bootlegged. They just know glossy cardboard hype and gilded coin bullshit. Why would it be any different? Run amok Capitalism has completely obliterated the connection between the value of work and their own lives since it's likely they don't even undertand WTF they do for a living. "Value" is something they only understand when its applied from amorphous external forces. eBay decides what things are worth. If these things are $60 on eBay (soon to be $600 on eBay) then they have value. A fan translation has no dollar value and therefore is worthless. Cardboard and gilded coins can't be dowloaded from The Pirate Bay so they have value. The idea would be to do whatever possible to tank this perspective, or lack thereof, at least to the extent that it applies to old-ass games.
WHEN IT COMES TO XAK III OR SO2 THERE COULD BE NOTHING MORE LEGIT THAN AN ORIGINAL JP COPY AND A CDR WITH THE ENG PATCH APPLIED. THERE IS EVEN SPACE FOR A CD-R IN THE GAME CASE ALREADY! THERE COULD BE NOTHING MORE FAKE THAN TOBIAS'S BULLSHIT CARDBOARD.
To make the message as non-counterproductive as possible I would suggest:
The message should be short, it should fit on a screen that already exists in the game, maybe a sub menu (thats a good one), maybe a title screen. No new screens, no new delays or pestering bullshit. Other areas of "not making the game worse" would be to not Vic with the gameplay and ruin what will likely be the only pressed English copies of this game that will ever exist. Keep in mind that the fan scene is far more important and long lasting than a revenge scheme you'll never even be able to experience first hand. If the game blows up the noobs will not get the window into the fan world I'm suggesting, they'll just be pissed off at it and the divide will grow. 10 years from now copies of these games will still be trading hands, do you want them to be worthless even after they are on their 14th owner and Tobias has been in jail for bond fraud for years? What would be the point of that?
I suggest: put them message in, put the kill switch in, if you have to. Every copy Tobias sells will be an ad for the actual translated ROM scene, pointing them away from him. If the pirate scum gets someone to remove the visual aspects of the code, have the code display a Donkey Kong Country-esque piracy notification at some point in the game freezing it in place.
And then, after Tobias has 1000 pissed off customers, after he stops selling the game, then release a fix. Keep in mind that these are pressed copies of cool games previously only available in Japanese. Wasting them all would pretty pretty uncool. No big deal to the guy that writes the code, but devastating to the schmucks that payed money for the stuff and were maybe really into the game before it had a temper tantrum and blew the f*ck up.
Possible ways to bring the broke games back to life could include; a downloadable ISO of a small program that patches the save file to skip past the blockage once loaded by the game, or a code that can be input with a controller.
Then, after Tobias gets all his money, you know, money, the most important thing in the world, and a thing that preferably a person would rather scheme and swindle to get instead of work because work is for idiots, after he gets that, he basically just took out an ad for the ROM hacking scene. If he hacked it, the fans will be rather put out that the game doesn't work and he won't be able to sell that exact CD for very long.
So in the end, the translation sees more use that it already has, the value of the game is highly unstable, and Tobias can go piss up a rope. Everyone wins.
