http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/YMMV/MarioPartyDSAntiPiracy
Following Go To- Accidental Innuendo: In the finale, DJ Hallyboo pursues Joey while repeatedly imploring him to "dodge the balls" (that can be misheard as "touch the balls") and evilly laughing. He was referring to giant inflatable soccer balls, which he sends flying in a recreation of the minigame Soccer Showdown.
- Alternate Character Interpretation:
- The description for the Host Hoedown description roughly translates to "Hudson - This is not necessary. It will extend the launch considerably." Was Hudson not on board with the anti-piracy measures that Nintendo or someone on the Hudson team were putting in the game?
- Is DJ Hallyboo acting out of a genuine disdain for pirates and a misguided, extreme belief that piracy is a terrible crime? Or is he a sad*stic monster who uses his role as the game's punisher of pirates as an excuse to terrorize and kill people? For both interpretations, however, he has the excuse of being programmed that way by the rogue developer.
- Anvilicious: The Author Filibuster of the finale with Joey turning into an angel makes the author's Digital Piracy Is Okay aesop abundantly clear. Though given the comedic tone of the finale, it's possible this too is being Played for Laughs.
- Awesome Music:
- Piracy is No Party!
, Nintendo Anti Piracy Self Reporter, and Host Hoedown, have been widely agreed upon by fans to be amazing in their own right, managing to be both ominous and groovy at the same time. Piracy is no Party!, in particular, has even had its own fair share of covers, including a jazz cover, an orchestral cover, and a lyrical cover. - The Whole Party and You, which sends up to Tally Hall and fits the tone of a nostalgic commercial perfectly.
- The finale of the series gives us This remix of Host Hoedown as well as the theme for the credits.
- Piracy is No Party!
- Crosses the Line Twice: The Sweet Sleuth minigame. The sequence is as scary as all of the other ones, as it involves the Shy Guy asking for your character instead of candy and then eating them alive to the sound of a static-y Drone of Dread. However, several viewers admitted to being amused at how Luigi willingly runs up to Shy Guy to be eaten, emits a flat-sounding "ow" as this happens, and then scores a point for his own demise afterward.
- Designated Villain: Joey is treated by the game, and later by the real DJ Hallyboo and the police, as a terrible criminal for pirating a video game. However, Joey is shown to genuinely believe that Digital Piracy Is Okay, and he otherwise seems like a normal, decent person. The videos sometimes seem to deliberately invoke this trope by making the misfortunes that Joey goes through look unnecessarily cruel.
- Fridge Brilliance: The Bilingual Bonus disapproving of the anti-piracy measures makes sense when factoring in how much time would have to go into such high-effort measures like the Host Hoedown minigame.
- Fridge Horror:
- It's implied through Japanese text in the videos that the anti-piracy measures were added by one Japanese developer with a Knight Templar attitude towards pirates. But all the anti-piracy measures seen in the videos have text in English, not Japanese. This implies that either one or more people on the US localization team were in on the scheme, or that they discovered the hidden anti-piracy measures and assumed that they were meant to be there.
- There's also the possible scenario of a parent buying a secondhand copy of Mario Party DS for their child, not knowing that it was actually a pirate copy, eventually leading to the poor kid being subject to one of the nightmarish anti-piracy measures. At best, the kid will probably be left traumatized; at worst, if they accidentally leave the "Piracy is no party!" screen running, they'll inadvertently call the police, resulting in dire (possibly even fatal, if DJ Hallyboo's behavior is to go by) consequences for the family.
- Funny Moments:
- As mentioned above, in the modified version of Sweet Sleuth, after Luigi lets himself get eaten by Shy Guy, he manages to score a point for doing so just before the game cuts to the "Piracy is No Party!" screen.
- The aforementioned Bilingual Bonus note from Hudson, which can easily bring up the mental image of even the developers Nintendo is working with being exasperated about their notorious obsession with stopping copyright infringement. It can be a cathartic chuckle for those screwed over by these policies.
- The finale is full of funny moments. Some moments that stand out:
- Two policemen chase Joey, who is running, with their car. The driver drives at a very leisurely pace, listening to upbeat music and singing along, while Joey is running and screaming outside. The cop riding shotgun is a Toad mask-wearing Cowboy Cop who seems a little too excited to shoot Joey. And he stores his gun in a Pokémon Happy Meal.
- After coming into the real world, DJ Hallyboo forces Joey to do a real life version of "Soccer Survival," and it mostly involves Joey running from a giant, inflatable soccer ball.
DJ Hallyboo: Dodge the balls! Dodge the balls! HA HA HAAA!
- After the Grand Finale aired, the series came back with a video about a "secret item". It’s a drink that takes Luigi to Inkopolis Square before the piracy screen comes up.
- Harsher in Hindsight: The series was created as a biting satire of Nintendo's overzealous policies regarding their copyright. Two months after the first episode aired, it was discovered that Nintendo actually stalked and intimidated certain homebrew developers for the Nintendo DS and Nintendo 3DS systems.
- He's Just Hiding: Joey is implied to be Deader than Dead at the end, as DJ Hallyboo sucks him into a DS and smashes it. However, some commenters believe he could still be alive in the digital world, and that he could somehow escape.
- Hilarious in Hindsight: After the release of the "Host Hoedown" video, some YouTubers made mockups of what could happen if they used a TAS bot to bypass the Unwinnable by Design act near the end of the minigame. Come the finale, and Joey does just that. Though, he quickly wishes he didn't.
- Nightmare Fuel: See here.
- Nightmare Retardant:
- The Anti Piracy Self Reporter forcibly connects your DS to a Wi-Fi access point (using a special brute-force method to bypass the DS' normal access point registration procedure), then uses the internet connection to call the police while instructing you to confess to your crime. However, the connection process is so slow that if it ever happened to you, you'd have plenty of time to simply turn off your DS, especially since the text on the top screen clearly explains what's going to happen if you don't.
- The finale does what's basically the opposite of Breaking the Fourth Wall. The rest of the series derived its horror from its very believable presentation, with Joey acting as if these videos were all things that actually happened to him in real life. This makes it easy to mistake it as documentation of real anti-piracy measures, and to believe that these things could happen to you too. The finale, meanwhile, is very clearly not something that happened in real life, not only because of it suddenly introducing blatant supernatural elements, but also in how it's edited, with cinematic elements like a third-person perspective, changing camera angles, cutting between shots, and non-diegetic background music, ending in a credits sequence. If you had the slightest amount of Willing Suspension of Disbelief, this ending will kill it for good.
- Paranoia Fuel: Who hasn't committed some technically-illegal or dubious act such as using pirated software, certain that it would be okay, since the "crime" itself is so minor that actually punishing the "culprit" would not be worth the effort? The "Anti Piracy Self Reporter" video plays on the fear of someone taking this "crime" seriously and actually taking measures so you'll face punishment by forcing you to call 911 and demanding that you confess.
- Realism-Induced Horror: For lack of a better term. Unlike most creepypastas, there are no clear supernatural elements at play (at least at the start); rather than being the result of a haunting or anything off, it all just seems the result of at least one developer being so fundamentally obsessed with piracy as to try and punish hypothetical pirates as thoroughly as possible, down to forcing the DS to call 911 and even compromising the game's quality and schedule (very much against the company's wishes) just to try and get back at them. Although the finale does introduce supernatural elements with DJ Hallyboo appearing in reality and trying to kill Joey, that part is played for laughs, while the rest of the series was dead serious.
- Retroactive Recognition: The only video that Joey Perleoni uploaded to his channel before the original Mario Party DS Anti-Piracy video blew up was a recording of a lecture that former Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aimé gave at Cornell University, specifically his response to a question about Mother 3 by an audience member.
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