And that is why, to this day, Leo buys his games legally. Or at least, he buys a hard drive big enough to hold them uncompressed.
The landscape of Shadow of the Colossus was there, but… wrong. The grass was a single green polygon. The sky was a static JPEG of a sunset. The main character, Wander, was just a floating sword with a pair of legs. And the first colossus? It was a cube. A giant, twitching cube with a weak spot that looked like a pixelated zit.
Leo never downloaded a compressed game again. But sometimes, late at night, his PS2 would turn itself on. And from the black screen, he’d hear a faint, cuboid whisper: Ps2 Games Highly Compressed
“You compressed too much,” the voice said. It was the cube. Its voice was gravel and static. “You took my soul out. Now give it back.”
The console whirred. The pink Sony logo bloomed. Then, silence. And that is why, to this day, Leo buys his games legally
But Leo was desperate. He spent two hours downloading a file named "SotC_Full_NoLag.7z" on his dial-up connection, praying his mom wouldn’t pick up the phone. When it finally finished, he extracted it using WinRAR (still in trial mode, obviously). Inside was a single ISO file: 312MB. He burned it to a CD-R, not even a DVD, using his dad’s work laptop.
And physical discs were expensive.
It sounded too good to be true. A 4.7GB DVD of Shadow of the Colossus , shrunk down to a 300MB zip file? Magic. Or malware.