Pirated games that you played/enjoyed & eventually bought them...

I guess most of the games I own I had non-official copies before. The thing is, if I enjoy the game enough I want to have it, even if I don't think I'll play it again.

played a lot pirated game, and now time for me to appreciate them. only Magicka right now and planning to add more when price goes off. it's sad, price off event for my planned-to-buy games never matched my purse condition :P

Earlier ones...not so much "pirated" as played copies shared with me by friends...but I suppose the distinction is blurry:
Monkey Island (for Amiga, I also bought the original games and the later incarnations in the past few years for PC), Doom, Doom II, Deluxe Paint 3, Blues Brothers, Leisure Suit Larry, Quake 3, Unreal, Tony Hawks Pro Skater on PS (also recently bought the HD version for PC when it came out on Steam).

Lost count, but those are the standouts.

The list is too long to recall. My previous laptop was one of the most unpredictable things. I could surpass requirements and not be able to run a game, or be far under them and play just fine. And don't bullshit me with those hardware sites. I can give a large list of games it incorrectly told me I could/couldn't run. I bought something because it said I exceeded the recommended requirements, and it wouldn't even launch. Plus, it later starting incorrectly identifying my hardware.

If something did run, I bought it. If not, well what am I going to do with that useless copy anyway?

It's not a problem with my new laptop at least. Everything runs, so I can just chuck my money at the devs without worry.

edit: I forgot about console games. I used to emulate them until I could get a legit copy of the game somewhere. I also emulated Kingdom Hearts and some other games before I got a PS2 with them. ._.

I'm including only PC games, the ones that I remember:

• Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge (bought remake)
• Samorost 2
• Uplink (got in a Humble Bundle)
• The Walking Dead (this one just for try how it was on my PC, actually never really played it)
• Legacy of Kain: Defiance
• GTA: San Andreas (was not really interested, must play it seriously now)
• Plants vs Zombies
• VVVVVV

Plan to buy asap:

• Dungeon Keeper

Do not plan to buy:

• Terraria (good game, but I tried it and I'm not interested in something like that for now, Minecraft is enough)

Warcraft 3
Alice: madness returns
Walking Dead

others are crap beyond insanity that I didn't even finish the pirated game
e.g.
Fear 3
Alpha Protocol
Air conflict series
etc.

The Orange Box.

How do you pirate a multiplayer-only game to test it? Games like Killing Floor and CS:S would be stupid to pirate, since A) the stats and player reviews are a clear indication as to how good they are, and B) THEY'RE FUCKING MULTIPLAYER ONLY.
Playing with bots, or worse, solo, isn't going to show you anything about the game.

Sure, you can play on cracked servers, but for 90% of multiplayer games, that involves wasting a massive amount of effort finding such servers, installing external software, or playing over vLAN, which are all terrible options.

Warcraft 3, but I promptly bought it after beating the campaign for battlenet :)

Operation Flashpoint, Machinarium, GTA 3 / 4

I did this with Fallout 3, Portal, Portal 2, Torchlight, and probably some others I can't think of at the moment. I don't often pirate, and when I do, I usually know in the first hour if the game sucks or not. XD

If it does, it all gets deleted... nod No point in holding on to a game I don't like.

hmmm ... Half Life, Plant vs Zombies, Oblivion, call of Cthulhu, GTA ('s), Alice MR ... but, as a lot of users, that stopped when I got Steam ...and some money

I used to play pirated games but when dota2 was out then i started using steam and from that day i never played pirated games.

After i started to use steam i stopped playing pirated games. Thanks to dota 2.She forced me to make steam account :)
Love you

50% of the games on my steam account (borderlands 1&2 portal 1&2 HL2 HL2 EP 1&2 Killing floor Saints row 3 amnesia Crysis 1 Crysis waehead Crysis 2 Mirrors edge Sleeping dogs and many many many more)

None , i did not brought them becouse i enjoyed them right away , i bought them becouse they were on sale (total war games)

Napoleon and shogun, bought both the retail version, not on sale

also played l4d ,then bought l4d2 preoder. Eventually got l4d on the next sale

Devil May Cry 4, Oblivion, Skyrim, sims 3, prince of persia games, QUAKE III

• I honestly repurchased or downloaded a pirated version of something i owned and lost or owned on console more often..

I guess this is the theme song of this thread ? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1I3acAE8JA .
Here is my list : Amnesia , Beat Hazard , McPixel , Plants vs Zombies , Saints Row 3 , Terraria , Torchlight , Torchlight 2 , Audiosurf , GarrysMod, Portal , Borderlands .

Paradox's grand strategy games, Total War franchise, probably gonna buy RAGE at the next sale, Operation Flashpoint/ArmA franchise, can't think of any others.

None. I pirated a game I already owned once, to see if the reason I couldn't play was system or DRM related (pirated version worked, legit version didn't - go figure).

I will never pirate a game to avoid paying for it, because I can afford to buy whatever I want to, and most games come with a demo/beta to try first. Plus games are a reasonable price for what you get out of them.

Films on the other hand... you pay more than the price of a brand new game to go to the cinema these days, and it's over in 2hrs... 3hrs if you count the amount of adverts you must watch first. Again, DVD's are reasonably priced so I will usually buy what I really want - I don't like how much space DVD boxes take up though, so usually pirate more than I buy with films.

"Hi, please incriminate yourself in this thread with a specific confession, thanks. The more people the better, so we have a list of people to connect to Steam accounts."

Skyrim, and that is pretty much it, haven't pirated sh*t for a looooong time.

Portal 2 and bought it cause of the Steam Workshop :D

Super Meat Boy, Counter Strike 1.6, Counter Strike: Source, Torchlight, Left 4 Dead