Batman: Arkham Asylum launches September 15 on PC, but pirates being pirates, they've gotten to the game early.

Of course, there's often a huge discepency of intelligence between the people who crack the game and the people who pirate it, as evidenced by a new Eidos forum post from user "Chescirec_the_cat", whose title reads, oddly enough, "Abandonware":

Hi!
I've got a problem when it's time to use Batman's glide in the game. When I hold <Space> , like it's said to jump from one platform to another, Batman tries to open his wings again and again instead of gliding. So he fels down in a poisoning gas. If somebody could tel me, what should I do there.

Another user promptly follows this up by explaining this must be inherent to the pirated version of the game only, as the demo -- that thing you download to to help you decide if you want to buy it -- doesn't have it.

Games like Mass Effect have taken to this approach in the past, with success on some levels, though the bugs, or "tripwires", were more subtle, and simply left a lot of pirates thinking the game was poorly made (and hence hindering any incentive to buy it). With Arkham Asylum, it appears the game's developer Rocksteady have done a pretty effective job by creating a more blatant tripwire.

At this point Eidos admin "Keir" comes in, confirming suspicions:

The problem you have encountered is a hook in the copy protection, to catch out people who try and download cracked versions of the game for free.

It's not a bug in the game's code, it's a bug in your moral code.

Take that, pirate!