The latest installment in the "Crash Bandicoot" series is, like the others, basically a crapshoot. Nevertheless, some of us love the series and want to play it, so we were excited when "Crash Bandicoot 4: It's About Time" made its PC debut on Battle.net last week. But lo and behold, this single-player game, which has no online component, comes with DRM that requires an Internet connection.

For publishers and hackers, this sometimes appears to be a sport. The former try to protect their products by any means necessary, while the latter are dedicated to breaking the same protections and allowing people to use the software they paid for in any way they want.

Crash Bandicoot 4 was followed by the Blizzard Arcade Collection (a package of single-player games that require a connection to play). When attempting to load Crash 4 offline, Battle.net returns the error code BLZ51900002. The Battle.net site shows this code as updated about six months ago, referring to a PC that failed to connect to the login server

However, the code is not updated.

In the case of Crash 4, however, this copy protection lasted only about a day.

The game was released on Friday, and by Saturday the hacker Empress had posted a crack that allowed him to bypass online check-in (thanks to Ars Technica) and announced, with some degree of bravado: "It's the result of a philosophy everyone was fooling around with. This is what happens when I 'run' and 'apply' a crack. I hope this release puts a smile on people's faces."

The crack was accompanied by an image showing that the game's copy protection format was "Battle.net + Online" rather than Denuvo, the usual Empress target.

For these hackers, hitting a game like "Crash 4" is a matter of principle. This is because the game has no online content and does not require you to check in to Activision's servers every time you play it. Of course, Activision would disagree with this.