You may have heard the whole Palworld scandal already, getting misreported with articles going on about the similarity of various designs to certain Pokemon. I want to clarify something here. Nintendo is not suing about copyright, so whatever you feel about how close the art design is, it's not relevant to the case.
It's a patent suit. They are suing over the concept of using small items to catch large monsters. This is on the heels of another recent suit where Nintendo sued another company for using their patented concept of using a touch screen to emulate an analog stick, from Super Mario 64 DS specifically. These suits are both based in Japan, where their patent office is way too lenient. Such patents would never have been granted in the U.S., and notably, it reminds me of Capcom suing SNK way back in the day over stealing the concept of a "fighting game", and of the lawsuit against Namco for using the concept of a loading screen mini-game.
Back in 2013, a case regarding software patents went to the Supreme court here in the U.S., and it was determined that such patents are invalid as they are too obvious and hinder innovation in the software space... which they did. It didn't help that these software patents were badly defined in the first place. That is, someone just comes up with the idea of "do this, but in software" with no actual implementation developed, no source code or anything, and someone who actually does the work of realizing it then gets sued. It's called a "patent troll", and yes, it's ridiculous.
Nintendo has crossed a horrible threshold, and they've become one of the worst threats in not just the gaming industry but software as a whole. I hope they lose this, and lose BIG, because this is the kind of nonsense that can stifle creativity and cause all kinds of companies to go after each other. Just keep in mind that Nintendo will likely get sued right after this by Atlus, because catching monsters and training them comes from Shin Megami Tensei before Nintendo came up with their "Monsters in my Pocket". However, Japanese law being what it is, Nintendo is likely to win there. Here's hoping the U.S. decision stands as far as such software patents go here, but recently, other software companies have been lobbying congress critters to pass new laws establishing software patents back into reality again, as well as DNA patents.
Let me be very clear on this point. Yes, it's pretty obvious how similar these "pals" are to pokemon, but Nintendo didn't go after them on that, or on copyright. The very fact Nintendo is pursuing this as a patent case is a tacit admission they know they wouldn't win a copyright suit, that the designs and storyline backgrounds are different ENOUGH that they are their own thing, just like Captain Marvel not QUITE being Superman, or... well all of the OTHER cases of comic book characters clearly being "inspired" by existing characters. Heck we've got Namor coming out to retake the throne of Atlantis from that uptstart Aqua Man pretty soon, so that's still a thing.
Starcraft is the best game ever made. It's an exceptionally amazing game which requires extreme skill to be good at and has a near-infinite skill ceiling. Being good at Starcraft is one of the hardest things to do in gaming. I have always loved the game, since I got it the week it released, but have always been terrible at the game...
So what have I been doing this year? Well, one thing I've been doing is getting back pretty hard into my favorite game ever, Starcraft. SC has almost always been my favorite game, of course, but other than several dozen games in 2017-18 after the release of Starcraft Remaster, I'd barely played it since about 2009, when I mostly stopped playing RTSes nearly as much as I had before for several reasons.
What were those reasons? They include my increasing interest in retro console games over modern games, how Blizzard was clearly not the same company it had been before being ruined by World of Warcraft, arm pain when playing mouse-intensive games, that I always was bad at them and you get tired of losing like 95% of the time after a while, and more. I had hopes for Starcraft 2, there are a few old posts of mine here about the game when it released, but I ended up dropping it almost immediately, and barely ever playing it again after that post I made here around its release. SC2 failed to hit the mark for several reasons, including its more cartoony Warcraft-ized art design, the bad decisions they made about Blizzard control of custom maps people made (these were hugely important to SC and WC3's success of course!), the awful story that ruins the characters of the original in favor of generic stupid nonsense, my reduced interest in the genre at the time, that arm pain, etc.
In 2017, Blizzard released Starcraft Remaster. It's an exceptional HD update of the original which changes nothing about the gameplay of the original, every bug and glitch is perfectly preserved, as the SC pros wanted. It's exceptional and was my game of the year that year. As I said I played it a bunch for a little while but not very seriously and after a little while I lost interest again.
Then, early this year I got into watching pro Starcraft on Youtube. I'm not sure exactly why but I do remember thinking about Warcraft 2, watching some WC2 videos, then it recommended some SC and... well, yeah, I was hooked. WC2 is a simpler game and I do love its music even better than SC's, but SC has more depth, it's overall even better than that amazing classic. I watch probably way too much Youtube, of course, but I've never gotten into watching pro gaming or speedrunning, other than the Mario platformer streamers/youtubers I like to watch and that's at most semipro, they're mostly just streamers. But in South Korea of course pro Starcraft is actually a real sport with a sizable player and fan base, and I've found it really interesting to watch the best players play. Of course it's kind of like, I can play the game but they're a hundred times better than me or more and I'll never be and never was anywhere remotely near that level, but still, watching people who are really good at such an exceptionally amazing game with such a stratospheric skill ceiling? It's really, really interesting to watch.
And then... there's actually playing the game. I have gotten back to playing some SC here and there this year, inspired by watching the pros. Well, inspired to play, not to play well... heh. I'm still awful at the game and aren't really trying to be great, I'd rather just have fun with it than put a full effort into being good. For instance, I am fully aware that to be decent at SC you need to heavily use keyboard hotkeys, but I've never liked that so I still don't. Is this a factor in why I almost always lose? Yes, of course it is, but so far I haven't changed that. Oh well. I'm having fun anyway. SC is a very intense and stressful game to play, but it's also incredibly fun. It's the best.
The main issue is, my play would work fine if the matchmaking was better, but unfortunately SC's matchmaking is pretty badly broken. That is, a lot of people quit instantly the moment the game starts, and when that happens it counts as a loss for them and a win for you. This makes it totally impossible to get an accurate MMR (player rating), because my score gets artiifically raised by the huge number of 'wins' over insta-quitters. Seriously, it's a LOT -- I probably actually win maybe 5% of the time still, same as ever, but I win like 40-46% of games overall. Yes, the insta-quitting plague makes facing opponents on your skill level pretty much impossible, most games are either against an instant quitter or someone a lot better than me (who has a similar rating because of the quitters). Obviously I could quit myself to lower my rating but I hate the idea of doing that so so far I haven't. Ah well.
Despite this though SC is the best and I'm so happy to be back to playing it, and to be following pro Starcraft closely for the first time. I knew of Slayers Boxer in the '00s of course and had watched a few of his games, but otherwise I wasn't watching pro SC back then. Now I am.
Limited Run, with iD software, are releasing a much more optimized version of Doom for the Super Nintendo of all things. I'm not sure how they're managing the Super FX part of such a cart, except emulating it with an FPGA chip or something.
Other than this, they've made yet another modern port of Doom and Doom 2, called "Doom + Doom 2". If you own Doom anywhere, on any modern platform, you already own this, so congratulations!
They're releasing a "Doom Anthology", but it's literally just a fancy box containing a download code, so I'll just skip it.
And lastly, they're updating Doom Eternal with the loooong delayed mod support and a development studio. About time!
Fortunately, this wasn't the result of some lawsuit, because if a site like Romhacking.net were to be taken down, then nexusmods would be next, as PC game mods and rom hacks are basically the same thing. No, no it's far stupider than that.
The original owner has posted an "explanation" of the shutdown, but what it amounts to is that they refused to step down as owner and pass things along to new ownership due to bad blood between this owner and some of the people wondering why the switchover was taking so long. There were disagreements about moving the site to newer tech and how best to achieve that, and some weird complaint about how to get the mods moved over to the new system that suggested the site owner wanted them physically mailed?
The collapse has one benefit, in that the whole site has been archived, so as long as that archive sticks around, the mods will still be available. What a disappointment. There's another person who's desperately trying to get THEIR mod hosting site to be the "replacement", but there are so very many things wrong with that replacement I won't even bother linking it. Suffice it to say it's hosted using BLOG software and THAT owner is also operating a ROM hosting site which would definitely put that new mod site in the crosshairs for a shutdown in the same way that Switch emulator was shut down due to the creators actively promoting and trading Switch ROM links.
This is astonishing, mainly because this doesn't involve the 32X or SVP addon chip at all. It's all being run directly off Sega Genesis original hardware. There's no sound effects, and the music is a scratchy recording of the original music done in a loop, AND the frame rate isn't any better than what you got off the SNES, but it's still impressive it's performing as well as it is. Near as I can tell, this is a port of the original reverse engineered code so it should control as well as that game. I'm sure down the line sound effects will be worked into it and the music will likely get converted to FM synthesis at some point, but it's amazing how well modern designers can make these old systems run.
This is from a month ago, but it's interesting so why not make a thread about it?
So, in a Japanese interview Miyamoto said that basically Nintendo needs to have one game sell 30 million copies every three to five years, they will be fine as a company. They are currently well over that marker. Meanwhile, 1 million sales is now not a huge hit anymore. Also, he says that nobody (in development) likes it if a game only breaks even financially; instead you want your game to be successful, not only financially neutral. "Miyamoto: Is that so? But if there's no profit and we're just breaking even, then it's just tiring, right? I'm sure the people who worked with me would think that that's not what we worked for . So, the reason why I don't praise my co-workers half-heartedly along the way is because, anyway, the reason I think it was good to work with them is because "we sell a lot."" How capitalist of him... I don't know, breaking even seems fine to me. But sure, being successful is better, if a game is successful it gives you revenues to make up for other projects that are less successful for example.
His concluding message is quite good, too. The idea is that Nintendo is a company that is always looking for the next big hit, and that he likes emphasizing to new employees that Nintendo's goal is to find that next hit game. " Miyamoto: That's right. For me the most dangerous thing is to overlook something that could turn into something big. I think the good thing about our company is that we have been able to nurture these kinds of buds." That makes sense.
It's interesting to see that this is how he and Nintendo think, but considering how successful Nintendo has been for a long time, obviously they are good at capitalism. Nintendo's focus on profits and rarely losing and never borrowing money is infamous, after all. 30 million every three to five years? The current Nintendo can easily cross that bar several times over. What we don't know is if Nintendo will continue being able to do that in the future, after Miyamoto retires... I hope they do, that they've set up a company that can last, but we'll see.
Remember Chibi-Robo and how heartfelt that game was? How the game was about a little robot cleaning up a house, but what it ACTUALLY was about was a crumbling marriage and how that affected the whole family, and how through the game you eventually resolved their marriage issues and gave the daughter pretending to be a frog a voice?
Remember the two sequels that had NOTHING to do with that heartfelt premise?
Well, turns out the original developers had nothing to do with the sequels, but have everything to do with this kickstarter!
For the longest time, I had no clue what the song from my ancient 3M branded CD Laser Lens Cleaner was using. Finally, modern "song recognition" algorithms have solved the problem. According to my various consoles, this is the most played song I have just because I like to keep that lens clean. So without further delay, Here's "Opening Up" in all it's synth glory by John Devereaux.
Not that prices haven't been going up, of course, but it looks like we have some concrete evidence it wasn't tied to anything natural, it was literally just CEOs jacking up prices to see what they could get away with until we, the public, finally squealed, and then suddenly it stopped.
It really was "greedflation".
Biden's "soft landing" plan actually worked to help end this nonsense. Credit where it's due.
