Thad

@metaphysician Hell, Capcom won't even do a compilation of the Game Boy Mega Man games.

Ha. This was my first Mega Man game.

Mike Drucker had a fun retrospective on 1900HOTDOG a couple years back: https://1900hotdog.com/2024/02/nerding-day-tiger-electronics-mega-man-2-%F0%9F%8C%AD/

@gojiguy There are DRM-free games on Steam, and you can download them with the command-line SteamCMD.

@h3s There are some games that have Linux-native versions on GOG, but it's a comparative rarity (and even when a game has a native Linux version, that doesn't necessarily mean GOG has it; for example, Saints Row 2 has a Linux-native version but GOG only has the Windows version) and if you want to try to get a Windows game running on Linux you're on your own. Whereas with Steam, I've found that the vast majority of Windows games I've tried run fine right out of the box.

Plus I've got a Deck, which obviously is a pretty Steam-forward environment.

But whatever experience you prefer, that's the right one for you. I'm not saying you or anyone else are wrong, just saying what's right for me.

@Sketcz I'm a Linux user. Valve supports my OS, GOG doesn't. It's really as simple as that.

You can get GOG games to run on Linux, using tools like Heroic Launcher. That's a great reason to support the developers of those tools. It's not much of a reason to support GOG.

I like GOG. I appreciate their DRM-free ethos. I'd like to support them. But the bottom line is I'm not going to buy a game that doesn't work on my computer (at least, not without the use of some unsupported third-party workaround).

Which is not to say that I'm going to buy something with Enigma, either. I just can't see supporting Capcom at all right now. I'm a fan from way back, but every time I see them in the news now it's for something like adding DRM to already-purchased games or hiring scabs or not crediting their talent.

> it has since become a cult classic, not only for its inclusion of Nintendo's hottest NES games but for its heartfelt portrayal of a broken family trying its hardest to heal following a devastating tragedy.

Yeah. That's what people remember about The Wizard.

And that $470 statement is "I wanted to spend $470 on an Atari watch, but I also wanted to make sure nobody could tell it was an Atari watch."

> For the longest time, it was believed to be nearly impossible

If it took thirteen years before even a single person managed to do it, then I would say that belief is probably justified?

@dunk Yeah, fortunately that other stuff is mostly forgotten at this point and the show's out there to appreciate on its own merits.

(I don't know if you're in the US, but a glance at JustWatch shows it's on Netflix, Pluto, and various other streaming sites.)

@cawley1 Maybe so, but the Saturn sold just fine in the UK anyway, didn't it? It was North American sales that were the problem.

Well, the TV show was good, anyway.

@cawley1 You may be right that Sonic X-treme would have flopped, but if you think a 2D platformer would have been a system-seller in 1996, you don't remember 1996.

@RadioHedgeFund The "arrogant American arm" was long gone by 2000. Sega Japan started yanking the leash with the (disastrous) US launch of the Saturn in 1995, and cleaned house in 1996; that's the period this article is about. SoA in 2000 was a very different company than in, say, 1994.

And, arrogant or not, Sega of America was responsible for the success of the Genesis in North America, and it was the only Sega console that was ever successful in that major market. (And whatever the flaws with the unfinished Sonic Xtreme, SoA was also responsible for Sonic 2 and 3, which I think are generally more highly-regarded than Sonic 1 and CD.)

A job well-done is its own reward.

@Johnny_Arthur You don't have a right to express yourself on somebody else's property, Johnny.

When someone deletes your post from their website, they're not disrespecting your right to self-expression. They're exercising theirs.

@Johnny_Arthur I don't know what post you're talking about but you're being a little vague about how, specifically, you "touched on a political topic" and it leads me to suspect that the details you're omitting are important.

@h3s Well, first of all, work-for-hire doesn't mean there can't be royalties, residuals, or other profit-sharing arrangements.

No, it's probably not feasible to have individual co-ownership of every element of a game (unless it's made by a very small team). But that doesn't mean that publishers can't be more generous in sharing their profits with the people who do the actual work they profit from.

And it's not charity, either; it's mutually beneficial. If you treat your talent well, they'll be more inclined to do more work for you.

This is not a new story. We've seen it play out in other creative industries. The owners make big money and promote their own success; the creatives realize they've gotten a raw deal and begin pushing for more credit and compensation. The owners insist it can't be done, but then eventually it turns out it can.

@Quick_Man Eh, there's nothing inherently wrong with questioning the relevance of something TE covers (just because Doug TenNapel says something doesn't mean it's retro gaming news), but this clearly is within the site's remit. It's news and it clearly involves retro video games.

And of course "I don't want to hear about politics" usually means "I don't want to hear about politics from people I disagree with." My grandma once forwarded me an e-mail that ranted at length about how Hollywood celebrities should just shut up about politics, and closed with a quote by Ronald Reagan.

@N-MCMXCIX Yes, that's what "initial assessment" means.

@h3s "Most work done in any field is work for hire" is not an argument that work in any particular field should be work for hire. It's just an appeal to tradition.

@President_Leever "How should residuals be divided up amongst the different artists?" is sort of a moot debate to be having when there are no residuals in the first place.

However you want to compare Zembillas's contribution to Crash to subsequent artists' contributions, he certainly had more to do with the act of creation than the current upper management at Sony.

@N-MCMXCIX Well, then I guess the Pentagon's initial assessment was performed by idiots, then. How embarrassing.

https://www.npr.org/2026/03/11/nx-s1-5744981/pentagon-iran-missile-school-hegseth

@PZT Never mind grandchildren; my fear is that everybody is going to forget about this within six years.

Trump getting a second term has pretty much shattered my faith in my countrymen, and I didn't have much to begin with.

@JayJ cool

@Coalescence Has it occurred to you that perhaps if the White House social media account's goal is to "get a rise out of people" that is, itself, a problem?

@RootsGenoa I'm sort of morbidly curious whether they're actually trying to provide Nintendo with grist for a lawsuit (see? people are misunderstanding this as an official endorsement!) or really are that dumb.

@RetroMasters People who aren't psychopaths, mostly.

@WileyDragonfly I'll bite. In what way is it parody? It may be obvious to you but I clearly don't have your familiarity with the relevant law; can you please cite the relevant statute or precedent?

@Fighting_Game_Loser ..."arguably"?

> While Xemu can be licensed under the GNU General Public License Version 2, it's generally frowned upon by the wider community to take that work and sell it for a profit, so it's little wonder that izzy2lost has also offered the same emulator for free on GitHub.

What? No. This is completely wrong and bordering on gibberish.

The GPL explicitly allows people to sell software published under it, for profit. The primary restriction is that they have to publish their own modifications under the same license, including releasing the source code. It's "little wonder" that the developer published their source code because...they are legally required to do so.

Software licensed under the GPL gets sold at a profit all the time. I am absolutely certain that you, the person who wrote this article, own devices that you purchased and which run the GPLv2-licensed Linux kernel. There's a good chance you're reading these words on one right now.

I think $8 is excessive and I wouldn't pay that much for it, and I'll agree that it would have been better form to collaborate with the devs rather than fork their work without communicating with them. But everything agrees to be legally above-board here, and it's not as if the dev just took the existing codebase, renamed it, and charged for it; they must have put in some amount of work to port it to an unsupported platform. They're not really competing with an existing product here.

@gojiguy I can't speak to any of the other ones but the Switch Sega Ages version of the original Phantasy Star is excellent.

@MARl0 And he's not even a copyright troll! It isn't even some kind of moneymaking scheme, he's just some nut who's spent thousands of pounds to make people stop talking about an obscure video game from 1999!

Big update: the VGHF called Brandon White's bluff and the trade association he's been using to send his takedowns has cut him off.

https://gamehistory.org/cookies-bustle/

@BionicDodo I wouldn't be so sure, given LLMs' environmental impact.

@EarthboundBenjy Maybe. Could be it's a pun and I'm missing the reference; I haven't gotten that far into the first game so maybe there's some Pluto stuff I'm not aware of.

I love TRPGs but it's really hard to find time for them anymore (unless it's Into the Breach or something like that that's designed for short play sessions).

FYI it's "Platonic ideal", not "plutonic". As in Plato, the philosopher who believed that the perfect idea of a thing is more real than its flawed physical expression.

Thanks for the list. It can be a daunting series to get into. I decided to start with Resurrection of the Dark Dragon; I tried the original Genesis/MegaDrive version first, but found that the GBA's QOL improvements made it easier to figure out how everything worked.

(I prefer the original graphical style, but the GBA look isn't bad, especially if you're playing it on a small screen like the one it was designed for.)

@Martin_H Okay, but, like, do you have any examples that aren't imaginary?

Can you give any examples of real-life Bobs saying that AI is great because it helped them continue to work creatively after a disaster?

Because in my observation, in real life most of the artists talking about how great it is are guys like Doug TenNapel.

@ckoerner And steps like a goose.

@jesse_dylan cool

@Razieluigi Does Doug even have a job for AI to take? He's a talented artist but I can't name anything else he's done besides Earthworm Jim.

Last I heard he had a podcast with Ethan Nicolle, another artist whose work I really enjoyed who turned out to be a bigot.

@flighty Yeah, EWJ had humble and mercenary beginnings (Playmates following up its massive success with the TMNT toy line by trying to create a similar brand that it would own) but the games and the TV show attracted a fanbase by being good. The games were beautifully animated, the cartoon had a great cast, and both were genuinely funny.

It didn't have the lasting success of a Transformers or a Masters of the Universe, but I think it means something that we're still talking about Earthworm Jim while most of the other toy tie-in media of the '80s and '90s are forgotten.

Are you misspelling his name on purpose? Maybe it's some kind of inside joke I'm not getting, like he got really mad about it once so now you do it every time because ***** that guy?

FYI it's TenNapel, with the e before the l.