@thehat360 wtf is pinboard

Yeeeeeeah I don't remember the part of Super Mario 64 that hits you with wave after endless wave of enemies while you're just trying to get to the next area.

Though I gotta hand it to 'em, they really managed to capture the frustration of constant random encounters in an action RPG.

@metaphysician Work-for-hire can include royalty agreements or other forms of profit participation; that's typical in the American film and TV industries, for example. But it's not typical in software.

@Johnny_Arthur If they're working on the compilation, sure; they'll get paid for the new work. But as for whether the original devs get any kind of long-term profit interest in an old game, that's pretty rare. Most game development is done on a work-for-hire basis with no profit-sharing incentives. That goes double for licensed games; Mattel doesn't want to be responsible for paying out royalties decades after their contract with the licensee is up.

There are cases where developers might get a new paycheck for the rerelease of an old game, if the developer actually owns the copyright (like Jordan Mechner owns Karateka, and Jeff Minter owns most of the Llamasoft games), or if it's a particularly generous (probably small) publisher that made profit-sharing agreements with its devs. But for a licensed game owned by Mattel? I really doubt it.

@ojisan Yeah, using AI tools in upscaling and restoration isn't an inherently bad thing but you have to use the right tools and tune them correctly. It may not require the same level of time and effort as restoring everything by hand, but it does require expertise and attention to detail; if you just throw the files into a batch job and call it a day, the result's going to show that.

@mariteaux "Can't imagine a whole lot" — well, that would explain why you're an AI booster, I guess.

I've never read Brawl in the Family but I liked Gamemaster Classified (his collaboration with Howard Phillips).

> Mike [Katz, the former president of Atari at the time]

Wait, was he the former president of Atari at the time, or was he the president of Atari at the time and he's the former president of Atari now?

"Former president of Atari at the time" implies that he'd been the president, wasn't anymore, then became the president again at some later time, like a Steve Jobs situation.

Man that apostrophe in the title is making my eye twitch.

I keep meaning to give these a read. I'm American so I had the Archie Sonic comic (which is a whole other topic in itself); I saw some bits of the Fleetway one here and there but I haven't read past the first issue.

> the retranslated script for the PSP release of the game

Not really retranslated so much as the same translation cleaned up a little.

https://legendsoflocalization.com/articles/castlevania-sotn-miserable-pile-of-secrets/#comment-9758

> (64-bit console)
> (8-bit handheld console)
> (16-bit console)
> (8-bit console)
> (home computer)

Guys, they're not Beetlejuice; you can say their names. I know Blaze is gun-shy about trademarks but you don't have to just copy-paste their list; you can say what those consoles and computers actually are.

@breach187 "This story's already been told, find something else" is a pretty weird way to look at history.

There's more than one way to look at past events. And while there are a number of resources dealing with the history of Tetris, the narrative to this point has been dominated by the Tetris Company's version of the story. There is a value to an outside perspective.

@Martin_H Wow. You're really going with the "animation is built on plagiarism" defense from The Simpsons.

@JJtheTexan We did get that ActRaiser remake, so it's not out of the question (I'm guessing SE owns the rest of Quintet's library but don't know that for sure), but ActRaiser is a better-known game, too.

@KingMike It's hard to even find what the heck it is @Yamanii is talking about but I guess one of the monsters has bare breasts in the Japanese version, and covering up a couple of 4-pixel nipples ruins the whole game?

@ojisan The original GI newsbit asked Sega for comment and quoted their response. If it wasn't accurate, whose fault is that?

@Yamanii IDK I still thought Earthbound, Final Fantasy 2&3, Chrono Trigger, Secret of Mana, Breath of Fire, and ActRaiser were pretty good, but you do you.

I know some fan translations where everyone curses all the time, if that's what you're looking for.

I've been thinking for years that what the game could really use is a rebalancing patch. The bosses are damn damage sponges.

@cyxceven "Not exactly sure how different it is to have AI assist with BG element design, or drawing/tiling over the big collections of reference materials SEGA has amassed over the years. As long as the AI used isn't trained on other people's stuff that they don't own, it does not seem so bad."

Is your argument that if Sega didn't have AI, they'd just reuse old assets and not pay the original work-for-hire artists for that, either?

Because, I mean, even if you're right that's...not a great defense?

@Quick_Man Well, I don't know about that last part, but it's still a good idea.

@BionicDodo https://xkcd.com/1357/

@bring_on_branstons "Not all jobs will be affected"

Oh, they will when the bubble bursts and we have a global economic recession.

@carlos82 "I'm excited for the game and thought it looked great and would rather focus on that than be miserable"

Your logical fallacy is false binary.

@SlangWon Those solutions are great for folks like you and me, but not everybody is prepared to maintain a collection of ROMs and set up emulators (or MiSTer or whatever). I've been at this since the Nesticle days and I don't even know where to begin with these recomp projects. There are, what, three different base versions of Super Mario 64?

The Evercade has its drawbacks, to be sure, but it's a much more accessible solution for an average user.

@leogames I got no dog in this fight but slider1983's on my ignore list and I'm inclined to believe I probably had a reason.

@joswaldodo "Why is it always easterners who are so accepting of bad behavior from people in power."

Weeb's gonna spend the rest of the day walking on air that someone called them an easterner.

@KingMike Directing something at a group of tens of millions of people is the very definition of impersonal.

@AlienX "Why is it always the westerners that talk trash about Naka-san?"

You mean besides the Tokyo District Public Prosecutors Office, right?

"Without his involvement with Sonic I would've never been a fan in the first place."

And without Doug TenNapel I wouldn't have been a fan of Earthworm Jim, but that doesn't mean I can't criticize Doug TenNapel. Eff that effing guy.

Just because somebody created (or, in this case, co-created) something I enjoyed doesn't mean they're a good person. See also: Rudyard Kipling, Roald Dahl, Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, Joss Whedon, Gerard Jones, Neil Gaiman, Warren Ellis, JK Rowling, Justin Roiland, Michael Jackson...

> After all, the corporate rivalry between Sega and Nintendo was as brutal and personal as can be.

Was it personal? I haven't read Console Wars so maybe there was some behind-the-scenes drama I'm not aware of, but as far as the public-facing stuff, it wasn't personal at all. It was crude and insulting, but the target was always Nintendo the company and its products, never any particular person.

It wasn't personal, it was business. And Lincoln understood that. Hell, by 1996 Nintendo had been copying Sega's aggressive ad strategy themselves for years; the "Why go to the next level when you can go light years beyond?" Star Fox ad was in 1993 and the Play it Loud campaign started in 1994.

@thedemon1238 "No one has ever said that Sonic was created entirely by Yuji Naka."

I mean, yeah, maybe you're too young to remember it but a whole lot of people used to say that, all the time. It was kind of the conventional wisdom for 20-25 years.

@JJtheTexan Yeah, he surely was a skilled programmer. The 3D maze rotation in the original Phantasy Star is still stunning to look at.

And that's the thing about a lot of these guys — they deserve a lot of credit (Steve Jobs was a fantastic graphic designer! Stan Lee was one of the best editors in the history of American comics!) but they still wanted even more.

@Martin_H And of course there are many famous stories of co-creators hogging all the credit for themselves and pushing their collaborators out of the picture. Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Stan Lee, Bob Kane, Walt Disney...

"Gradriel" is a pretty unfortunate English-to-Japanese-back-to-English mangling, but I guess per Etrian Odyssey it is canon, like "Varia Suit".

@Przemyslaw Yeah, when I first saw it I figured it was for TATE-mode games but it's a square; you could just rotate the image.

@MojaMojaKumaSan @ErgoProxy It's not an airport; you don't have to announce your departure.

@axelhander "AI has not verifiably spread misinformation" is a take, I guess.

Like, as a big example, one of the things AI tools seem to be pretty good at is finding security vulnerabilities. That's good! But you need rules for reporting those bugs, or you're going to get a huge mess of people reporting the same bugs they found with the same tools.

Banning the use of AI in finding vulnerabilities is probably not a good idea. But you need rules in place as to how to report what the AI has found. That's just common sense.

Here's Linus Torvalds saying more or less that exact thing: https://lkml.org/lkml/2026/5/17/896

@Martin_H And it's the only option for the first two models of DS, right? They don't have SD card slots; those were introduced with the DSi.

@gingerbeardman I don't think that limiting use of a thing but not outright banning it is "taking it with one hand and pushing it away with the other". There are lots of things that are allowed within restrictions. I think the driver's license analogy could use some work, but, for example, you're allowed to use a car but you have to obey traffic rules. Do speed limit signs take cars with one hand and push them away with the other?

@TakahashiYellow Most of them did; that's why they forked it.

@FR4M3 ...what?

I'm not sure you've thought this analogy through.

@gmar Where's the copyright violation?

If the firmware includes encryption keys, then Nintendo might have a case against the firmware. And they can certainly go after anyone who distributes a flash cart with Nintendo ROMs preinstalled on it. But flash carts in themselves aren't illegal (and neither are emulators). At least, not under most countries' copyright laws.

@gingerbeardman I don't see anything strange about specifically banning the use of AI to submit pull requests and requiring contributors to understand the code they commit.

A blanket ban on AI would be understandable (although difficult to enforce; how do you prove something is AI-generated if the user submits their own PRs and can explain and debug the code effectively?) but they're addressing the specific pain points that AI-generated submissions have caused them rather than AI use in all its forms. Seems like a reasonable stance to me.

@PKDuckman 6-8 are available on GOG and Steam. In fact, it looks like they're on sale at GOG right now and if you're in the US you can snag all three of them for $2.50.

Perhaps more significantly, Drecom owns the "Wizardry" name and other associated trademarks. Anyone who wants to publish a game under the Wizardry name has to go through them, including Atari.

We can reasonably expect that we'll be seeing Digital Eclipse release Wizardry 2-5 in a similar form to what they did with the first game (IIRC they're all built on the same codebase as the original game so I wouldn't expect it to be too difficult to update the wrapper they built for the first game to work with the others), and they'll have to pay a licensing fee to Drecom to publish them under their original titles.

@EricR Yes, I'm sure the poster is just very concerned about continuity, and that's why the only continuity changes he's upset about are related to gender and sexuality.

@EricR Because the poster is complaining about breaking a canon that has ALWAYS been broken.

But you wanna talk about the carefully-coordinated, extremely consistent '90s Marvel canon? Sure, where would you like me to start? With the various retcons to Magneto's identity and ethnicity? How about Teen Tony and the Mutant Wasp and how they just got reset back to normal because mumble mumble Franklin Richards?

Say, if the Age of Apocalypse is a timeline where the Fantastic Four never existed, how come the world didn't get devoured by Galactus?

Oh, and the Clone Saga. Now there was a clustershock. How did the Jackal implant visions in Peter Parker if he wasn't a clone? And we're just not gonna talk about that time he slapped his pregnant wife, right?

Come on, man. You're gonna back up a guy saying that '90s Marvel continuity, '90s Marvel continuity, was clear and consistent and didn't make major changes to existing characters, because some guy in the licensing department once told a licensee that their Juggernaut was off-model? Yeah, sure, buddy.

BRB gonna go switch bodies with a Japanese lady.

@DestructoDisk Yeah, I miss the good old days where games were apolitical, like Guerilla War.

Not to detract from the engineering accomplishment, but if that's "keychain-sized" then y'all must have some big-ass keychains.

@Quick_Man "X-Men didn't used to be woke" might genuinely be the dumbest take.