Quoting: LoudTechiePengling, the extend of your knowledge of the history of game development is scary sometimes, you know that?

Haha, thankyou. :wink:

Quoting: LoudTechieI can see you are using a search engine, but that's not such a powerful excuse as you might think.
The fact that you are using it in a casual conversation means that you knew many of the basic facts and just tried to fill in the blanks with it.

Thanks, again. :smile: I'm only using a search-engine to retrieve links to things that I already knew of! :smile:

I'm in my 40s, so I was there to see a lot of the formative years of gaming as we know it today - I remember seeing news articles unironically and disingenuously calling Sonic The Hedgehog and Super Mario violent "because they jump on people's heads", or talk-show hosts complaining about their kids "playing on a Nintendosega", or the press in my country unironically suggesting this baby-toy [External Link] as a serious alternative to the likes of the Game Boy, Game Gear, and Atari Lynx.

Let's not even get started on the utterly deranged way so many grown and allegedly-reasonable adults behaved towards Pokemon in the late 1990s - though that's better catalogued [External Link] by folks who know more than I do [External Link] about that topic. (I'm not much of a fan of RPGs, so whilst I love the creature designs and concept behind Pokemon, I've never really enjoyed the games. I even skipped Bomberman Max, which I mentioned earlier, as I mistakenly thought it was more RPG-like than it actually is - I plan to finally play it soon.)

Quoting: LoudTechieI'm happy to converse with such a knowledgable person about their subject, but wow.

There is a phrase I jokingly use with some fellow GOL'ers who I chat with, and that is "Gaming is a way of life!". That is to say, it's a medium we've all grown up with, so it's fun to learn about what's shaped it. :grin:

Just don't get me started on Bomberman lore - we'll be here all day! :tongue:

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Quoting: pleasereadthemanualI agree with Pengling; just clarifying that a "derivative work" does qualify as copyright infringement. Not saying that Pal World falls under that category.

I get where you're coming from. :smile: It's an interestingly fine line!

For those who don't find a hobby in reading about this stuff (I've read a bit on the topic because I find it interesting to see how genres evolve and what is and isn't allowed to shape them), it's probably worth noting that there's a difference between derivative works and scènes à faire [External Link] - that is, traits and tropes that any given genre is outright expected to have, which are not copyrightable.

This issue first reared its head in the video gaming realm with the 1994 legal case of Capcom U.S.A. Inc. v. Data East Corp. [External Link], in which Capcom took issue with Data East's 1993 title, Fighter's History [External Link], claiming that it infringed on rights established by the genre-defining Street Fighter II. After Capcom lost basically on the basis of it being considered an expected trope that a fighting-game would have certain combat and scenery stereotypes, it allowed fighting-games to bloom into the juggernaut that they were in the 1990s. It's worth noting that, in that case, the design-documents for Fighter's History outright named elements from Street Fighter II that they intended to ape!

EDIT: Obviously, this case extends far beyond fighting-games, though - it warded off the chilling of the development of all genres, at the end of the day.

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Quoting: tuubiThe catching ball mechanic has been copied by plenty of monster catching games before,

This mechanic originated in the 1994 SNES RPG Robotrek [External Link], and Enix (who, as we know, later merged with Square to form Square-Enix) has never taken any action about it that I'm aware of.

Let's be honest, the "keeping a creature in a ball" idea is inspired by gachapon toys, so there's generic prior-art from long before any video game employed the idea. :smile:

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Quoting: melkemindand there are tons of Pokemon lookalikes.

This is a key thing - there are plenty that look very close, but which never attracted any legal attention because it would've been laughed out of court.


I mean, has anyone on GOL ever seen these before? They're from the 1999 Game Boy Colour game, Bomberman Max [External Link], and they didn't attract any legal attention whatsoever. :tongue:


What about Keitai Denjuu Telefang [External Link]? Again, no trouble here, and it even had a manga that looked incredibly similar.


And Robopon [External Link], anyone? :wink:

Some of these fellas are much closer in design than the ones in Palworld - and one of the Robopon ones is literally just Kirby with Pac-Man sitting on his head. :tongue:

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This is really great, because the option names by themselves are not easy for a lot of people to understand, and this should just help make the features more accessible.

And they look to be well-written, too - what a great feature to have. That's something that will help PC-gaming as a whole, in the bigger picture.

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I don't want to bring up Nintendo (I'm an ex-fan and I'm not going back), but I have to: At least this one sounds like it performs better than the recent Pokemon titles! :tongue:

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Will you be picking it up to have a nostalgia blast?

I probably will*, but it probably won't be at launch - I want to wait to hear others' experiences of running it on Linux first.

*If it's saddled with DRM I won't touch it with a ten-foot pole - I'll go the TR1X route in that case. But the Steam page doesn't currently suggest its presence, thankfully.

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Quoting: tuubiThere was no X button on Amiga Workbench windows. :grin: But the dot-in-a-square the manual called "the Closing Gadget" was indeed at the top left.

Yeah, that's the one - thanks. :grin: I never owned one myself, just had friends who did and have done a little bit of emulation, so it wasn't an immediately-clear memory!

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Quoting: slaapliedjeThe proper place for the X button, looking at you, Apple! I've looked up how to flip that to the other side on macOS, and apparently the Almighty Apple has spoken and does not allow such things... All other operating systems I've ever used has it on the right side... but not macOS...

It's been several decades now, so I may be misremembering, but wasn't it on the left on the Amiga, too?

Anyhow, the top-left is clearly the right place for it. :wink:



After all, you don't want Close to be anywhere near to Minimise and Maximise, and it's convenient to have it near to the menu you use to open new things - that's simply good interface-design. :grin:

(Yes yes, I'm being a bit facetious, and I know I'm in the minority preferring to have the X there. :tongue: I'm just glad that Linux desktop environments give us the options we want - Xfce lets me arrange these things however I like, for example, and I seem to recall that KDE also allows that.)

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Quoting: Doktor-MandrakeLook at capcom recently adding in some drm into resident evil revelations, a game over ten years old! I don't feel comfortable with them having too much control over my purchases

And more besides (a few titles I'd picked up were affected too) - I wrote a bit about it over on the forum.

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