Even sadder is that there are no popular EU streamers throwing their weight behind the initiative. What are they waiting for? Does PewDiePie still stream games?
PewDiePie moved to Japan and while I have no idea what he’s uploaded (or not uploaded) I get the sense he’s basically retired. He’s doing surfing, rock climbing, art, I don’t know that he cares enough anymore to support it.
I have a steam controller that is brand new in the box. Valve liquidated them like 10 years ago. I bought a bunch of themfor only five dollars apiece. I have absolutely no use for them and they are taking up space. If anybody is interested, they can contactme and I will send it to them. I would rather see somebody enjoy it.
You should give it a try, it is some of the weirdest and coolest tech in controllers. It’s the only one I use for gaming, dropped every other for it. The gyro aiming thing is such a weird yet natural concept it’s just funny nobody thought of it before them. Lots of settings to go through before it works well for a specific game. I set it up for CSGO and was able to play at like 80% of my usual skill (LEM at the time), with spray control being amazing on it compared to mouse. Honestly, if I had it when I was learning to play FPS when I was young, I’d probably be better on it than kb+m
Still, being able to argue they’re not for profit is what typically has protected emulators from being sued to oblivion (and with Nintendo, even that’s risky)…
Has being non-profit been a legal defense used somewhere before? At least in the US the case law is based on commercial, profit-driven emulators being explicitly ruled as legal when Sony tried suing them. I see this said constantly and I think it’s genuinely just the result of propaganda from Nintendo or something.
Nintendo was able to sue palworld using a patent that didn’t exist before palworlds release. It’s not right, but they can do whatever they want regardless of what the law says.
People say this, but I believe it is mostly technically untrue. It’d be a relatively easy argument to say that a downloaded ROM that isn’t exactly the digital copy YOU purchased with a license would be seen as not legal.
However some people talk about literally ripping the game off the physical device themselves, hence copying their own copy of it. Now you are in grey territory of making copies of copyrighted materials, and in the case of more modern games like the last decade, they almost assuredly have language that specifies you don’t actually own the code and all that.
All I’m saying is be careful and probably refrain from repeating the fallacy that owning a game makes emulation of it legal, because that implies having the ROM is legal and that’s doubtful.
Copying your own game and materials for backup purposes is no grey area, and neither is development or use of emulators, and panicky, uninformed spewing of gut feelings are how public knowledge of your actual rights gets muddled into people with zero knowledge waxing poetic about how they THINK it works because they like games and think that makes their ramblings valuable.
/edit: I was WRONG. This is my memory failing me. I explain it further below, and apologize for wasting any time.
After the DMCA passed there was a case of a judge finding it legal to bypass DRM to make backup copies, but illegal to distribute the software used to do so. I have no idea if there was ever further clarification or new law about this. That was like 20 years ago. It was part of a case going after the company who was making the software, but the name slips my mind. I’ll try to look it up if anyone cares enough and wants to look for something more than hearsay on a forum.
I get you! I was bigger into copyright some 20-30 years ago myself when we would’ve all been on Slashdot.
To that end, I was WRONG in my post, I think I was conflating two things, and for that, I’m sorry. I was certainly thinking in part about Universal City Studios, Inc. v. Corley (2001). That was the case that decided that the software DeCSS was illegal, and you could distribute the software. I was thinking that while the court did agree with Universal over the software, that it did not find that breaking DRM on a product you owned was inherently illegal. (I legit think this was a “take” at the time. Probably wouldn’t hold up in court these days, sadly.) And I did find that years later the Library of Congress offered exemptions for breaking DRM on some hardware (vehicles, medical devices,) but I believe even those were temporary and have since lapsed.
Sorry I spoke so surely about something I was wrong about.
Not to be a stickler, but this does not say making copies is illegal - it makes circumvention of drm methods illegal. You can make drm’d copies as you like as long as you don’t circumvent the drm method. If your game isn’t encrypted, and the emulator doesn’t implement the drm, you haven’t circumvented drm - you are playing your legal copy on a device that does not implement the drm. It’s distinct from removing the drm from a device that implements it.
I do get that most consoles encrypt their software these days, but let’s be clear - it’s not as simple as “DRM means you have no rights.”
I don’t agree with any of that noise around the DMCA for the record. I feel like we effectively lost our right to archival copies.
On a PC, what you said about copying the DRM along with the data is largely true. It is possible sometimes to copy the DRM and reproduce the image with the DRM intact. It also might not be depending upon the copy protection mechanism. Commercial video DVDs used to employ tricks with the storage sector that made it almost impossible to properly copy by a standard computer disc drive. You could get around this with additional program like AnyDVD, but that was only available for sale outside the USA because of the fact that it allowed you to bypass DRM.
And like you said, the content can be encrypted. Decrypting it is, IIRC, considered bypassing DRM - at least in the USA.
Again, I don’t agree that this is how things should be, but the legality of emulation is complicated depending upon what we’re talking about emulating.
I also don’t like how things are legally speaking with DMCA, but the main takeaway is - the creation and distribution of an emulator, without DRM protections, is unequivocally protected and legal. ROM backup is certainly in most cases not, but if you are making your own copies for your own use, even while illegally breaking encryption, it would be difficult to prove and prosecute on an individual basis.
The right we must continually remind people is NOT even REMOTELY in question is the right to create and distribute emulators. This is by far the more important one, because people cannot reasonably develop their own emulators - it requires an open, collaborative community to ensure future preservation, and it’s a constant battle to keep people from actively trying to cede this right because they have nebulous loyalties to soulless companies that return no such feelings.
The emulation itself is legal, assuming you’re not using any copyrighted code, BIOS, etc. to make work.
The backup copy of your game that you need can be made legally as well, but in the USA, if the source contains a form of DRM, then you cannot legally make a copy.
Each game needs to have a custom profile created to render in 3D. From the linked article:
3dSen is an emulator that lets you play 2D NES games in 3D. Its programmers have to create a custom profile for it to work its magic on each game, which means there are currently 100 supported games, including Contra, Super Mario Bros, Batman, Castlevania, Bubble Bobble, and Gradius.
Hopefully Valve will decide to release their Ibex soon. I do like that this is a split controller, but the ergonomics don’t look great compared to the leaked Ibex image.
They actually did a lot of rebalancing of difficulty and P Organ (hee hee) progression alongside this. Mortismal touched on this in their video.
But Lies of P, at its core, is a game about parrying. You can get a long way with dodging and i-frames (I didn’t do a deep dive on how good of a dodge P has but it is definitely on the lower end of the genre) but basically the last three or four bosses of the core game more or less require parries and guard breaks to have any chance of damaging them.
I loved Lies of P but the difficulty progression is REAL bad. Sekiro actually had similar issues but at least had Genichiro 2 to try and force you to learn (and then Ape to drill that in). Whereas Lies of P lets you play “wrong” for like 16 hours.
I think Team Ninja screwed the pooch on other aspects of it (basically every single enemy does nothing but delayed attacks…) but I still think Rise of the Ronin set the bar for what a parry should be in the 2020s: Triggerable from block so you have minimal penalty to mistiming it for all but the perilous attacks. And Clair Obscura is similarly awesome for tightly coupling the parry and dodge timings so you can learn a fight with perfect dodging before switching to perfect parries for maximum punishment.
If whiffing a parry means I lose half my health bar (cough Dark Souls cough) I am never going to use it. If whiffing a parry means I take chip damage or if I can practice my timing with a safe defensive mood? I’ll be grinning like a beast as I clown on the heroes/“heroes” of the Bakumatsu.
But yeah. I REALLY enjoyed Lies of P even if I think the last 3 or so bosses are… kind of genuinely bad (two puzzle bosses in a row is also a real bad feeling). Still need to get around to the DLC but I am INCREDIBLY interested in what the next major game from that studio is. But I wouldn’t encourage anyone who doesn’t vibe with LoP to try again (well… maybe with the new rebalance patch?).
Yeah I’d be a bit shocked if you could dodge your way through the final boss of the DLC. There are some attacks I think need to be dodged, but they feel like the exception, not the rule.
Like I said, the DLC is still on my todo list but assuming it follows the Bloodborne DLC difficulty (it sure as hell is following the Bloodborne DLC concept and narrative…)? Yeah, I would be amazed.
But I did watch a video of someone dodging to beat the real end boss of the core game which I similarly thought was nigh impossible. And it is incredibly brutal with basically a need for fairly perfect play just to do chip damage. So… sickos gonna sicko.
Agreed. Amazing game, but it’s because most of it is excellent so the jank is easy to ignore, rather than the whole thing being polished.
I think they made the parry-heavy emphasis of the game even more difficult to ‘read’ by having all the early enemies be very twitchy robots with difficult-to-anticipate parry timings. It becomes much easier to get the timing right once the enemies become more ‘organic’ a bit later. That’s also the point where you have some better gear and some level ups, so it’s not quite so brutal.
Giving the early enemies slow, smooth attacks with big swings would make sense for robots, sort out the difficulty curve, and give you plenty of chance to get used to parries. They can reasonably require a lot of damage so ripostes would be the only way to effectively defeat them - health which you could reasonably remove from a lot of the late-game enemies who are stupidly robust.
Never felt like P actually has iframes on his dodge? It’s serviceable enough when the important thing is to move away from where an attack is going to land, but it’s certainly not a Dark Souls-style ‘dodge through the attack’. It’s not Sekiro’s ‘running away to tease out an attack you can punish’ either, he’s a very slow dude in comparison.
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