Old School Annoyances

[bluenote]

For me, it's the difficulty. Especially NES games. It seems the older I get, the worse I get at games!

[Herschie]

One thing I definitely don't miss are memory cards. What a pain, always having to change them, corrupted data, never enough space.

[Breaker]

One thing I definitely don't miss are memory cards. What a pain, always having to change them, corrupted data, never enough space.

Given how large games are now, IMHO this hasn't gotten any better. Almost every time I try to play a new game on my PS4, I don't have enough memory for it to load and I have to do the "which do I keep, which do I pitch?" shuffle.

Edit: But at least everything is in one place now - I'm not trying to remember which memory card has which game saves on it.

[ThePixelatedGenocide]

What always cracked me up was how in the early days game designers would blatantly rip off and crank out games which were basically identical copies from other games without getting a license and then turn around and try to copy protect there work! Pac-man absolutely has to be the game copied the most for example.
It’s like I can steal from them but don’t you steal what I stole!
It was just laughably hypocritical.

The Pac-Man clones were somewhat limited on console, though. The K.C. Munchkin lawsuit saw to that.

I wish there was a way to compare Pac-Man clones to the amount of Rogue/Knight Lore/Zelda/Final Fight/Street Fighter/Doom/Pokemon/Grand Theft Auto/Dark Souls wanna-bes. Each was cloned so often that they became the default template for a genre.

It's especially shameless when the genre already existed before them.

[DialSforSam]

One thing I definitely don't miss are memory cards. What a pain, always having to change them, corrupted data, never enough space.

Facts. I had to get a separate memory card when I got Madden '99 for Christmas one year, because the game took up either all or all but one spot on it.

[VideoGameCritic]

You can blame EA for that memory card fiasco. Most games only took up one block, out of like 12 slots.
But then EA made saving a "season" in one of their sports games consume the entire card.
Can you believe they would do something like that?

I will say something for the memory cards - they last. It kind of freaks me out when I load up a game from the 1990's and see the initials of an old friend I haven't seen in 20 years.

[pacman000]

What always cracked me up was how in the early days game designers would blatantly rip off and crank out games which were basically identical copies from other games without getting a license and then turn around and try to copy protect there work! Pac-man absolutely has to be the game copied the most for example.
It’s like I can steal from them but don’t you steal what I stole!
It was just laughably hypocritical.

The Pac-Man clones were somewhat limited on console, though. The K.C. Munchkin lawsuit saw to that.

I wish there was a way to compare Pac-Man clones to the amount of Rogue/Knight Lore/Zelda/Final Fight/Street Fighter/Doom/Pokemon/Grand Theft Auto/Dark Souls wanna-bes. Each was cloned so often that they became the default template for a genre.

It's especially shameless when the genre already existed before them.

There were plenty of Pac-Man clones, like "Cat Trax" & "Clean Sweep;" the court noted that gameplay wasn't copyrightable; Magnavox got in trouble because their characters were too close to Pac-Man & the Ghost Monsters.

Here's the court's decision, if you'd like to read it: https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/ap ... 07/331150/

[SpiceWare]

What is the deal with the controllers with the curled-up, telephone kind of cords. I'm mainly talking about the Colecovision and Intellivision controllers. Those things get tangled up in everything. Ugh.

I bought a Yurkie modded Colecovision (video, skip BIOS, etc) that came with decurled controllers. It's nice that they don't get tangled up, but the tradeoff is they don't fit in the storage area very well, as seen in the photo. The controllers also have a knob, which helps a lot with ergonomics.

IMG_2771D (1).jpeg (151.6 KiB) Viewed 402 times

[ThePixelatedGenocide]

Deleted due to accidental repetition.

[ThePixelatedGenocide]

There were plenty of Pac-Man clones, like "Cat Trax" & "Clean Sweep;" the court noted that gameplay wasn't copyrightable; Magnavox got in trouble because their characters were too close to Pac-Man & the Ghost Monsters.

Here's the court's decision, if you'd like to read it: https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/ap ... 07/331150/

It's subtle, but there's more nuance to the decision than you're giving it credit for.

Both games, moreover, express the role reversal and "regeneration" process with such great similarity that an ordinary observer could conclude only that North American copied plaintiffs' PAC-MAN.

They name Rally-X as a great way to create a maze chase game without breaking the rules. "Feel" matters too. According to everything I'm reading, Cat Trax would have been an easy target for Atari. It's got everything called out in that quote, but also including the basic aesthetic and the focus on eating.

There's an abstraction test used to rule against K.C. Munchkin that it completely fails.

As for Clean Sweep, it's taking that decision very literally. It's a blatant Pac-Man clone, but the regeneration process involves the enemies returning from off screen. There's no "gobbler", and the vacuum needs to unload the money it sucks up. I'd need to play it, to know whether or not "becoming supercharged" plays into those mechanics, because it seems fairly 1:1 with Pac-Man otherwise. Still, it's incredibly fitting that they're using vectors. More on that in a moment.

First, we need to acknowledge Vectrex was a commercial failure; even Bandai couldn't save it. And the same was true of the creative geniuses behind Cat Trax. Neither of these games were a threat to Atari's control of the market, and the crash was about to give them bigger issues to worry about.

Now, about those vectors...

I have no idea how Atari decided they had a case against K.C. Munchkin, which they only won on appeal. Or how they got Imagic to settle out of court over Demon Attack, which looks nothing like the characters of Phoenix Attack and also has some minor gameplay changes.

Because they lost a similar case, the year before. And that was a better case.

Essentially, Meteors was a blatant Asteroids clone with raster graphics, and the court ruled that this plus rapid fire and a speed increase counted as being totally different.

The only thing going in Atari's favor going forward was that the judge specifically ruled that this was due to the limits of the medium, which requires one to be ignorant of how gameplay mechanics work, and everything about actual asteroid belts...Meteors was basically a reskin and a difficulty hack. The KC Munchkin decision references the ruling, but thankfully reads it as literally as possible in order to thread the needle.

The ruling in Atari's favor both defends representation, and creative works.

In the end, I have a lot more respect for the KC decision after doing all this research. Because wow, Atari, Inc. v. Ken Williams dba Online-Systems got it wrong. It claims that only the sprites matter, and that was likely due to Gobbler being pulled from store shelves in favor of Jawbreaker - it really shows off how misunderstood videogames were.

The decision against KC Munchkin changed all that, at least for a little while. It proves that maze games and "Pac-Man" clones are not the same thing. Thank you for linking it, as it explains why console Pac-Man clones are nowhere near as common as "Boomer shooters" aka Doom clones.

A shame that it was bulldozed over in Capcom vs. Data East.

At least until Tetris Holding, LLC v. Xio Interactive, Inc, brought it back with a vengeance. Because the court could have ruled purely on the visuals being near identical. In fact, they mention that fact themselves. But they went way beyond, and made sure that Dr. Mario cleared up any confusion on the matter. And their notes on Lotus Development Corp. v. Borland Intern., Inc, made it clear that courts were going to be more skeptical about "this was the only way we could do it" aka "merger" going forward.

And just in case anyone was still tempted to read that decision as narrowly as possible, the judge in Spry Fox, LLC v. Lolapps was making it clear that this wasn't going to go the way the defendant had hoped.

I'm not sure where this leaves copyright law currently...but it might have something to do with AAA developers rediscovering the value of surface creativity, even when they keep it to the bare minimum.

https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/di ... 2/1478917/

https://itlaw.fandom.com/wiki/Atari_v._Williams

https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case ... 0025243346

https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case ... t=80000006

https://digitalcommons.law.scu.edu/cgi/ ... historical