Ugh, man I fucking hate time-limited and format-limited music licensing. There’s basically no way to watch proper Daria in 2018 unless you wanna subject yourself to grainy .avi rips of old VHS tapes or the cobbled-together soundtrack overlays fans have (to the best of their abilities) assembled.
My favorite reality competition show ever (actually the only one I like) The Sing Off has basically been whisked out of existence by NBC (they don’t even maintain the old site on NBC.com just a few years after the last season aired) because of music licensing issues; you also can’t buy the series digitally anywhere (and it was never available on DVD), so again, piracy’s your best bet. Though at least with that, the last few seasons are available in HD from. . . sources.
And then yeah, classics like Tony Hawk… and the like are basically trapped in eternal limbo here because Atlantic Records couldn’t stand to let two early 00s Goldfinger tracks no one has thought about or listened to outside the context of a skateboarding videogame in a decade be re-licensed for a reasonable cost (laziness reveal: I have no idea what record label Goldfinger is on or whether or not they’re one of the tracks causing issues, I just wanted to make fun of Goldfinger).
It’s really frustrating that either people don’t think about future-proofing their work or the music industry isn’t willing to do sensible indefinite-but-specific licensing deals for that one context or both. (Or I know for TV, sometimes consider a DVD release or whatever to be separate from airing it.)
I’m frankly amazed that there isn’t a perfect fan-edited replacement soundtrack for Daria (assuming there’s any source material at all for every episode). Maybe the fandom isn’t that large though.
And let’s face it; people who make videogames aren’t seers of the future, just like those who make TV shows. And lawyers generally try to avoid setting precedent that may make for a bad deal.
Thus, making a deal that completely accomodates in perpetuity changes in distribution format, additional SKUs and repackages, etc. is simply not possible. It sucks, yeah, but it’s really never anyone’s “fault”.
I beg to disagree with the latter on account of the former ;-)
More seriously, I kinda suspect a lot of bands–especially, say, mid-tier-at-best-ska-acts–would be totally cool with a licensing deal to a videogame they think is neat in perpetuity. Their labels would prefer to leave open the doors for extra profits every 6 months or whatever, though, which, really, is kind of even less realistic, cuz they know better than anyone how ephemeral and short-lived most of their artist stable’s careers are gonna be. . .
TBH the fan edits aren’t actually terrible, but IIRC there are numerous places where music overlays dialogue and/or other kinds of foreground sound where full replacement is difficult.
Heh; lawyers have employers. Those employers aren’t going to let them set a bad deal that could bite them in the ass later. And this isn’t just about money, either - there are rights issues to be considered, as rights can revert after time, be limited in scope due to regional distribution deals, etc. In other words - the licensing can be gnarly, complicated, and known to have limitations based on external factors or the potential for ownership to change, so anyone who tried to do a deal like that may be dealing from a position of bad faith.
TBH the only GTA I ever really enjoyed playing was one of the old 2D ones at a friend’s house. The move to 3D just sorta killed my interest in the concept.
Have to say, I was leery of revisiting old Nintendo 64 and PSX 3-D games, but modern emulators can run the polys in high-res 720p or higher, and they look great and suddenly become very playable. Bilinear filtering and such can take the bite out of the pixels in low res textures, similar to what the Voodoo cards did to PC games. Mario Tennis is still a frickin’ fun game, and even more so when the characters are not a blur. Hopefully they’ll work that tech into this box.
I think all the cartoony games will still hold up, seeing as their textures allow for your brain to accept simplification… it is the more realistic games that will suffer, given the lack of detail. Too bad they didn’t get more 2D(+.5) shooter/sidescrollers in there, like Klonoa, In The Hunt, R-Type, Silhouette Mirage, etc.
Press Event recently allow hands-on with the system
Sounds like emulation might be good, but the features are not particularly deep. One of the great things about the SNES classic and NES classic are how slick the software looked/worked with multiple save state slots, rewind etc.
Rewind support is much hard to do on PS1 compared to 8 and 16 bit consoles. Not a surprise they didn’t include that given the target price.
My new pet theory is they will sell DualShock bundles in the future where additional games are actually built into the controllers using USB mass storage.
What? The Classic connects to the TV via HDMI. The controllers are wired and use standard USB to connect to the Classic. Latency could be an issue in some games, but mostly that will be a reflection of the display in use compared to playing on a CRT.
