They were saying on NPR last month that Spotify initially didn’t know how to contact the rights owner to a ton of music, because it was so obscure, and no one was clear on who owned the rights anymore. So what they did was just put it on the service. And what that did was to bring people out of the woodworks, suing Spotify for putting the music they should have been paid for on the service, and that was great for Spotify because now suddenly they had someone to negotiate with, whereas before no one could even figure out who to contact. For some of these older games I feel like someone needs to do something similar. Put something out there, then see who sues.
That’s a terrible idea. Maybe for Spotify, sure, since they’re huge and have a ton of leverage. For what you’re talking about, unless the entity putting something out there is huge, lawsuits suck butts.
Sure, but Spotify has a flotilla of lawyers who are sitting around waiting to use those law degrees, which Tim Cain does not.
This is a non-video game video, but I’m going to post it anyway since there’s tabletop RPG & board game activity on the forums. Jubensha is a bit “murder mystery dinner party” meets parlor LARP. Small nitpick: Quinns talks all about this being a huge cultural hit in China, but then he goes to Singapore for an English-accessible experience without mentioning that this is a different country.
A deep dive into probably* the best cosmological horror/survival game ever made? Yum. By Power Pak; you probably saw his previous MyHouse.WAD video so you’ll know what to expect.
Maybe he’ll do Void Stranger next. Mwuh haha.
* Definitely. Definitively.
Without me seeing Power Pak’s video, I nonetheless greatly recommend playing the game before watching anything about it. It’s not a long game, and meeting it fresh without exposure to any visuals or ideas elevates the game’s impact. That’s how I experienced Signalis, and it was glorious.
If you need a push to start playing, then I hope the video will help you get there.
Gamespot and Royal Amouries with another great video. This time it’s the thorny issue of how guns are represented in games with attention to copyright, trademarks, and “trade dress” issues.
Latest NoClip:
I don’t think this YouTube channel has been shared here, but sorry if it has. You know that photography technique called tilt shift? That’s the thing that makes pictures or videos of faraway subjects look like they are little toys. This video maker has been doing that with videogames. The short videos especially work well with sprawling and detailed open world games. They look like impossibly cunning little train sets, vignettes into tiny worlds.
I’m not sure if minimme has been mentioned here before, but I love his retrospectives on b-games, movie-tie-ins, and bizarre licensed games. Did you guys know there was a baffling but ambitious Queen adventure game or a weird Japan-only PS1 adaptation of the Tempest?
I knew about that one. Been trying to buy a complete copy for PC, but so far too expensive.
The Peniment video is quite good!
As is this documentary about the creation of the first two iterations of The Oregon Trail. The first part goes all the way back to 1971, and the creation of the mainframe version.
(If you want to make a millennial geek’s head explode, tell them that you played Oregon Trail twenty years before they did - I played it on my school system’s mainframe back c. 1978. Most of the people who played the CD-ROM version in the 90s have no idea the 80s version exists, let alone the mainframe version.)
I had always known the first version was made for the Minneapolis school system, but never knew it was created by grads of my own alma mater. Go Carleton Knights! (I would say, if Carleton alums ever talked about their sports teams, which we don’t.)
I think the first version I played was on the Apple II.
I didn’t even know this existed.
NoClip has posted an update on their work to preserve the hundreds of tapes they rescued from landfill. There is some cool stuff on there…
The footage they have digitised can be found here:
Internet Archive: Digital Library of Free & Borrowable Books, Movies, Music & Wayback Machine. (raw footage rather than YouTube encode, but lagging behind)
https://youtube.com/@NoclipArchive (YouTube uploads)
The video above is an overview of what you’ll find there.
Some wiz has created a way to basically turn any N64 game into a native PC port.
