Castle Magus

Pick your poison as far as articles about it.

PC Gamer: "Sega is delisting a huge number of its greatest classic games on Steam, probably so it can sell you a new collection"

Gamesradar+: "Out of nowhere after 14 years, Sega's killing off one of the only sources of legal ROMs on the entire internet as it delists 60 classic games"

TheVerge: "A whole bunch of Sega classics are being delisted"

Probably a lot of other places in addition to the above where one could read about this, but those are the three I immediately saw via Google News App today.

As for me, I fall into the category of already having most of them and not caring that much about the ones I don't, but I still think it sucks, just on general principle, that Sega is doing this. Oh well, it's not like the games are forever lost, in most cases, thanks to unofficial/unsanctioned emulation. *shrug*

"Nintendo is speedrunning the Disney playbook. We all know where that goes."

If, by "is speedrunning," one means "has been, for the past 20-30 years or so, slowly following," then sure. As is pointed out in several of the comments under the article, and which is pretty clear to anyone who has been paying the least bit of attention over the past three decades or so, Nintendo's aggressively litigious nature is nothing new.

As far as "passion projects" or "fan games" that specifically use Mario or Link or Samus or Kirby or any Pokemon or whatever go, well... Yeah, if you've got a Youtube channel or Twitter account (or whatever the kids are using these days after Twitter died and became 卐 I mean X) and you're actively publicizing your thing, or, worse, you've got a publicly available Kickstarter or Patreon or SubscribeStar page or something, directly making money off of the thing (not that not making money off the thing will save you), then that's just begging to get C&D'd at best or outright sued at worst, and I can't truthfully say I have any sympathy for you in that case, either. If I have heard about your thing (and, more likely these days, even if I haven't heard about your thing), then you can be damn sure Nintendo has heard about your thing, too, and their lawyer-ninjas are probably sharpening their swords and donning the black pajamas already.

And I'm just like whatever. If Nintendo wants to continue to chip away at and tarnish their own reputation with this shit, that's entirely their prerogative. They obviously don't care about that, or they wouldn't be doing the shit in the first place. In the vast majority of these cases, what they're doing is not "protecting" anything. The only effect it's having is to make people hate Nintendo more and more. And Nintendo seems to be fine with that. Go figure.

As for me, personally, I haven't (legitimately) played a Nintendo game in over 10 years now, and I doubt that'll be changing any time soon, though that's less an issue with Nintendo and its excessive lawsuits, in particular, and more just that I haven't been much interested in any consoles lately, Nintendo or otherwise. That said, if I ever did get back into consoles again, I'd probably start with the Switch/Switch 2, if only to be able to play the Zelda and Metroid games that have come out on those, none of which I've touched yet (legitimately or otherwise). I'm in no great hurry to do so, though.

Saw this on my Steam discovery queue for today and immediately put it on my wishlist.

Scrolled down a bit and saw "This game requires a controller in order to play. Playing with a keyboard and mouse isn't supported."

Immediately removed it from my wishlist.

Even beyond that, the reviews and forum posts indicate that it's a pretty shitty port in other ways, too.

If I ever want to play these again some day, I'll just stick with emulators (which do support KB+M, by the way).

"The fan emulation scene has not only lead to countless innovations over the years, it's directly benefited Nintendo."

In other words, asinine Nintendo is asinine. Look, yes, it's their IP and they can be as anal-retentive about that as they want, but they really need to get entirely off of their holier-than-thou moral high horse on this. Emulation is not the eldritch evil that Nintendo is trying to make it out to be. Never has been, never will be. Nintendo sure didn't hate emulation when they were selling all those old NES/SNES/Sega/arcade/etc. games on the Wii, after all.

And regarding the mention of the fan translation of Mother 3 in the article... well, emulation does what Nintendon't.

(For once, the comments under the article are generally supportive. There are a few Nintendo fanboys/rep management drones/"That One Guy"s down there, but those fuckheads are thankfully in the minority, at least in this particular case.)

"With the release of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild for the Nintendo Switch and Wii U, Region Locked takes a look at another Nintendo game by one of Zelda's key developers, Eiji Aonuma, titled Marvelous: Another Treasure Island. Through our analysis of Marvelous' gameplay and its history, we hope to shed some light on why this game never left Japanese shores."

(Video upload date: March 19, 2017)

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I was going through some more DidYouKnowGaming? videos[1] tonight, and I came across the above video about this game, which I'd never heard of before. Found a rom with fan translation of it and, finally, got it working on SNES9x. I normally use ZSNES for this kind of thing, but this game apparently doesn't work properly on ZSNES.

Unfortunately, I don't have time to really get into it right now, as I have to get up tomorrow at an ungodly early hour (for me, anyway), but maybe I'll give it a try later.

[1] - Which I've been sloooowly doing, off and on, for the past few years now, from least to most recent, and so far I've made it up to the 3 year old videos, which were probably the current, most recently uploaded videos when I started this. >_> In any case, they're all fairly interesting videos, mostly lore, behind the scenes stuff, Easter eggs, looks at games that were never released outside Japan (such as the above) or were never released at all, that sort of thing.

When I get up in the morning, I will be breaking out the Super Nintendo and starting on something like the 10th to 15th or so playthrough of EarthBound (aka Mother 2).

Mother 3 fan translation is complete.

Man, I only made it up to Threed in EarthBound. Oh well. I guess I could hold out and finish EarthBound first, but.... nah.

*notes the time and sighs* Whatever.

Anyway, I just finished Terranigma a few minutes ago. Of the three games in the loosely-tied SNES trilogy (the other two being Soul Blazer and Illusion of Gaia, which I also played through over the course of the past few weeks), I'd have to say that Terranigma was the best of them by far, though all three of them were pretty cool.