Month: August 2018

The past few weeks have been pretty bad for fans of the retro gaming scene. Following action by Nintendo, two ROM platforms shut down in response to a lawsuit and another, EmuParadise, voluntarily stopped providing game downloads.

While these events have probably resulted in congratulations being shared among colleagues back in Kyoto, few gamers will join in the celebrations. Quite simply, most don’t understand why the company chooses to be so aggressively protective.

For the purposes of this discussion, let’s work on the assumption that distributing and obtaining ROMs in order to play retro games is the same as any other kind of piracy. It breaches the rights of gaming companies and can result in a copyright lawsuit, like the one leveled at LoveROMS.com and LoveRETRO.co.

Now let’s view this from the position of the average retro gamer. Obtaining ROMs, in order to play retro games, does no harm. The titles themselves are often decades old, run on obsolete hardware, and have already covered their costs a thousand times over.

With all that in mind and considering many gamers are currently buying new games, they’ll be wondering what the hell the problem is and why gaming companies are being such assholes?

It is this disconnect, between the positions of gaming companies and fans of their historical creations, that causes so much confusion. Surely, if gaming companies like Nintendo or former arcade giants like Taito or Namco want to exploit their catalogs, they would already be doing so with comprehensive game packs and devices?

Of course, over the years this has happened to a limited extent, with games companies digging into back catalogs to create products like the NES Classic and Atari Flashback, but these barely scratch the surface of what is already available unofficially.

It cannot be denied that Nintendo has produced some of the greatest games of all time, with titles such as Super Mario 64 guaranteed a spot in history for being both ground-breaking and absolutely magical. But despite its incredible ability to manipulate players’ emotions in ways other developers never have, Nintendo seems to underestimate the emotions experienced by retro gamers every time they play.

This week, when EmuParadise ceased offering downloads, site founder MasJ revealed some of the touching stories emulator fans have shared over the years.

“We’ve had emails from soldiers at war saying that the only way they got through their days was to be lost in the retro games that they played from when they were children,” he wrote.

“We’ve got emails from brothers who have lost their siblings to cancer and were able to find solace in playing the games they once did as children. There are countless stories like these.”

As these examples show, classic games from many years ago have the ability to trigger waves of nostalgia that can be beautifully overwhelming. From associating a particular title with a specific time and place in personal history to stirring memories of long-since disappeared yet cherished friendships, the emotions are like nothing else in the gaming world.

“When we experience nostalgia we tend to feel happier, have higher self-esteem, feel closer to loved ones and feel that life has more meaning. And on a physical level, nostalgia literally makes us feel warmer,” explained psychology lecturer Erica Hepper, Ph.D. in a 2013 interview.

One has to understand the power of this emotional attachment to appreciate why retro gamers are so passionate about their pastime. Retro games provide a fix that no modern game – despite their technical brilliance – will be able to provide for another 10 or 20 years, until they too become old and soaked with distant memories.

Retro games are able to transport players back in time, from stolen moments in high school to the arcades that first exposed many of us to video games themselves. From the moment they view the intoxicating attract mode on the brilliant Hyperspin, they’re transported back. And when that first coin hits the virtual slot of any number of emulators, nirvana has truly arrived.

It is this shared appreciation of the beauty of retro gaming that holds communities like the one found at EmuParadise together. While the site no longer offers ROMs, its members have entire libraries of games at their disposal and nothing short of Nintendo physically turning up at their homes will stop them from enjoying them.

“People absolutely love and adore these games. They are a part of their personality, their childhood, their culture,” MasJ told TF. “These tiles are also a part of our shared human history. People will find a way to get their game on.”

More importantly, perhaps, those players will also share their ROMs with whomever they like which, according to experts, seems more likely when nostalgia is involved.

“In strongly nostalgic states, individuals are shown to be more likely to commit to volunteering or other expressions of altruism,” a 2014 piece in the Guardian notes.

“In group situations, those with induced nostalgia not only tend to feel more closely bonded with the group but also more willing to form intimate associations with strangers and to be freer in their thinking.”

This sounds like the perfect breeding ground for ROM sharing but it’s just a small taste of what drives communities like EmuParadise. It’s also important to note that the mindset behind ROM ‘piracy’ is unlike that commonly associated with movies, TV shows or music.

While the latter are largely available to potential purchasers, most ROMs only exist in unofficial form. There is no way of paying games companies for the pleasure of playing most of them since they’re simply not for sale and especially not in the required all-you-can-eat format.

“Unfortunately the video game industry is quite fragmented so unless the big publishers get on board, a Netflix-style system is nigh impossible,” MasJ says.

“However, the industry and the technology at this point in time is mature enough and consumers are also primed to pay for something of this sort. The only thing left to do is build it. I’m pretty sure either Nintendo, or Sega, or anyone else would be successful if they tried to do it.”

This glaring lack of legal alternatives means that most ‘black market’ retro gamers don’t think they’re committing a crime, which is a huge stumbling block for enforcement. When there is no respect or support for the law, people have few qualms about breaking it. Indeed, due to the massive time invested in retro gamers’ ROM collections, prising ROMs from players’ cold, dead hands might be the only forceful solution to this problem.

So with three major sites now out of the ROM equation and no sensible legal options available, is it now ‘Game Over’ for retro gamers? Will they walk away defeated or will more resources appear to fill in the gaps?

“I don’t think ROMs will be harder to find,” MasJ predicts.

“Perhaps it’ll take a while for another reliable resource to come up and become popular but the bottom line is that people want to play these games. So if you don’t offer than any legal way to do it, they’ll figure out another way.”

Unfortunately for companies like Nintendo, retro gamers have grown accustomed to everlasting credits and it won’t be long before the familiar yet depressing minor key tones associated with character death transform into the chirpy and optimistic tones heralding “Ready Player One”.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons.

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Enlarge / Who's a hungry frog? (credit: Gnog)

Gnog doesn’t ask much of its players. The pastel puzzler is easy on the eyes and easy on the pocketbook. It doesn’t last long, either. You can knock the whole thing out in a couple of hours or less. Its puzzles consistently capture the satisfaction of fitting a square peg in a square hole without much challenge to speak of. It is, put simply, one hell of a chill time.

Put less simply, Gnog a game about manipulating 3D puzzle boxes in the form of cartoonish floating heads. Each diorama tells a pseudo-story and ends with the constantly changing “face” crooning a little ditty. I found it hard not to bob my head alongside the colorful creatures. That’s especially true when playing in virtual reality. Those faces feel present in VR in a way that 2D screen representations can’t match.

Every head is carved from soft-edged, chalk-bright colors. It’s a friendly, welcoming sort of surrealism that only gets more charming as you peel away each layer. If a tiny being inside a head is sad, odds are your puzzle solving will make them happy. If background music is discordant or an object is out of place, you’ll probably set things right by winning. And the happy little songs at the end of each stage feel like precisely the kind of small, pleasant reward each small, pleasant level should end on.

Just the right touch

That general pleasantness also applies to the manipulation of knobs, dials, switches, buttons, and various other devices that fill out each puzzle. Anyone familiar with The Room games or Amanita Design’s output (like Machinarium and Botanicula) will recognize the objective. You’re presented with things to fiddle with, so you fiddle, constantly, until the guess-and-check methodology makes the correct order of fiddling clear.

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Enlarge / Riverfront Ave. in Calgary during the Alberta floods 2013. (credit: Ryan L. C. Quan / Wikimedia)

In June 2013, Keith Musselman was living in the Canadian Rockies when the nearby Bow River flooded. “We were in a valley, so we were stuck for about five days,” Musselman told Ars. “The community was devastated.”

The flood was one of the costliest and most devastating natural disasters in Canada’s history, with five people killed, more than 100,000 evacuated, and extreme property damage. Heavy rainfall falling on late snow in the mountains had overwhelmed rivers and reservoirs, and Musselman, a hydrologist, realized that this kind of rain-on-snow flooding wasn’t properly understood.

“Forecasters have a good handle on what happens when rain falls,” he says. “But when that rain falls in mountains where there’s deep snow, we don’t have a good handle on what the flood volume will be.”

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Access to the Internet is considered a basic need in many modern countries. Ideally, this should come without any content restrictions.

With all the fuss about net neutrality in recent years, most Internet providers have stayed clear from any interference.

In Belarus, however, local ISP Velcom is crossing a sensitive line.

The company informed its customers that its summer promotion, which provided subscribers on some plans with “unlimited” Internet access, is being limited.

Those who exceeded their regular cap have been able to access the Internet without any restrictions until now, but starting tomorrow BitTorrent traffic will no longer be allowed.

“From 13.08.2018, the possibility of data transfers using the bittorrent protocol is excluded for subscribers of the Comfort and Comfort + plans, when using the Unlimited Internet package,” the company writes in its terms of service.

The restriction was publicly announced by the ISP but no reason for this change was provided. The company does stress, however, that the BitTorrent blockade only applies when the regular limits of the plan are exceeded.

The special “unlimited” promotion only runs this summer and will end in September, so it’s effectively a temporary measure.

Given the fact that the ISP changed the rules during the promotion suggests that many torrenters were using it to their advantage. Perhaps to a degree that it was causing more overhead than the ISP hoped for.

Velcom does not provide any details on how BitTorrent traffic will be detected. However, it’s probably safe to assume that tech-savvy subscribers can still use a VPN or other tools to remain undetected, to get truly ‘unlimited’ Internet access.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons.