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Category: Game Philosophy

Region Locking Is Ancient And Obsolete; Nintendo Needs To Get Rid Of It

Published July 3, 2013 by E. Zachary Knight

End Region Locking; Nintendo Region Free

This isn’t my first rant about Nintendo region locking its consoles. It probably won’t be the last, unless Nintendo does what its fans want and get’s rid of them. My first rant was less about the region locks, but more about Nintendo’s indifference to its fans who want to play games released in regions other than their own. My second was in direct response to the news that the Wii U would be region locked. Finally, I wrote up my thoughts about this whole fiasco after the news was released that Sony and Microsoft would not region lock their new consoles. There is a disturbing trend in all this.

After the success of getting Sony and Microsoft to back down from DRM on used games, game fans have turned their sites on Nintendo and the last major anti-consumer issue facing them at this time, region locks on the Wii U and 3DS. The image above comes from this effort found on a Neogaf thread calling for fan action in demanding a region free update.

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Vlambeer May Like Competing With Clones After All

Published June 28, 2013 by E. Zachary Knight

Ridiculous Fishing

It was only a couple of months ago that I wrote about a Twitter exchange I had with Vlambeer developer Rami Ismail over its gripes about game cloning. The story at that time was that Vlambeer’s latest game Luftrausers was being cloned by some other developer. This event followed a previous one in which its game Radical Fishing was cloned and released to the iPhone App store. In that exchange, Rami came across as preferring to somehow block clones from the market rather than compete with them. That opinion may have changed though.

A Digital Spy report shows that despite the inability to be first to market with Ridiculous Fishing on the iOS, that game went on to be a phenomenal success despite the clone, Ninja Fishing, having had a months long head start. What was it that allowed this late comer to the iOS market to beat out the competition? Exactly what I said was the key. Making a better game.

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Kingdom Hearts HD 1.5 Remix Highlights The Challenges Of Game Preservation

Published June 28, 2013 by E. Zachary Knight

Kingdom Hearts

Kingdom Hearts is a great game series, one that I have enjoyed from the beginning. While I have not been able to play every game in the series, it still remains one of my favorites overall. I feel that it is a series that exemplifies the games industry at its best. It has a compelling story, accessible game mechanics, beautiful art direction, and the game is a whole lot of fun to play. This is definitely the type of game that should be preserved for future generations. However, its preservation is not so easy.

IGN reports that in making the Kingdom Hearts HD 1.5 Remix, SquareEnix had to recreate all the assets from scratch. Why? Because they lost all the master files for the original game. Title Director Tetsuya Nomura stated in a recent video:

Kingdom Hearts 1 was created a long, long time ago, so actually the original data was missing already. It was lost, so we had to research, and we had to dig out from the actual game what was available and recreate everything for HD. We had to recreate all the graphics and it was actually not that easy.

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Why Microsoft Was Not Ready To Join The Digital Future

Published June 20, 2013 by E. Zachary Knight

The Digital Future Is NowWith all the talk about Microsoft, I had been thinking about the digital future of gaming and specifically Microsoft’s place in it. I made a quip back during E3 that I couldn’t figure out if Microsoft was taking a bold step into the digital future, or if they were just plain bonkers. However you may view their move, the truth is that they were moving into the inevitable future. Think about it. What has happened to music over the last 10 years? What about movies and books? Even games. They are all going digital. That is the future. That is the present.

But, you may ask, if digital is the future, why is what Microsoft did such a bad thing? I will explain that here in detail.

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The Debate Over Used Games Continues With Cliffy B and Miyamoto

Published June 14, 2013 by E. Zachary Knight

Cliffy B VS MiyamotoThere is a battle raging in the land of consumer freedom. This battle is most recently fueled by the revelation that Microsoft’s next console, the XBox One, will be regulating the sale of used games. Now, two new challengers have entered the fray to be the last word in this epic battle. We have Shigeru Miyamoto, game designer extraordinaire for Nintendo, and Cliff “Cliffy B” Bleszinski  formerly of Epic Games, knocking out their opposing views of how used games effect the industry.

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