nesdev.org

Nintendo isn't the only one:

• Capcom requires royalties for Street Fighter series tournaments.
• Sega went on a takedown kick related to its Shining RPG series.
• Activision Blizzard had a TV rights dispute with the Korean e-Sports Association (KeSPA).
• Upstream licensors tend to be a problem more with genres popular on consoles than with genres popular on PCs. When music publishers and record labels license their works to publishers of music games such as Dance Dance Revolution and Guitar Hero, it doesn't necessarily come with a license to perform the game publicly.

This really upset me when I heard about it. Here is my opinion.

For me its all about the changing technology in our world.

Remember when TV was only in black and white and then finally they were able to make color TV's? When color TV's came out did anyone ever want to watch a black and white TV? Mostly likely not. That's because you could easily see the upgrade. Who would go out and buy a new black and white TV at the store when color ones are available? Thus you get a situation where the old product becomes abandoned.

Similar situations can be seen with the upgrade from NES to SNES back in the 90's. I remember that when the SNES came out almost nobody cared to play NES games at all. Many of my friends traded in all their NES stuff just to get an SNES. The mentality was, out with the old and in with the new.

The fact that Nintendo still thinks that their old NES and SNES games are worth protecting is ridiculous. They as a company already made their money when they originally sold the product. They are protecting old vintage abandoned software that the vast majority of the population deems as irrelevant.

When you go to rom sites and you see that they have all of the roms from other companies available except nintendo then you know something is out of place. The other companies know that with many products when you make something and sell it that's the time when you are most likely to make the most money off of it and then it pretty much becomes abandoned due to not being relevant anymore.

Super Mario World, as amazing as it is cannot hold up against current triple A games, but Nintendo apparently still thinks it does and that's is what is wrong with their mentality.

If you are a company who can only survive in the business world on old software that you produced over 20 years ago then you need to get a new business model.... seriously what a joke.

Also as a company you have to be nice to your fans, because without your fans you have no business. Who cares if someone made a remake of Bomb Bomb Battlefield in HD for SM64. Seriously who freaking cares, oh apparently Nintendo cares. A company who shuts down fan projects that are not for profit and pose no threat is insecure and personally it makes me not want to support them.

As for TAsers, many speedrunners spend years working on their runs to make them as good as they are and then Nintendo sh*ts on them and pulls down their videos? What a bunch of crap. They should be embracing them and handing out awards and such or at least give them recognition for their accomplishments.

Instead of Nintendo wasting all this energy and resources on a bunch of BS they should be doing what they need to be doing and that is making excellent games. That's all they should do is make outstanding games. If they do that then they will have their profits and not have to worry about protecting some old game that is less than 1 megabyte in size.

Its a bunch of crap and it may actually blow up in their face one day with a bunch of angry fans.

I'd have agreed with you fully 10 years ago, but today there is a big comeback for retro games, so I guess it's just natural Nintendo cares as much. They're just protecting their interests : With the virtual console and other retro products they're making profit and this is endangered by emulation. Nothing wrong with that even if that means going against our interests.

Also as a company you have to be nice to your fans, because without your fans you have no business.

It's their decision to favour a particular branch of their fans (those buying hard copies) rather than another (the ones that downloads roms and emulators, and hacks them). We are none to juge whenever that decision is good or not, because we are absolutely not neutral, reperenting only a very particular (and minourity) branch of "their fans".

Personally I have stopped completely buying any video game products 3 years ago for reasons totally unrelated to this debate. Since we (the people who download roms/emulators) are already either completely or almost out of business with them (since Nintendo don't profit from sales of used hardware/cartridges), it hurts them less to hurt that particular type of buisness and expanding on the mainstream business rather than the other way around. If you want to continue to run a company, you have to please to the majority, and nobody cares about minorities.

I'd have agreed with you fully 10 years ago, but today there is a big comeback for retro games, so I guess it's just natural Nintendo cares as much.

In my opinion if Nintendo actually cared about retro games then why haven't they actually made a new game for the NES or SNES or N64. Honestly I even think for like the 20th anniversary of some of these old systems they should make a special retro game for that system celebrating it.

If Nintendo made a new game for an old retro console I would most likely buy it for nostalgic reasons, but have they done this? The answer is a clear NO as they are NOT interested in retro games and only interested in making MONEY off their old products.

Nintendo did make the expanded version of Donkey Kong with the cement pie factory. It's also making retro style games on its newer platforms, such as Super Mario Maker. But otherwise, it's like asking why Disney is vigorously enforcing copyright in the original Mickey trilogy (Plane Crazy, The Gallopin' Gaucho, and Steamboat Willie), up to the point of allegedly bribing the U.S. Congress (in conjunction with the Gershwin estate) to delay the films' entry into the public domain, while not making new black-and-white cel-animated short films with what is now considered lo-fi audio.

tepples wrote:Super Mario Maker

Am I the only one who has negative feeling about this game? I mean, this is 20 years late. I guess you could say better late than never, but there have been rom editors made for these games for ages. (I was about 10 years old when I first started messing with these kinds of games in editors, and I had no problem, so the easiness factor isn't an issue.) Additionally, although you can't do something that breaks the limitations of the system (like make Bowser 128x128 pixels large on the NES,) you're able to do more if you know what you're doing. (Although this is where you need to know things.) Although terrible, I've seen people make custom bosses and enemies in SMW, and I've seen plenty of custom tilesets, some better than others, but often still good. I don't care if it comes with 100 levels, I still think it's ridiculous that it's going for $60 when I could possibly make even better Super Mario levels for free. The only legit thing about this game is that you can play other people's levels, but I'm sure they're bad.



You have to be kidding me... The damn thing's even sold at Walmart! I had to go all the way to BestBuy to get my Splatoon Bundle, and if you know where I live, I can assure you it isn't very close by. You know what, my unreasonable dislike for Super Mario Maker is probably linked to the fact that it's now overshadowing Splatoon, or at least Nintendo isn't paying as much attention to it, although I know it's older.

You know, this is going to sound like ridiculous speculation (because it is) but do you think Super Mario Maker is Nintendo's answer to all the "illegal" roms and rom editors? I mean clearly, with the abundance of them, people have clearly wanted it. (And we're well aware of Nintendo's oddly extreme hate for this kind of stuff...) I just don't see how it took Nintendo so long to figure that out.

Espozo wrote:I mean, this is 20 years late.

Two major reasons this didn't happen 20 years ago:

1. Internet connectivity and networking is an integral part of this game.
2. It really needs a modern CPU to handle all the unreasonable piles of crap that are necessary to allow to make the tool easy to use, interesting and flexible.

Anyhow, I think Mario Maker is actually quite wonderful.

Don't expect any worthwhile "offline" content, though. Yes, there is ~100 pre-made sample levels, but they're all just little demonstrations. If you want a real Mario campaign, get one of those instead. This game is entirely about making strange things and seeing what other people have made.

Espozo wrote:

tepples wrote:Super Mario Maker

You know, this is going to sound like ridiculous speculation (because it is) but do you think Super Mario Maker is Nintendo's answer to all the "illegal" roms and rom editors? I mean clearly, with the abundance of them, people have clearly wanted it. (And we're well aware of Nintendo's oddly extreme hate for this kind of stuff...) I just don't see how it took Nintendo so long to figure that out.

I have the feeling that it is, too, especially after I saw how popular "Kaizo Mario" videos are with Japanese kids.

There are a ton of reasons why they made Mario Maker now:

1. Modern hardware is finally capable of simulating hundreds of onscreen objects easily. Previous generations would have had to put lots and lots of restrictions on the user when creating. (I can't imagine how many "never do this, or the game will break" rules there were when creating SMB3 levels.)

2. With modern internet connectivity and networking, the social capabilities of this game are tremendous compared to what we would have had in the past.

3. Game is a good use case for the Wii U pad's stylus input.

4. Games that depend heavily on online interaction have stronger anti-piracy, and a slow expiration as users eventually dwindle.

5. Timed marketing for Super Mario Bros. 30th anniversary. (Did they throw a party for regular Mario Bros. 30th a few years ago?)

6. The recent success of Minecraft sets a very strong commercial example for other companies to follow, making "sandbox" games with massive amounts of user generated content shared online. Many, many companies are currently hard at work making "the next minecraft" right now, and Nintendo is no exception.

7. Nintendo has always been aware of the rom-hacking scene, and the public interest in it. Just because they have a harsh stance on copyright doesn't mean that they don't like the public interest in modding itself. Mario Maker is their attempt to finally make money off this interest.

Perhaps the question was why N didn't do this a generation ago. Point and click was also a good use case for the Wii Remote's pointer, and things like Mario Improvement and Lunar Magic ran on roughly Wii-class PC hardware. Furthermore, Sony beat N to the console platformer level editor with LittleBigPlanet.

I think if anything it'll make kids interested in designing video games without all the harsh realities of actually programming, and maybe the interest of homebrewing will grow. Maybe the door to what's currently a pretty niche interest will widen.

rainwarrior wrote:1. Modern hardware is finally capable of simulating hundreds of onscreen objects easily. Previous generations would have had to put lots and lots of restrictions on the user when creating. (I can't imagine how many "never do this, or the game will break" rules there were when creating SMB3 levels.)

Well, I could sort of imagine this on the SNES (using a vram and palette finder and other stuff. Certainty not the regular SMW engine) but I wouldn't think the N64 and beyond would have any trouble.

rainwarrior wrote:With modern internet connectivity and networking, the social capabilities of this game are tremendous compared to what we would have had in the past.

Oh boy.

rainwarrior wrote:5. Timed marketing for Super Mario Bros. 30th anniversary. (Did they throw a party for regular Mario Bros. 30th a few years ago?)

I find the fact that this year's the 20th anniversary of DKC2 to be more exciting.

rainwarrior wrote:6. The recent success of Minecraft sets a very strong commercial example for other companies to follow, making "sandbox" games with massive amounts of user generated content shared online. Many, many companies are currently hard at work making "the next minecraft" right now, and Nintendo is no exception.

Isn't Minecraft (hopefully) on the decline at this point? Or maybe it's just that I'm a sophomore in high school and the people who have played it are tired of it / "outgrown" it. I just thought it was really popular around 2012 - 2013, even though I'd heard of it before and after (obviously).
Yes! Just continue going down...

rainwarrior wrote:they have a harsh stance on copyright

Hey, you know what that reminds me of? This page in the instruction booklet I own for the Super Gameboy:
"Please destroy any illegal copies that may come into your possession"...

tepples wrote:Perhaps the question was why N didn't do this a generation ago. Point and click was also a good use case for the Wii Remote's pointer, and things like Mario Improvement and Lunar Magic ran on roughly Wii-class PC hardware. Furthermore, Sony beat N to the console platformer level editor with LittleBigPlanet.

Asking why they didn't do it earlier seems a little like the problem of trying to prove that something doesn't exist. I'm sure they've had the idea for this kind of game for a long, long time, but at any given moment they only had finite resources to spend on a finite number of projects.

To know why they didn't make this game in 2005, you have to exhaustively look at all the things they did release in 2005, and speculate why Nintendo might have thought they were a better bet than Mario Maker.

When doing this, you should also probably come up with a speculative cancelled game for every one they did release (I believe at least 50% of software projects are cancelled and never released, Nintendo has plenty of skeletons in its graveyard). You've also got to wonder if any of their unreleased projects were in fact earlier iterations of Mario Maker. They may very well have been chipping away at this for many years.

They may even have wanted to release a game like this 10 years ago, and failed for reasons unrelated to the viability of the project. There are many, many factors, internal and external, that can kill a game in development. Bad management. Personal problems. External financial pressures. Unexpected death of a key project member. etc. etc.

Asking why a game doesn't exist is a much, much more difficult question than asking why one does.

Espozo wrote:

rainwarrior wrote:1. Modern hardware is finally capable of simulating hundreds of onscreen objects easily. Previous generations would have had to put lots and lots of restrictions on the user when creating. (I can't imagine how many "never do this, or the game will break" rules there were when creating SMB3 levels.)

Well, I could sort of imagine this on the SNES (using a vram and palette finder and other stuff. Certainty not the regular SMW engine) but I wouldn't think the N64 and beyond would have any trouble.

You could, in theory, make some kind of "mario maker" on any platform. There were plenty of Construction Set games over the years that can probably give you some idea of how it would behave, and maybe Sim City and its related game series' are a good indication of the way heavy-simulation gameplay works on various platforms over the years.

My argument is only that it's much easier than ever before, making it an appealing prospect right now (combined with the other factors I listed, and probably others).

Hopefully Mario Maker will actually increase the interest in hacking nintendo games, thus pissing off nintendo even more. hahaha

I personally want full control over a game that I decide to make. If I want to change the graphics then I should be able to. If I want to code custom enemies then I should be able to.

I personally think Nintendo should go a step further and sell development kits where you can make a full game easily. That would be the way to go. Once you are done with your game submit it to Nintendo and if they approve you get to sell it on the online store.

Give the power of development to anyone.