Category: Debated

Arguments, appeals, or otherwise analytical.

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Debated

Deconstructing Konami vs. Roxor

*Please note: I am not a lawyer.*

Big news hit the Bemani world yesterday, as Konami filed a 16 page patent suit in Texas against Roxor Games.

Konami, as most of the world knows by now, are the creators of the very popular Dance Dance Revolution (or DDR) video game series. While DDR was hugely successful in Japan in the arcades and has seen large success at home over the last few years, the series has been unofficially on hiatus since the end of 2002, when the last Japanese arcade version was produce. Players differ in opinion as to what exactly represents a hiatus – Konami continues to make home versions, particularly for the US where only one legal arcade mix was created – but many players realize that without constant new versions in the arcade, their interest in the game was diminshed.

In the last two years, one of the many DDR simulator programs – Stepmania – was spun off into an attempted commercial project called In The Groove (or ITG). Available as a PC setup called a “BoXoR” (as in “*RoXoR BoXoR*”; I will refer to them as “kits”), In The Groove raised eyebrows during its introduction to the marketplace as it required to be plugged into an existing DDR arcade machine to be used. People representing the project, as well as fans, hail ITG as a game designed for fans of the dancing game genre.

Konami’s attempt to get an injunction comes just days before the release of the home version of In The Groove, produced in conjunction with Red Octane, arguably the most successful dance pad maker in the US. The court filings, available in PDF form from DDR Freak, include seven separate counts that Konami is seeking damages for.

There seems to be a lot of confusion in the community about what the exact point of the filing is, and what it means for DDR and ITG in the future. So, I’ll try my best to break it down to easy to digest portions. Click through for my deconstruction and analysis of the claims.

Continue reading “Deconstructing Konami vs. Roxor”
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Debated Disliked

America – Now With Less Freedom!

I’ve been following the Terry Schiavo case a bit over the last few weeks, keeping my fingers crossed this wouldn’t become a national issue.

Lo and behold, [here we are](http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4367201.stm).

Friends, this affects every last one of us. You have lost the ability to make critical care decisions for loved ones. You no longer can expect someone to be able to take mercy on you and end years of pain and suffering and vegetative state. Personal decisions *and* the decisions of your doctor have been usurped by the government.

I don’t care if you’re Democratic, Republican, Catholic, Jewish, Agnostic, or SubGenius – read the [details of this case](http://abstractappeal.com/schiavo/infopage.html) and realize how tragic this is not only for Terry Schiavo and her husband, but for the United States as a country.

********

> In cases like this one, where there are serious questions and substantial doubts, our society, our laws, and our courts should have a presumption in favour of life.

-George W. Bush

> By now most people who read liberal blogs are aware that George W. Bush signed a law in Texas that expressly gave hospitals the right to remove life support if the patient could not pay and there was no hope of revival, regardless of the patient’s family’s wishes. It is called the Texas Futile Care Law. Under this law, a baby was removed from life support against his mother’s wishes in Texas just this week. A 68 year old man was given a temporary reprieve by the Texas courts just yesterday.

–Digby’s *Hullabaloo*

I’m not even going to get started on his very much pro-death penalty ways; I’m content to stand pat and call the man a massive hypocrite.

********

While reading the [fantastic MetaFilter thread on the ordeal](http://www.metafilter.com/mefi/40549) – about Congress rushing through legislation to score political points; the stringent court cases that have assessed her as unable to recover; the fifteen years Michael Schiavo has spent flying her all over the country seeking treatment – I was struck by some odd nostalgia.

Bill Hicks, who by now should be up for sainthood, has a bit on one of his CDs (*Rant In E Minor*) about pro-lifers; it was one of the first Hicks routines I had ever heard. The jist of the bit was that if you’re so pro-life – if you so dearly value the sanctity of human life – then stop blocking abortion clinics, and instead links arms and block cemetaries.

Never in a million years did I expect anyone to actually take the suggestion to heart.

(As I write this post on the subway, *I’m Afraid Of Americans* by David Bowie + Trent Reznor came on my iPod. Irony noted.)

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Debated

Defying The Machine

Yesterday, in my linkblog, I linked to a [fantastic speech by Greg Costikyan](http://www.costik.com/weblog/2005_03_01_blogchive.html#111069190589189590), given at the “Burning Down The House” rant session at the Game Developers Conference. It hit a lot of salient points, but in particular this portion rung true:
> You have choices, too. You can take the blue pill, or the red pill. You can go work for the machine, work mandatory eighty hour weeks in a massive sweatshop publisher-owned studio with hundreds of other drones, laboring to build the new, compelling photorealistic driving game– with the same basic gameplay as Pole Position.
> Or you can defy the machine. You can choose to starve for your art, to beg, borrow, or steal the money you need to create a game that will set the world on fire. You can choose to riot in the streets of Redwood City, to down your tools and demand an honest wage for an honest eight-hour day. You can choose to find an alternate distribution channel, a different business model, a path out of the trap the game industry has set itself. You can choose to remember WHY we love games–and to ensure that, a generation from now, there are still games worthy of our love.
> You can start today.

Those who have been here a while will hopefully still remember I used to work for a [small Mac-centric gaming company](http://www.freeverse.com/), and there was some nice synchronicity between the timing of that rant and a product release today:

Back in November was the uDevGames contest, a yearly Mac programming competition where people can enter any game they’ve programmed for the Mac in hopes of winning fabulous cash and prizes. Developers get to make a name for themselves, Mac gaming companies can find new talent, and end-users get a flood of semi-nifty to badass games to try out. Freeverse had, before I left, found at least one programmer through the competition.

[I did some reviews](https://vjarmy.com/archives/2004/11/udevgames_2004.php) of games I liked, you might recall. Out of the five games I listed under “Fantastical”, the one that had captured my interest the most by far was [Kill Dr. Coté](http://www.udevgames.com/downloads/?dlid=32). A major throwback to Smash TV and/or Robotron, it wasn’t a deep game but fit a gaming niche that I had been sorely lacking lately – the Quick One-Off Game. It was the only game I took with me for the Sakai conference in New Orleans to keep me occupied during the downtimes, and it worked brilliantly.

As part of one of my annoying character traits, I of course had to mention this game to everyone I knew who would care – anyone with a Mac, preferably those in the gaming industry. I went out of my way to throw this at Ian and Colin Smith, brotherly overlords of all things Freeverse. When I saw the [uDevGames voting results](http://www.udevgames.com/contest/2004/winners/), where the game won Best Gameplay but not overall game, I sighed and let my Coté dreams subside.

But Ian, much unbeknownst to me, had taken the ball and started bouncing it with [Justin Ficarrotta](http://www.justinfic.com/index.php), the programmer of this bundle of joy. The game was finessed, given some new assets, and tweaked to perfection.

And behold – Kill Monty was released today. And it makes me happy because, among other reasons:

* It still remains a game very easy to pick up for however long you need to be distracted and then put down.
* It maintains the core Coté features I loved – Survival mode, five difficulty settings, countless red pixels, the Story button.
* It has the thing Coté needed – variety. More levels, enemies, and lead characters.
* There are unlockables. There aren’t enough computer games with unlockables.

I was talking it over with another friend today, and I nearly died laughing when he said “It’s better than Doom 3 because your Mac can actually run it.” But I don’t actually think the comparison to Doom 3 is invalid, after some consideration. We’re talking a game that’s less than one-third the price that could quite possibly give you the same amount of entertainment. Your $12.95 goes directly to the people who made the game possible – programmers, artists, sound creators – rather than getting splintered among manufacturing efforts and licensing fees. And yes, there’s no [performance issues](http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20050315-4704.html) with Kill Monty.

So as one somewhat biased former gaming company coot ranting on his personal website, take my advice: If you have a Mac, and you’re running 10.3, [download Kill Monty](http://www.freeverse.com/download/select.php?name=killmonty&platform=osx) and give it a try. And if you want to see other games like it, [plunk down the $12.95](https://store.freeverse.com/). It’s worth it – the flamethrower rocks.