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'Randomizers' Are Breathing New Life Into Old Games
Like a longtime partner or a favorite pair of socks, there's comfort to be found in revisiting a familiar game from your youth. There's a sense of ease knowing what lies inside each treasure chest, which bush an enemy will spring from, or the secret tactic that vanquishes a foe with ease. That calming intimacy makes games like these an easy nostalgic choice when you just want to take a load off.
But what if you want to add some spice back to that familiar experience? After playing a classic game to the point of memorization, how do you recapture the sense of adventure and discovery you experienced the first time you played it? A small but growing community in the retro emulation scene is aiming to answer those questions with a class of mods and hacks called "randomizers."
At their most basic level, randomizer mods shuffle the data in a game's ROM so that each run becomes a new and unpredictable experience. So The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past randomizer could change which items you find in which chests, alter the rewards from dungeon quests, and even replace Link's sprite for one of the numerous fan-created options (the Mega Man X sprite is a personal favorite). And you can go even further than that, changing the exit locations for various in-game doors or even scattering the boss keys for specific dungeons throughout the world (rather than in the dungeons themselves)!
What started as a small niche has now evolved into its own retrogaming genre. The BIG List of Video Game Randomizers website, started back in 2016, now lists hundreds of randomization mods for games from Metroid Prime, Golden Sun, and Earthbound to Faxanadu, Adventure Island, and Doom. The list is still updated weekly with new titles, so if your favorite isn't listed yet, it may be soon.
Different randomizer mods allow for different levels of randomization, but the idea of mixing up locations of items or discovered skills and abilities is rather standard. Some retain the title's intended structure but change the rewards and items you find on your journey. Others completely alter the way the game is played.
[...]Randomizers add near-infinite replayability to tired-old games, with fresh challenges for players to overcome with each playthrough. They test the player's skill and knowledge of the game instead of simply the muscle memory gained from years of experience. By limiting the player's ability to rely on their autopilot memory, the focus turns instead to quick adaptation and problem solving.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 08 2019, @07:19AM (4 children)
The old titles may not be good enough for sales to the general populace, which is why you cannot buy them anywhere, and that, in turn, is why nobody's making any more money off of them.
But they're still plenty good for lawyerly fleecing a handful of modders and hobbyist enthusiaists for much more than the whole scene's worth of "lost sales" (which is moot anyway, because every single one of them already bought the game back-in-the-day).
How about a compromise position:
Proving actual damage (while the right thing, IMNSHO) is not going to happen anytime soon ... so how about proving instead that you were making any kind of income (not profit, that is too tweakable, just income) off of it, before suing for copyright infringement? After all, if you don't have income, there can hardly have been any damages ....
(Score: 4, Informative) by Gaaark on Sunday December 08 2019, @12:32PM
GOG.com
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Sunday December 08 2019, @03:32PM
The excuse I've so often read is "We're making income from the sequel, and availability of the original would cannibalize that."
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Monday December 09 2019, @04:51PM
Much of what you said was true, before GOG. Look up the origins of Good Old Games, it's essentially an Abandonware site turned legit. GOG is what I dreamed a game store would be like. They even have more/better things that I dreamed of.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 09 2019, @11:24PM
Just have it a logarithmic scale for a copyright fee. They get something generous, something like 50 years for free. Then every 10 years after that costs $10^x^(x-1) where x is the number of decades past the original 50 you are. So years 51-60 would be $1.00 (to weed out abandoned or orphaned IP) and years 71-80 would be $1,000,000.00. Even the 50 years is a long time, especially in our modern times, because how much IP from 1970 has a ton of value today, and the stuff that does, would definitely be worth paying a dollar for. And at that 80 years for $1,000,000 is the same as stuff is either mostly forgotten, in which case people should be free to use it, or embedded in our culture, in which case you should pay for that privilege of monopoly.