Quoting: whizseWho actually owns the right to Croc? It goes something like Fox Interactive -> Vivendi -> Activision Blizzard? There's also this little tidbit on Wikipedia:

"As of 2022, most of Fox Interactive's game library, which was copyrighted to 20th Century Fox, is owned by The Walt Disney Company through 20th Century Studios"

Croc a Disney princess now?

Argonaut owned its own creation, and then after the company went bankrupt 20 years ago, within a week its founder Jez San bought up the rights to the company's games - this was covered by various news organisations at the time. After that, the Croc rights were moved to his mobile games company, which then made a few Croc mobile games. Now Jez San has brought back Argonaut and I presume will bring back other franchises too, the most notable of which is probably Starglider, which was the series that led to Argonaut collaborating with Nintendo to create X (a 3D Game Boy game) in 1992 and then Star Fox (the famous 3D SNES game) in 1993.

In short, the rights to Argonaut's games basically never left the company's founder.

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Quoting: AederIs this just for newer games or would it fix stuff like the videos in old games like swat 3?

Quoting: tarcisiosurdiCould this also improve performance in games like DJMAX Repect V? I feel like it’s way harder to run it then it should because it’s essentially a video playing in the background of very simple UI elements…

All you can do is give it a try - Proton Experimental usually fixes more than they list, because changing things has knock-on effects.

Quoting: KingKrouchThe recent versions of Proton Experimental seems to fix video playback on several Ghostlight PC ports (Mugen Souls, Mary Skelter 2 + Finale) as well.

The recent ones have also (finally!) fixed the crashing when video cutscenes are called in Super Bomberman R, as well, over a year after Valve incorrectly assigned it a stable Proton where it was still crashing and corrupting the video files all the time. They've clearly been putting in a lot of work with these issues!

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Quoting: LinasAny other recommendations? I don't think I have ever played an FMV game, but I am curious.

It's not in this bundle, but I personally enjoyed Mia and the Dragon Princess, by Wales Interactive. It's a fun little action/adventure story with a runtime of a little under an hour, about a mysterious woman and an ancient lost pirate treasure, and a group of thugs who try to take over an unassuming little bar so they can get at both. It's got several paths and endings, and has a useful feature so you can keep track of which you've uncovered across repeat playthroughs.

Retro-wise, I was always quite fond of the so-bad-it's-good Corpse Killer for the Mega CD, which apparently has a higher-resolution anniversary re-release on Steam these days (though I haven't picked that one up, since losing the grainy 1990s look takes away some of the charm, for me).

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QuoteAnything take your fancy there?

Unfortunately not - hopefully next time!

QuoteWhat have you been playing lately?

Just emulated stuff, as has been the norm for me for most of this year. Saturn Bomberman (Saturn, of course ) remains a firm favourite, and I plan to play Castlevania: Rondo of Blood (PC Engine) next week for Halloween.

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Quoting: emphyHelpful thread with game suggestions: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/forum/topic/6016/

Thanks for the link, there - much appreciated!

Quoting: TheSHEEEPI'm relatively certain that once the Switch's lifetime has ended, Nintendo will be a lot less aggressive towards its emulation.
After all, I don't see them going after GB, NES, SNES, N64, DS, GameCube, etc. emulation (unless there is some additional shadiness involved).

Quoting: tmtvlLet's hope 5 years from now, when they've moved on to the successor of the Switch, Switch emulators can finally get developed in peace.

They recently went after a YouTube channel for merely showing footage of emulated Wii U games, many years after the Wii U met its demise. And when they went after Yuzu they also rolled Citra in with the same takedown, years after the Switch had replaced the 3DS hardware. (And, purely speculation on my part, but I wouldn't be surprised if they go after Dolphin at some point, too.)

If I had to guess, it'd be that they intend to offer titles for these systems as part of their online subscription, hence going after emulators for consoles whose lifespans already ended.

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Quoting: KlaasLike Disney, re-using public domain stories for (almost) everything while lobbying for longer copyright protection (for their own stuff).

Yeah, not too different!

More irony, for anyone else who remembers this one, when they brought Pokemon outside of Japan, they stuck with the contracted name instead of the full title of Pocket Monsters, because they didn't want legal issues from the long-established Monster in My Pocket toy-line/media-franchise. They've become exactly what they originally sought to avoid.

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I've been doing a bit more research, and apparently the series' creator himself admitted years ago that he was inspired by Ultraseven (part of the Ultraman series), which featured Capsule Monsters* that were sent out into battle.

*Not coincidentally, this was the earliest name for Pokemon, and was presumably changed so they didn't get sued by a bigger fish. There's some irony there, I'm sure.

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QuoteTake for example this patent (approved in Japan, pending in the USA), that covers the feature of capturing creatures by throwing an object and sending out a character (like a Pokemon) to engage in combat.

I'm surprised this was approved, considering that there's prior-art - the 1994 SNES RPG Robotrek featured robots who were kept in capsules and sent out into battle, for example.

Also, at this point in time, almost 30 years after Pokemon debuted (if they'd patented this back then, it would've expired by now - I'm not sure why they left it so long!), the creatures-in-capsules concept could fairly be considered to be scènes à faire, much like happened with fighting-game tropes in the outcome of Capcom U.S.A. Inc. v. Data East Corp..

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Quoting: Cyba.CowboyWell this is interesting... I didn't know this!

I'm sure you know capsule-toys, though - from there, it's not a big step to the "Capsule Monsters" concept-art that was the earliest known part of Pokemon's development.

Quoting: wytrabbitLet me also introduce you to Robotrek:

Yep, Robotrek is prior-art, too!

And the way Poke Balls are depicted as functioning is obviously inspired by Capsule Corp's capsules from the Dragon Ball franchise, too.

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Quoting: Doktor-MandrakeOr Nintendos D-pad

To be fair, that was a novel invention that nobody had done before, and a correct use of patents, though. (Pretty sure that the Namco one was pre-dated by the 1987 Invade-a-Load tape-loader for the Commodore 64, though.)

On the other hand, it's being speculated that Nintendo is going after Palworld on patent grounds due to holding patents on the concept of catching monsters in a ball - something that was inspired by real-world gachapon toys that existed before the Pokemon games did. It just goes to show how little they have going for them in this case if that's all they could come up with, so hopefully they'll lose this one and won't be able to enact chilling effects on future competition.

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