[SuperWes]

Shouldn't that make you upset with Bioware/EA? Isn't that kind of like when a guy gets mad at the guys who his girlfriend is cheating on him with instead of his girlfriend?

-Wes
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[The King]

Wes, You can be mad at more then one person/company at a time.
Why would you give the gamestop/dude fucking your girlfriend a pass?
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[SuperWes]

Because GameStop can offer to have sex with my girlfriend all day. It's only a problem when my girlfriend says yes. Then I can be mad at her because I know I can no longer trust her.

-Wes

EDIT - I realized my comment didn't properly address what "The King" said.

[Felix]

hey wow this thread went places!

Wes' last posts really weird me out so, ignoring them for the time being --

obviously I am a huge believer in piracy-as-preservation from both a professional and hobbyist perspective, I think I've made that clear here a number of times. I'd say that Broco is correct in that the maintainers of old console romsets have done a largely phenomenal job of cataloguing 80s and 90s titles such that I have no concerns that even if emu-russia or romhustler were to go down, that archive would be perfectly replicated elsewhere, with the same pretty-good-metadata currently employed by way of filename suffixes to indicate whether a game is the NTSC version, whether it's a fixed dump, etc. etc.

however, to say that preservation is a 99% solved problem is really false. home computer titles have never been as well collected as console titles (HOTU and Macintosh Garden are great, but because of the tendency to view "all end-user software" as an impossible set to fully describe, they can't be as exhaustive in their collection parameters). emulation is extremely useful when it comes to things like compiling old win9x software (BenRen is right on that count, though I think he may have been misunderstanding with Gironika meant by "Windows 98 binary"), such that I have basically no patience at this point for anyone who claims not to like emulation because it "doesn't feel enough like the real thing" or because they've gone and let themselves feel morally indebted to a corporation again. but not all recent consoles have been emulated (or, in the case of the 3DS and the WiiU, decrypted), which drives down the incentive for backups to circulate, as well as the standards for fidelity which they'd be held to so long as the commercial pressings are still widely available and in recent memory.

furthermore, while I've never personally failed to find a not-so-old game circulating somewhere on the internet when I've been driven to do so, I tend not to be hugely bothered about patching the game up to the state its publisher left it in when it's for my personal use, and this is actually a huge preservation gap; for PC titles, no-CD cracks had to be versioned, which actually helps to a degree by getting the piracy community involved again, but for PS3/360 (and onwards) titles, where I'm a big believer in digital distribution and could never be arsed to complain about the need to download patches and whatnot because a) I hate physical media, b) I have pretty good broadband and am fairly patient, and c) I don't believe that any meaningful "ownership" is conferred by having physical media which is difficult to maintain and if ever a company screwed me on DRM I believe I am more than sufficiently empowered to pirate everything I originally purchased and wouldn't bat an eye at having done so, basically believing it to be for the greater good, despite all this, the best effort of piracy-as-preservation at preserving versioned releases of recent titles is basically something like http://thepiratebay.se/torrent/9620067/The.Last.of.Us.1.06.UPDATE_Left.Behind.DLC.FIX . which is real bad.

Cuba, I don't totally get at what you meant by your question about whether a climate-controlled university library full of PCBs would be better -- that's fundamentally ridiculous. those degrade. we're talking about a medium that's "natively" digital, ergo there is no justifiable reason not to copy those digital representations into newer storage environments.

[Talbain]

For museum purposes those PCBs might be useful as something to show people, but past a certain point they will exist solely as something to be viewed, rather than used. Kind of the conundrum of historical artifacts.

I do have concerns about 80s and 90s romsets, but it's mostly related to romsets not made in the US/Japan. There's also the ongoing debate about functional romsets versus accurate ones, but that doesn't seem likely to be resolved any time soon.
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[Glam Grimfire]

you guys ever notice how all arguments for switching entirely to digital predicate entirely on a magical world where everyone has affordable google-fiber quality internet that's well networked and never goes down or has critical failures. meanwhile, the argument for physical media is basically inverse of that, and the rebuttal is always "yeah but also what about that stuff about internet speeds increasing"
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##SKELETON PARTY (new article as of 04/26/14)Grim

[Felix]

the infrastructure question fundamentally isn't that interesting here (for the record, I have 25mbps that never goes down for a reasonable price in a 20 year old building in a relatively dense area in a major canadian city). I could see issues arising if net neutrality is completely undermined as looks to be happening, but cutting out retailers like Amazon or Gamestop still seems to be a net good.

[CubaLibre]

[Talbain]

[Felix]

good coupl'a posts right there

[tiburon]

hey so it's currently impossible to play Halo 2 1.5 (the latest patch) unless you play the shitty vista port, however the master chief collection releasing in january will have Halo 2 1.5.

HD collection discussion, go
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stream - steam - tweets

[Iacus]

[Mikey]

My dream is that when retail sale of new games (and by this I also mean newer used games) ceases to be profitable enough on its own that Gamestop will become less a place to buy games and more a place to play them, transforming into spaces where local tournaments/qualifiers for Pro tournaments are held. Especially if this includes games other than the FPS/MOBA du jour. Like, there's never going to be an EVO for racing games but wouldn't it be great if big publishers sponsored tournaments to promote new releases? This also ties in to my fantasies of expanding E-sports to encompass a broader range of games.

[BenoitRen]

[Sly Buccelli]

[SuperWes]

[Iacus]

[Sly Buccelli]