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Joined 7 months ago
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Cake day: May 19th, 2024

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  • I finished the first Metroid Prime thrice on the Gamecube, twice on the Wii, once on Dolphin Primehack (mouse+keyboard) and once on the Switch. It’s no exaggeration to call it my favorite video game of all time.

    I finished MP2 once on the Gamecube and I regret every second of it. I’ve played several games that were worse, but none of them had such a vertiginous fall from grace compared to what the same IP had produced before. The only one that comes close is Diablo 3. MP2 managed to go wrong with every single change they made in relation to the original: the soundtrack is worse, the environments are uglier, the story is uninspired, the enemies are boring, the puzzles are too easy, the gimmick is awfully cliché and actively hampers enjoyment and then removes itself for the last 20% of the game, and I don’t even remember the final boss, which shows what a huge impact it had on me.

    I have never been so disappointed by a piece of media in my entire life, and I probably never will. I feel personally insulted that even a single person would consider remaking this garbage anything other than an affront to good taste.




  • If they call it a “sale” rather than a “licensing” then I consider myself entitled to remove the DRM (which I do to all my Kindle ebooks, for example) or to download a cracked copy for archiving (which I do to some games I wish to keep, if I haven’t bought them on GOG or another DRM-free platform). Common sense and ethics dictate that I am in my right to do this.

    If companies are relying on a technicality - an obscure one to the general public, even though techies have been aware of this issue for over a decade - to hoodwink people and charge actual-purchase prices for mere licensing, then I am relying on the implicit tenets of morality, good faith and common sense to bypass their malicious and bad faith distortions. Artificial scarcity be fucked, I paid what they claim is a fair price for what they claim is the purchase of a digital good, so I shall treat it with Animus Domini just as I do with any physical purchase. This includes lending to others as per the First Sale doctrine.

    The fact that the seller consciously chose to contradict themselves, calling it a purchase out in the open and a licensing deal in the fine print, should it ever work to someone’s disadvantage, should obviously be to the disadvantage of the person who intentionally made the blunder, not to good faith third parties. This is a well-established principle of legal ethics and Civil Law which is adopted by legal scholars the world over. Whether or not they have failed to apply it to these specific cases is wholly irrelevant to its validity, and I apply it to my own dealings with a perfectly clear conscience.

    I legally purchase all my media, and I will use any and all means necessary to protect my good faith acquisitions, including those which are incontroversially illegal for those who have not purchased that piece of media, such as downloading cracked software, because this is simply done to remedy an inexcusable omission on the part of those who claim to have sold me a copy of that software but don’t provide me with the possibility to archive my copy locally. So long as these transactions are referred to openly as purchases, sales, etc. I shall continue to act in this way to enforce their overt nature over the malicious mischaracterization contained in their licensing.

    In other words, slimeballs, have the guts to call it licensing and renting. Until you do, I and many like me will continue to make your lies come true and there is realistically nothing you can do to stop us.


  • The problem is that the legal definition of what is or isn’t emulation doesn’t necessarily have to coincide with the technical one. Any EULA can include a statement to the effect of “for the purposes of this Agreement, emulation is defined as such and such”, but even if they don’t, all the company would have to do is convince a judge, practically all of whom are total laymen when it comes to computer technology, that using WINE or virtual machines or whatever other emulation-adjacent technology counts as emulation or, alternatively, that even though they aren’t technically emulation, since they accomplish a similar purpose, they are implied by the use of the word “emulation” in the EULA.

    Legalese is largely characterized by vomiting every synonym you can think of to make absolutely sure that they are all included in the text, but that isn’t a requirement. It’s just to avoid having to debate whether something was included or not. Unless it is either explicitly included or explicitly excluded, its implicit inclusion is up for debate in a court of law, and the last word belongs to a judge who can’t tell a smartphone from a network switch.


  • You’re asking for a blanket statement from me but giving specific examples.

    Regarding what you said before the quote block, yes. My generic objection to EULAs would be lifted in this case.

    Regarding the obviously objectionable example clauses in the block and after it, I am opposed to those but they are a reason to reject the particular EULAs which contain them, just like any contract which contains similar dispositions (imagine having to agree never to eat at Burger King when you buy a Big Mac).

    My previous comment was about things that are generally wrong with the practice of EULAs because they have become a de facto standard, and was not meant to imply that those are the only things that can possibly be wrong with any EULA ever.


  • EULAs should be completely non-enforceable in a sane world. They are enormous, full of frivolous dispositions just to bloat them and discourage actual reading (like the infamous prohibition against using iTunes to help you build nuclear weapons) and rarely are they ever available before you’ve already purchased the software. Instead, they’re presented to you only as part of a setup program where the font is minuscule, Ctrl+F doesn’t work and which often doesn’t allow copying+pasting the EULA to a non-retarded text window somewhere else which actually allows you to read it comfortably, save it or even print it out. EULAs are a perfect example of contracting in bad faith and if any Law student anywhere ever created a EULA-like document as part of a Civil Law assignment, they would get a failing grade automatically because no professor in their right mind is going to read more than two paragraphs into that obviously malicious bullshit with 50 other papers to grade.










  • That isn’t the whole picture. I was born in 1988. The sampling of music from the 70’s that I’ve been exposed to is completely different to the sampling of music from the same period that someone born in '58 was exposed to in their lifetime. They got to listen to a bunch of bad stuff (and probably some great stuff) that I don’t even know exists.