Delicieuxz

Gothic 1 and 2 are mentioned on the previous page, and I support that suggestion. I think they could be gold-mines for a good AF review. They've got character and quirks oozing out the everything and are also just amazing games - in many ways the pinnacle of Western RPGs, never again as of yet matched. They're also unknown to a lot of North American gamers as Elder Scrolls was the big thing over here and Gothic 1 and 2 didn't have big marketing campaigns (or any?). I stumbled across them entirely by happenstance when I decided to play whatever random thing I could come across while perusing a torrent site and G2's English release had just come out - and it blew me away within minutes of playing it. They were hidden gems in their day. Of course, Gothic 3 was a major disappointment and not done at all in similar vein as G1 and G2.

Nice video. Coulda been neat to mention something about Canyon Platform, the classic TrackMania game mode which was added to Canyon in an update, and which Nadeo even later broke and never did anything to fix again. I recall some fuss about the car handling in Canyon being revamped at one point, and people complained about it. I think I also preferred the original. https://forum.maniaplanet.com/viewtopic.php?t=40834 Ross, you said in your video that you didn't play the original TM games and didn't find them visually attractive. TMO has some cool handling, but I recommend checking out TM Sunrise and also with the TMS Extreme expansion. Its graphics are a significant step up from the first TM game's, and still look beautiful. Plus, the sense of speed in TMS is greater than in any other game. TM Sunrise also has what I think are the best music and menu presentation in the series, and a lot of the coolest tracks. It also has 3 game modes: Race, Platform, and Puzzle. In my opinion, a TM game isn't a TM game without all 3 modes - even if Nadeo has been making Race-only TM games for longer than they made them with the other modes included. Platform is my favourite mode. It has no timer but presents challenging platform-based tracks with checkpoints that a car can be respawned to if something goes wrong. Gold, silver, and bronze awards are given based on how many times the player resets their car at the most-recent checkpoint (which they do whenever they fall off the track, turn upside down, or anything else that prevents progress). And some of the Platform tracks get really crazy (timestamped video): TM Sunrise is Nadeo's peak as a developer, IMO, and the studio has been putting out mediocre and half-baked releases since being bought by Ubisoft. And to anyone who would suggest playing TM United instead because it has samples of the same environments as TM Sunrise: TM United isn't comparable to TM Sunrise, it's a much worse package, worse music, worse stages, worse presentation. I think it also has less content. Even importing the TM Sunrise maps into TM United isn't nearly as great an experience as playing TM Sunrise. Because of the horrible Starforce DRM Nadeo put into TM Sunrise, to get TM Sunrise to work on a modern PC, either a virtual machine of Windows XP, Vista, or maybe Windows 7 is needed, or some other method. I've seen people get it to work using various methods. I've also bugged Nadeo to release it without Starforce on GoG, but they seem to be pretty stubborn in not doing that, so far. http://www.tm-forum.com/viewtopic.php?t=24517 http://www.tm-forum.com/viewtopic.php?p=211090#p211090

Hey, thought people here would appreciate this. There isn't even a debate about ownership with GoG - they outright say on their website that you own the games you purchase from them. "You buy it, you own it". Keep in mind that many of the games sold on GoG are the same ones sold through Steam and other platforms, and by the same publishers.

Reverse-engineering is not illegal. The Library of Congress ruling specifically grants an exemption from the Digital Millennium Copyright Act for people to modify their software as necessary to continue using it after official support has ended. No, I believe you understand it wrong. It's only allowed to circumvent the DRM (including online DRM) AND it's for museums and such. Preservation does not imply individual play, from what I can get. Also what Lenard was saying (and it was quite painful to watch tbh, because clearly both of you have not enough technical expertise on the topic, so your questions and his responses were all over the place and never actually covered the actual problem core) - basically if the only thing you are making is the server code and just it - then maybe it's legal (though I am still not convinced you are free to reverse the client to do so), but if you are also producing anything else (any asset) - that is covered by copyright and you can't do that. That's what I get from there - i.e. if you have say a Quake style server that basically just relays the messages everywhere and does some simple movement/shooting logic - it's fine. But if it's say Destiny server that have quest definitions only on the server (while all the dialogs, cutscenes, etc are on the client) - if you reproduce them, you actually infringing their copyright on those quests - even if you've never seen the actual server data (and if you not copy them you probably making derivative work, which is also forbidden by the license). No, it's you who've read it wrong, and Ross is correct: The Library of Congress authorizes the bypassing of DRM protections and the backing up and modification of video games for the sake of continued use of the software programs by the people who have bought it. https://s3.amazonaws.com/public-inspection.federalregister.gov/2018-23241.pdf Here's the proposal: And here's the ruling: The part you're talking about, being archived by a museum or similar, is (B), whereas the part Ross mentioned, being able to bypass DRM or modify the software to keep playing it, is part (A). The allowance is for people to modify their software in any way necessary in order for them to continue accessing it in the way it was designed to be used when it was bought. That means that not only may people in the US back up their software and bypass any of its DRM, but they may also do what else is necessary with it in order to continue to use their purchased software. As Ross said, though, copyrighted material cannot be used in the modification. As the Library of Congress ruling says: Outside of the Library of Congress ruling, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act allows people to reverse-engineer software under limited situations. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/PLAW-105publ304/pdf/PLAW-105publ304.pdf "a person may develop and employ technological means to circumvent a technological measure, or to circumvent protection afforded by a technological measure... for the purpose of enabling interoperability of an independently created computer program with other programs" - this sounds to me as though it already on its own and without the Library of Congress ruling protects reverse-engineering for the purpose of getting a game to interoperate with an OS, in other words, to run properly.