piracy (Read 815 times)

[Aeon]

MORIYA SHRINE WILL NO LONGER BE HOSTING OFFICIAL TOUHOU GAME AND MUSIC DOWNLOADS DUE TO A DMCA REPORTEDLY FROM TEAM SHANGHAI ALICE

bit of a shame! but arguably moral!? that is the query for you all here in the serious discussion subforum

personally i pirate literally everything i can except for indie stuff. if i could download a car i would. if i could run breath of the wild on my computer i would do it in an instant. but dear little edmund mcmillen is a good guy and not a corporation lobbying for minimum wage to go down so i dont mind buying two copies of isaac and five of meat boy

although touhou i have never applied the same logic to
not because zun is particularly capitalizing on the daily but because damn. damn. at least fifteen bucks a pop for well over a dozen games does not go down easily.
i mean when i started touhouing that wasnt even an option, it was import or bust.
and to be honest the steam version of games are simply not managed well
they never go on sale, they haven't been patched since their original release for even an upscale or anything, and they don't have achievements or cards or whatever. i've got four or five official touhou games on steam and i don't even bother running them since pirated copies with thcrap and resolution fixes baked in work so much better
good ol "piracy is a service problem", thanks gabe

and on the whole i consider this a bad thing because itll be a lot harder for new people to play touhou when they cant download all the stuff at once from a place that has them organized and accessible
you aren't going to find people starting from the steam versions because it is incredibly cumbersome to manually patch every game, not that you'd even know it's an option looking at the store page.
aocf was properly translated, so he clearly isn't against it. what's the holdup

that is what i say! maybe you say something different. open forum subforum thread post for all

also it is fairly possible that the moriya shrine takedowns were falsely submitted since i know for certain there are at least a few people who are not big fans of it. hoping such is the case since i dont exactly want to have to copy ten desires over from my 8 year old computer next time i wanna try extra again

[spongelevator]

ok with music the only concern is the actual official music cds because moriyashrine's doujin selection is lol and I probably know more places to snag arranges than there are ZUN cds
I aint no "3000 dollar headset and flac music ripped freshly from the CD" guy I'm the "this single earbud earphone was at the daiso for $1.50 so I bought ten" guy though so I can just hear the adventures of merry berry han on youtube dot com in all its 360p glory
but for those audio guys I guess they will have to either buy it on the google thing if that's actual quality audio or they'd just have to go lookin around
for the games I suppose we will have to go back to the old ways of pastebins leading to mediafire downloads
either that or one site goes down and two pop up as the saying goes

when it comes to piracy morality discussions I believe that time is better spent being kind and understanding to your fellow man because you only gain one sin point per game pirated anyway as long as you avoid the 100 point punishment and curse if you pirate an entire series without buying at least one game
though there's also that other saying: never pay more than twenty bucks for a computer game (troll face troll face epicly pwned)
chad MGSV player pays V dollars for their game

I just pirate series-1 game most of the time because until like a year ago I quite literally had no way to purchase games outside of december and since everything I pirate is either twenty years old and cannot be purchased outside of scalpers, or, ten years old and, within the next year, no longer purchasable (thanks playstation store and eshop) it don't matter to me
if something is epic I shall pay my respects however (get it pay as in use money funny laugh I wish we could use our forum money)

the steam 2hu versions are pretty not worth it from my experience as well I got like two of em and literally the only purpose of them is to buy ZUN a beer there's no other reason to bother getting them
aint no new players gonna dump five-and-ten clams to try the games out

honestly I think if someone wants to play the games though they'd be able to find them
at least I hope because otherwise that is uhhh
that is very discouraging for the future of the human race
it happened back in 2009 and also word of mouth can lead to the spread of some areas maybe perhaps perchance
it is a pain but I believe, as 'tis piracy, we are unstoppable and nothing other than government honeypots and torrents nobody wants to seed and private trackers making it so you have to buy stuff anyway and getting trojans and bitcoin miners and rensenware on our systems can prevent us from getting windows for free


there is ONE major concern though: fangames
either I am cripplingly incompetent or moriyashrine is basically the only english-language site on which I can download 2hus fangames like the aya ace attorney or the fairies metal gear or the fairies pikmin or the 2hus puyo
I guess unreliable warosu browsing and hoping the 2009 guy uploaded the game to mediafire and not rapidshare or megaupload is an option very occasionally but eh
if nobody keeps track of those then the only way to play those anymore would be spending three dollars on the game and then forty dollars importing it because 2022 shipping

anyway though remember
yarr harr fiddle dee dee
being a pirate is alright to be
do what you want 'cause a pirate is free
you are a pirate


ok upon further usage of brain think I have realized obviously it's just gonna be official content taken down because that was the entire point of your post 
uhh oops
now strange UFO puzzle game will be safe forever




(need four image slots in newer post :( )

[rys]

What a shame, they really went through and cleaned out everything.

Wonder where the change of heart came from after 20 years, but what can you do? Would've expected them to start DMCA'ing all the album/ost uploads on youtube before an English forum, though (unless that's to come). At least doujins have made pretty much everything that's been officially released

time to start feeding and seeding the games either way

[TSUN]

kinda tragic but it makes sense
piracy just got accepted because that was the only way to play for a while
now that the games are on steam, it's a lot more of a choice

but yeah $15 a pop for a game you can beat in about 30 minutes is hmmmmm
the games get all their longevity through replaying them a bunch, and you'll probably only replay a game a bunch if you really love it
my legit physical copies of PCB and EOSD each cost like $30. i have dozens of hours of fun in PCB, and it's become my go-to Touhou game to replay. i beat EOSD on Hard solely out of a sense of obligation, and have barely touched it since.

also the "objective" value of each game seems to fluctuate as well
IN has so much cool stuff that it's prob worth double something like MOF

also also what about the stuff before 9.5? those aren't on steam, right?

[spongelevator]

ok I don't know how to do the username things so
>rys
the youtube stuff has been under heavy fire for a long time with lots of channels getting nuked both for uploading official and/or arranged musics for years
but there are also so many uploads that there's always a place to get em anyway
I remember one video had like 10 albums in there and when it got taken down some other guy uploaded it
and then that got taken down so some other guy uploaded it again
and when that went down someone uploaded it with an unrelated name so it showed up in recommendations from people who saw the other ones but couldn't be searched for by the copyrighters lamo

>"tsu "つんいーきゅん~” n"

man what you paid 30 bucks for each I got TD and UFO for like three bucks each (yes I own two games I cannot beat even halfway) and I'm pretty sure the only integer game above 10 bucks was WBaWC or something
in fact all five of my games combined (none of which I can beat) currently cost around 2600 yen and I recall prices being lower on DS and SWR
ya got japed hard

15 each on steam without sales ever is pretty bad honestly considering most of the games are over half a decade old and competing with the entire steam library that apparently has people racking up 500+ games at cheaper prices
15 for one is kinda like going to one of those fancy hotels and paying 10 dollars for a bottle of water but any more than one and it adds up fast and becomes pretty horrendous and unviable so I would go a bit further with what you said and say it's really only worth buying the ones you intend on replaying frequently
in fact I'm pretty sure the combined prices of every game on steam I have is less than the cost of buying three (3) 2hus and purchasing just every main game on steam would cost $135
including the spinoffs on steam (9.5, 12.5, 12.8, 14.3, 15.5, 16.5, 17.5) that's $235 and for that price you can quite literally buy a playstation 2 and shin megami tensei: nocturne (2004) for the playstation two and still have around $100 left over to buy another ps2 or both DDS games and both ps2 persona games or another three and a half copies of shin megami tensei: nocturne (2004) for the playstation two

(best usage of funds)
alternatively a ps3 with the entire metal gear series (including GZ and TPP) will cost ~200 with 35 dollars left to buy the digital versions of shin megami tensei: nocturne (2004) for the playstation two along with the two DDS or ps2 persona games digitally and the remaining 5 dollars can go to metal gear rising

(superior usage of funds)
these examples are of old stuff but toho is also old stuff
I suppose it's a result of the games coming out way before something like steam existed so now ZUN puts them up at the same prices as before and they have to compete with constant sales and newer games instead of buying both copies of a pokemon game costing the entire birthday fund
nothing before 9.5 (also none of the first-gen fighting games and two of the second-gen fighting games) is on steam so that costs zero sin points per pirate

assuming I am not entirely misinterpreting what you mean MoF usually costs like tree fiddy while IN usually costs some 6-7 bucks so you have perdicted it (though it's probably because early windows costs more in general)

actually at the end of this I think it's significantly better to legitimately buy the games by buying physically if one wishes to avoid piracy as opposed to digitally because the prices are so high which is not something seen often at all
buying the entire not pc98 series including spinoffs and physically is pretty damn easy and probably costs around the same that it would cost to buy all integer games available on steam and nobody in japan plays pc98 anyway because of their aversion to emulation or paying 1.5m yen for an old disc

[Aeon]

spongelevator
yeah music isn't a big concern since youtube to ogg isn't going anywhere. not entirely sure what the status is on official music uploads but i know it doesn't have all of them and i'm not gonna install google play music or spotify or whatever

so true king ! i will not stop you from buying your games and i do have a fair bit of legitimate touhou stuff as well. there are a few things where i would say it is more moral to pirate than not like anything with adobe/disney/nintendo-type guys but even still it can be a pain so whatever

is that pic of your own cd collection because gat daaaamn that's slick. out of anything touhou i'd say its coolest to have physical copies of the music

fangames: do not worry
moriya shrine isn't just packing up shop, all the stuff that was not directly dmca'd is still gonna be up. speaking of which, apparently the order was official by team shanghai alice and not a troll, kinda lame.
ok upon further usage of eyes i have realized i didn't need to respond to that bit since you have a realization in the next paragraph

rys
not entirely sure where it came from, best case scenario he's getting some kinda touhou collection compendium game together that has everything from 1-18 with all translations. that would be pretty rad actually but i somehow doubt it
just for everyone's convenience i might bundle my copies of everything and put it somewhere accessible-ish (this is against the forum rules however)

TSUN
touhou games would really benefit from a try before you buy type of thing
maybe easy/normal main game could be free and hard/lunatic/extra were included in the paid version and it would let you pay for the ones you think are cool and still have a way to decide if its cool or not
also congrats, you are one of the few people here in the states with legit versions of early windows games! why'd he go and dmca games he's not even selling............
and yeah the value of the game changes depending on the game. i know at least on steam shoot the bullet (11) is cheaper than anything else while aocf (25) is the most expensive

spongelevator again again
the username thing is with @

my man
where are you getting touhou games for three dollars
on steam you will never see anything below aforementioned 11 bucks, usually 15, and if you're getting them on import that low you gotta tell me your seller. tsun is workin in normal prices, i had to drop twenty on magical astronomy alone

with 235 dollars man you could almost buy two complete copies of fire emblem fates

that is actually insane though in your examples that you can get so much yeah touhou is way too expensive
like i can imagine paying 15 bucks a year at comiket as it comes out but only people who are already fans or only care to play one are gonna do that
for people who wanna get into it thats a fat stack of cash and it'll only get fatter if he keeps putting more games on steam

alright genuinely though where are you seeing those prices because i've looked on ebay and stuff and touhou imports go for minimum 20 bucks a pop

[spongelevator]

certainly it is most moral to simply use unregistered windows 10 when your install implodes upon itself and you must start from zero
activate windows
go to settings to activate windows

yeah I got them akyuus too but it does not fit in the image
hifuu very kuhl und epoch and you can see the booklets in there so you know what it actually looks like (too bad I can't read)

good thing aya ace attorney 2: didn't play it is gonna stay up for all of time so we don't have to scour the interwebs looking for a copy

ebay is a vile hellscape where buying one item will cost you the entire price of importing it alone plus extra do not buy from mr scalpy scalpy he will take your money and he will use it to buy another hot tub for his pet bear
you gotta import yourself
forward it or use proxy in most cases or surugaya-en if lazy
it's usually $3-8 for an individual game plus indeterminate shipping depending on what you ship with and when (currently it's ~$30 for a 1kg EMS package which is around 11-12 games/discs in my experience) so you can't get a single game for extremely cheap but once you buy and import two games (assume $5 per game and $20 shipping and it's $30) it's already a better deal than ebays
I would even encourage importing just like two games for three dollars cheaper even if it's not really worth the time just so mr. scalperman doesn't get his daily dosh (now THIS is morality argument!)
if you bought 12 games for 8 bucks a pop (which is too high price honestly wait for sale) then it'd be like $130 which is the cost of four ebays and a sandwich
here's EMS rates
www.post.japanpost.jp/int/charge/list/ems_all_en.html
CDs tend to be ~80-100g so you can approximate the weight of the box
if you are/end up becoming one of those people who buys 10kg packages (why) you should ship with DHL because EMS charges entirely based on weight and past a certain point it becomes unholy
on surugaya
www.suruga-ya.jp/search?category=11&search_word=%E4%B8%8A%E6%B5%B7%E3%82%A2%E3%83%AA%E3%82%B9%E5%B9%BB%E6%A8%82%E5%9B%A3&is_marketplace=0
you can get the games used for usually ~5-8 dollars (scroll down all the stuff at top is new or rare demos) but they have time sales and frequently drop below $4 (well it's in yen but you know)
used so if you're unlucky there is going to be a giant slash on the cd case lol but that only happened once for me out of all of them and I can't be damned to replace the case
www.suruga-ya.com/en/index
it also has an international store thing where it can ship directly to the US but I dunno the reliability of it or the prices of shipping I just know the international site's listings are outdated frequently and some .jp items don't show up here for some reason
this is the one case of not needing a middleman at all so it's definitely the most convenient if you're willing to deal with that
surugaya is the best place to get any of this stuff because the other two are a big pain in the ass and typically cost more unless you're buying half the damn series
you can also snag from mercari
jp.mercari.com/search?keyword=%E4%B8%8A%E6%B5%B7%E3%82%A2%E3%83%AA%E3%82%B9%E5%B9%BB%E6%A8%82%E5%9B%A3
here the prices are way more variable and mercari japan blocks foreigners from signing up so you can only buy here using a proxy where fees for using mercari are really high (~$11 for all the proxies I know of) because mercari sucks ass
BUT sometimes you can find someone selling a bunch of CDs at once for some cheap price so as a last resort it can work out well
then there's YJA
auctions.yahoo.co.jp/search/search?auccat=&tab_ex=commerce&ei=utf-8&aq=-1&oq=&sc_i=&exflg=1&p=%E4%B8%8A%E6%B5%B7%E3%82%A2%E3%83%AA%E3%82%B9%E5%B9%BB%E6%A8%82%E5%9B%A3&x=44&y=20
where it's like mercari execpt also bids sometimes and therefore a huge pain in the ass another way
basically another place where you can sometimes find many games sold in one listing for a decent price I dunno if you can bid with a personal account but proxies hate YJA wayyyyy less than mercari so is cheaper
ok that is how you do it
if you wait for shipping to be cheaper then books can start being worth it but shipping like two of the artbooks is immediately 700g so do not do that unless you are rich
anyway to sum it up forwarder/proxy and if you don't want to deal with that garbage just buy directly from surugaya-EN

at the end of this I realize it probably sounded like I was saying three dollars plus shipping or something so if you thought you can get the entire series for like fifty bucks my apologies (you can definitely do that with akyuu CDs actually)
it's better prices than ebays (or steam if you buy at least three games) but it's not like bootleg guatemalan finding nemo prices


yeah prices are very ass and also there's the issue of those weird unavailable games
I vaguely recall something about ZUN saying he doesn't care about overseas fans pirating older games but eh I dunno maybe he puts em up on steam if this is legit DMCA
either way I already have em on my system and they aint gonna go disappear any time soon (other than 15.5 which I think I deleted because it's not worth the storage space so now we can't play that! yeah!!!!)

also with 235 you can't even buy one complete fates copy

when I checked like two months ago I remember this being like $130 and thinking "man"
and now this is an average price

jp is better

tfw piracy thread turns into "how to buy games"

[Aeon]

thank you for the tutorial that will surely prove to be incredibly useful information. if i could pin threads or post i would wanna toss that somewhere where it was easier to see

that is something zun said, i've seen it posted around a bit since the takedown but i guess he changed his mind or something

my fates price estimate was using the cost of msrp conquest or birthright plus the other routes and dlc from the eshop, which is pretty inaccurate now since the eshop is dead! oh well. you can buy a 3ds and an sd card to download it to with 235 though

[spongelevator]

thank you very much please defeat the big scalpermans who made it so any graphics card released past 2013 is directly equivalent to a human kidney

lol well actually here's the thing
you can buy a 2ds on ebay for $60 I see one right now
and then this baffling world has two 128gb sd cards on amazon dot com for $25
so you can actually buy TWOdses, both fit with 128gb sd cards, and pirate the entire fire emblem series sans tellius and the third house and all of the available SMT games and spinoffs and the entire picross series because good and any funny stuff like the godawful shovelware game angry bunnies or runny egg and any other virtual console goodies for only $10 more than buying all integer toho games on steam
in fact you can even probably use twilightmenu to run touhouds and then use virtuaNES with toho rououmu and have a (worse) touhou experience ON both of the 2dses at the same time

[Aeon]

you can also neko project 2 as a .cia and can enjoy the crisp 20 fps of 3ds pc98 emulation. incredible stuff
on the topic of original touhou piracy: does anyone know if the steam copy of touhou 12 still comes with a virus (not rensenware :[) because i remember that being a bit of an issue a while ago

[spongelevator]

I think it was being picked up as a false positive (or maybe legit I dunno) so they just took it down and then put it back up and said "it's a false positive"
also many of the games on moriyashrine had michaelsoft binbows defendor detecting things as viruses and they always just say "is false positive" so I guess there is just something weird about how the games are made I dunno
only downloaded from there but I'm assuming it just happens with the games in general perhaps

on the topic of piracy again
there's the early windows games that aren't on there because too old and then there's those new but not newest fighting games 13.5/14.5
those aren't on steam at all so is 13.5 just going to be forgotten (is this good thing) and 14.5 is gonna become a console exclusive
obviously there are more ways to get them but if this is legit and ZUN also intends on putting older games onto steam these two are in a tough situation lol

[Aeon]

weird
it could be something zun's engine is doing specifically that triggers it, although i've never had the alert when i try to run any touhou game

early windows games, all the fighting games but aocf, all the pc98, none of it is there. it would be kinda weird with ulil and swr since they are just like pre-dlc aocf and soku, especially since aocf has been up for years and soku doesn't even work without swr. they should simply be sold as trilogies with a fancy launcher and aocf/soku updates patched back into the game before them! why not

[Aeon]

phantasmagoria of flower view is coming to steam
unusually, it looks like there is one bonus thing this time: the inclusion of v1.5a as an option through the betas section. apparently this patch includes netplay? i'm not actually reading the japanese i just went ahead and google translated but thats what it said. i always thought it released with it, so maybe this patch just makes it better
it's nothing new though, the patch itself has been out since two thousand and fiiiiive
and unless he tossed adonis in there too, it probably is not gonna be terribly helpful

[spongelevator]

if I'm reading it right it says "you can now play against the network" so this experimental patch allows for netplay but the patch is fifteen years old

all of our copies (from moriya) are 1.50a but we still have to use adonis anyway and I have no idea if the "normal" method detailed in the blog actually works
ZUN talks about it in the blog like he doesn't really seem sure about whether it actually consistently works either ("This experimental version is not a stable version so I don't know what will happen")
basically this is just what we already have minus adonis
I have no idea if all of this is just what you said and I completely misinterpreted every word of your post but eh watever

also regarding moriya itself
some uhh like literally two hours after the thing about the DMCA being legitimate there was a post about how they'd just be moving the file server to some country like russia or the netherlands or wherever that gives not one shit about copyright laws and then find some other way to offer the content without technically going against DMCA
just the typical piracy stuff except somehow they didn't have to consider relocating until now because 2hus
I can't actually go snip the post because I went to go do that and the site is under maintenance right now but it seems it'll still be as easy to access as before so we don't have to do a scary singular google search to find wherever else offers a download

neat that it did turn out he DMCA'd with the intention of adding more games to steam but when will he start putting stuff on sale because this just adds another half a copy of shin megami tensei:nocturne to the pile (probably because an integer game but the price isn't actually there yet so I dunno) and we only play multiplayer PoFV like twice a year so 10 bucks is the maximum

[Aeon]

thats what i was guessing but i was not sure for certain
i believe he said at one point he wasn't going to upload stuff before 9.5 to steam since he didn't have source code so i suppose fixing it is a bit out of the question
also: you do not need source code to upload games to steam, literally any binaries in a zip will do (i know this because i have done it)
and since its not like hes making them steam compatible or adding/fixing anything, it shouldnt be particularly relevant. maybe we see 6-8 on steam after all

godspeed moriya shrine, i know its against the man himself but it is an invaluable service
and thanks to those countries that simply do not care. there should be more of em