piracy (Read 807 times)

[spongelevator]

honestly at this point I am just wondering if anything will be done to make steam actually equal or better to just pirating the pre-patched games because if he's gonna upload the rest of the stuff it's the 235 plus another assumed 60 for 6-9 and assumed 11 for swrsoku which allows for the purchase of another ps2
probably being annoying about this but price is really the main thing that makes the steam option ass so hopefully if he intends on putting more games on steam he also intends on making things go on sale because otherwise it's just the exact same unmodified game except more inconvenient to obtain and use and aint nobody want to backflip through three flaming hoops for the same result
at least we still got crusty imports for now

[Aeon]

if he just went and patched some of the bugs it would at least be something but even though stuff like 3 power marisa b has been documented and even reverse-engineered for years, steam is same as original release
now what would really get people in on it would be just a teeeny lil game-focused update like toss me a bone here whats it take to add ooone more character to each game as you go through them
a shot type, a bomb, some sprites, and dialogue
that would go so far in making the steam versions worth it even if they didnt have any steam features or english patches
man says he has source! act like it
maybe i am being overly critical and underestimating how difficult it is to add a character in his engine compared to my own since recently i did see some unfiltered zunscript and it looks. challenging. to work with
but we all got copy paste
and thats just an example right like maybe toss in a spellcard or two, maybe spell practice for the games that lack it since i know thats just a copy paste and a menu option

and yeah price is the big kicker
no bundle, no sale
but at least we have sponge-sourced import methods

[spongelevator]

lol I wonder what will happen if steam EoSD then
with its windows 10 123336669fps thing
he's gonna have to do some shit to make that actually work if we get that and EoSD would also be the big seller so it has to work good

yeah something actually different about the steam releases from pirated or CD release would help if he never puts the things on sale and each time you buy a game you feel the demons slip away forever
spell practice is the one reason I actually gave more than 1/8th of a shit about IN even though I was still garbage at it
this time I didn't have to play through a full stage to get to marisa's star-fire shitstorm and die immediately
so that but every game would make it worth considering paying fifteen dollars for touhou: uhhhhh unidentified fantastic object
no clue about adding new things into the games myself but there is one thing he can (probably) easily add without issues and that is achievements
literally seventy cent puzzle games on steam have a handful of achievements and there's even achievements within UM, right?
what is the incentive of getting past stage four if I can't see a little notification saying "earned achievement: stomped sukuna"???????
for now I will continue to not be able to beat anything above nomaru modo all-bombs all-deaths PCB

virgin importing official games vs chad importing ikusaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaan

[rys]

Apr 8, 2022 18:44:22 GMT spongelevator said:

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

Life finds a way I guess.

If they're just going to keep pushing (unpatched) rereleases on steam, that does kind of kill some hope for something like a remake of the old games though, which is a shame. maybe Zun has something else in the works?

[spongelevator]

yeah I honestly am not sure why he suddenly chose to start putting older games on steam but not actually doing anything with them
for PoFV the patch is still beta after fifteen years which is pretty damn weird to do so I have no idea what's goin on there
if he's just trying to make the games more accessible to the western audience I can see that but it's strange to only be doing that now hasn't it been like two years since he did anything similar with more than just one game (oh god it has been almost three)
since he's done it before and nothing came out of it though honestly this is probably just that again 
in the end even if eosd gets added to steam at 69420fps we can sleep soundly knowing pc98 will forever be forgotten and not be remade or put anywhere legal ever so it's completely fair to play it on your nintendo sony sega microsoft gamestation triple

[Aeon]

spongelevator
achievements would prooobably take just as much effort as a content patch (not that much). do would still need source (or some funny ass guy that hooks onto the game)
but it would be pretty good to have. maybe even backport the ingame achievements to at least the other stuff that uses the modern engine
spell practice i have literally never understood why its not in half of the games. it like. is not hard to implement at all, let alone already having done it before. super balls ass annoying to mod in i bet but if you are zun it should be a single day job

also he commented on the eosd problem before, pretty sure he said he would just work with whoever already made the patch and toss it in the steam version. maybe he will realize you can do that for more than just fixing unplayable glitches

also you got ikusaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaan that one is pretty good
i oughta give it another go

rys
i posted a long time ago about a rumor that he was doing pc98 or early windows remakes, but i probably wouldn't hold out faith for em by this point. i'm sure he's got something in the works though, it's getting to be about that time again. will it be touhou nineteen: battle for misty lake, or touhou eighteen and a half: the secrets of the ability cards? place your bets


also, moriya shrine is back up. i clicked through the downloads as far as i could get without actually downloading anything since i have basically no space right now, and it looks like everything's back up. takes some guts to just shrug off a dmca like that

[TSUN]

yeah, the prices of the steam versions are kinda eh. like i think they're *way* overpriced, but also i paid like $60 for two games. and it might sound dumb, but personally i might actually be willing to pay like $300 for a collection of every windows 2hu game if it was physical copies at a con. but when it's a digital copy on steam, you'd be hard-pressed to find me paying more than like $5 for just one game. like, i might pay for a couple of them, but that's more like a donation to ZUN than anything.

Maybe it's just a me thing, but digital downloads just feel exponentially less valuable. Like, physical copies are tangible, and it feels good knowing you *own* it. Unless the thing you've downloaded is borderline lost media, you don't really get that feeling with digital downloads. It's just a folder on your hard drive, and most folders on my hard drive were downloaded for free.

the takedown thingy happening because of the older games being put up makes sense, but also...
okay this might sound dumb, but taking down fan projects that make the old games way smoother experiences and releasing versions that make no improvements whatsoever and charging several $$$ for it
kinda reminds me of a couple things Nintendo has done
obviously ZUN himself is no Nintendo
but the fact that i can even draw a comparison between his actions and theirs at all is a bit sad
theoretically it's great that the old games are officially available, but from a western player's point of view pirating is just more convenient on every level

and ya know, moriya shrine being gone wouldn't actually change anything except making it more inconvenient to pirate. and sure, piracy is often done when it's more convenient to pirate. but the best way to fix that is to make the official services better, not make the unofficial methods worse

but whatever. either way, i'll happily buy him a few beers, and enjoy shoot the bullet 2 as a bonus

[spongelevator]

ok assuming "every windows 2hu game" is every integer game (definitely not because I don't want to have to search up every single game) it is uhhh
8642 yen for 6-17 (18 wasn't in stock) and an approximated 3700 yen for shipping (I guessed 1.5kg to be safe but it could end up less) for a total of 12342 yen before tax and without including time sales
prices are a tad bit wonky right now I saw a lot of games were a decent amount more than before but eh sales will kick it down enough anyway
there's stuff like StB though where I bought them for less than 500 yen and they now cost almost 1k yen which is complete ass
I gave enough an ass to check because wynaut but I did not give enough an ass to do it properly

now you may be thinking "why does the sponge keep checking the prices when it does not matter at all?"
excellent, my dear fellow! a welcome question!
naturally, it is to compare these prices to shin megami tensei III: Nocturne for the playstation two!
(yes I am fully aware this is not even close to the original purpose of these comparisons)

here it is, the aforementioned classic, for three-hundred-and-ninety yen!
if we are to assume a weight of one-hundred-and-fifty grams, you would be able to purchase approximately sixteen-and-a-half copies of shin megami tensei III: Nocturne for the playstation two for six-thousand-four-hundred-forty-two yen and pay another five-thousand-and-nine-hundred yen to ship your newly found copies!
perhaps you should mean to obtain a large section of the Touhou Project series, or possibly you simply have not yet witnessed this striking deal!

yeah nintendy is ass I honestly forgot they were doing that kinda stuff though but now I have remembered all the things they nuked
at least they aint touchin 

(I don't actually know what this is other than "mario kart wii mod" but every time I see it I laugh because of like
every single part of this)
thankfully though moriya rose right back from the earth aided by lady frog-sama herself and the war had ended as quickly as it began
(dammit I have to play 15.5 again because of this)
though ZUN may have decided to release PoFV with quite literally zero changes even including the beta patch, it don't matter 'cause we're back in business!

(I got ZUN his two beers or however many
yeah two
two beers already so I am freed of sin)

[Aeon]

TSUN
yeah all of that makes sense
i wouldnt call the digital ones exponentially less cool since the physical ones don't have any special goodies but if there was some kinda quirky physical bonus it would be neat. it would be cool too if digital copies had something to distinguish themselves, i wonder if there is some kind of "un-duplicatable symbol" that each copy could come with and [this user was shot dead while composing this post]

troubling comparison! although i think zun is ambivalent to the fan-patches and upgrades and is just knocking it off because of the piracy, when with nintendo, you can make it as legal as possible and they still get sniped.
still quite lame though you are very right

but dooont even worry, moriya shrine is already kicking again

spongelevator
a mere three hundred and ninety yen! that is incredible. if discounts past release count, why i may very well start measuring things in copies of castle crashers (frequently on sale for 99 cents)

i got a few beers paid for too i think we are in the clear

[Aeon]

piracy. serious business.
well, i've calmed down over the past couple of months. or a year. i've reevaluated the situation, crunched some numbers, synergized some stocks, and have discovered the new meta.
they say the rich get richer. true, true.
but the virtuous, the righteous, the great, they get greater.
the worlds greatest website, archive dot org, has become a fairly awesome place to pirate recently
i don't know if there's no moderation or no rules or if it truly is just serving its duty as the ultimate library but,
they have whatcha need.

those links don't cover everything, but it's a fair bit. you can pretty easily just punch "archive.org touhou [x]" into google and find it.
or maybe not google? i use duckduckgo and i can find stuff easily but my sister tried a few times on google and was having trouble.

[spongelevator]

yeah archive.org has basically everything half of all links to old games are now archive.org links to giant collections of entire game libraries
though I don't know how long it'll stay that way because every time I hear about it these days is about legal trouble unless I am illiterate or something

either way a copy of shin megami tensei: nocturne still only sets you back 380 yen compared to the ??? dollars that EoSD on steam costs (because it does not exist)
good deals good deals in the piracy thread

[Aeon]

i also found sonic frontiers on archive.org like ten days after it released lmao
the site is getting a lot of fire from chumps yeah but so far i don't think it's been about games or whatever, just books. those publishers man they got sticks up their ass. i always sign their lil petitions and donate a bit since archive dot org fights tha good fight

one of these days i gotta learn to torrent but
that day is still not today

[spongelevator]

oh ok books are less relevant since there are probably 999999 websites with books that are far easier to navigate and also hosted in lawless lands so they will never go down
looks like them gamecube archives stayin up

I was too lazy to learn how to torrent back when I was a wee middle school babby
and recently I've found pretty much everything I would want to find as a ddl
it seems people don't want to torrent much anymore other than for faster speeds so everything is on a website these days
I was surprised to find the only thing separating me from a full switch microsd is 500kb/s download speeds
oh other than one in every forty niche touhou arrange album I still need to torrent those every four months one comes up

[lazulum]

I remember that they used to be a really good resource for downloads back in the day. Now that Zun's games are available on Steam, I guess it isn't surprising he'd start issuing takedowns. The justification for many back in the day was that the games were largely inaccessible outside of Japan.

Edit: oof, just read the part about the Steam versions not coming fully patched. That definitely creates a barrier for entry. Hopefully that gets fixed sooner rather than later.