Re: how far have we really taken these rules on the forum!
If you are totally blind, you are never going to get to actually play Mario Party successfully. No matter how hard you try, that's just the way it is. There are dozens of other games this is true for as well.
Pokémon is a different story, admittedly, since while accessibility is up and down, and you'll never get the complete picture, you can still play most main series pokemon games as a blind person.
Juan, what it sounds like you're saying is that because Pragma has given people a chance to play an approximate version of one or both of these games, his sounds should be left alone. By this logic, someone in the community should be able to pirate a bunch of Final Fantasy assets and make a Final Fantasy clone. Or Legend of Zelda. Or Mortal Kombat. Or any of half a hundred other franchises. Except, that's not a good idea precisely because it's using pirated assets.
If the Japanese community can produce free audio games with lush soundscapes, and can evoke a certain feel while doing it, then I daresay so can we. Take Shadow Rine, for instance. It pretty much has a basic SNES-style action RPG vibe, and even though it's not stealing hundreds of sounds, it does a great job.
I'm sorry, but the argument that Pragma's game needs pirated assets in order to be a good game is just weak, and it doesn't work. Remember, I've played both this game and experienced some of the original source material here. Does borrowing those assets help immediately evoke a certain vibe? Well sure it does. I won't deny that. But is that necessary for playing the game? Not at all.
Here's where I say something you folks really won't like though.
The reason I say that this whole thing is a slap in Pragma's face is very simple. Basically, what Pragma wants to do is make a game that's very very similar in almost every way to Mario Party or Pokémon, and one of the shortcuts he used to achieve mass appeal is by using pirated assets. Basically, most games have to fly on their own laurels to some extent. They need to succeed or fail on their own merits. But what Pragma did, in essence, was to use a ton of someone else's work and say "Hey, see, my game is just like theirs!". You folks talk about how hard it would be to replace those hundreds of sounds; yeah, uh, how hard do you think it was to -create those hundreds of assets in the first place? Basically, anybody who's spouting the "these pirated assets are necessary" party line is arguing that it's okay to shortcut your way to success by stealing somebody else's work. Last I checked, we're...really kind of against that in the audio gaming community.
And perhaps the reason at a glance that something like AA's sound pack doesn't get quite the same attention, BTW? Yes, it's full of copyrighted assets, no argument there. But there is a game without that sound pack. You can play AA without the sound pack and the game itself is essentially unchanged. AA doesn't live or die by its pirated assets. But by the argument that continues to crop up, apparently CP does. While you may think this is a strength, it's actually a weakness, and really shows off the lack of originality and willingness to steal, so long as it's in the apparently good cause of evoking nostalgia.
Now let's take this one step further.
What if my reason for stealing assets is because I want to make a game but don't have money? Is that okay?
What if it's because I really really really freaking love these certain pieces of music and I want you to experience the game a certain way, but I know I'm just not going to be Nobuo Uematsu's equal? Is that okay?
What if I just felt like it? Is that okay too? Really give this some thought, folks.
Really, what some of you have arbitrarily decided is that nostalgia is a good enough reason to tolerate piracy. Why is that? Really sit down and chew on it. If we're supposed to be improving as a community, why are some of us saying that nostalgia, or trying to mimic the sound of another game, actually makes a good audio game? By this argument, really most of our attention should be on ripping sounds from popular projects, slapping on a fresh coat of paint and calling them by slightly different names. Clearly, this is the key to popularity and success.
Never mind that whatever you might think of a faceless corporation, there were actually individuals in those projects who worked like dogs to create some of the things you know and love. Never mind that the gaming industry in general is chock-full of stories of companies treating their employees badly, of harsh deadlines, of unrealistic expectations, and of employees who are overworked, undercompensated and prone to mental health problems because of unreasonable working conditions. Never mind that we're absolute death on clones because they steal code. Why is stealing code so bad but stealing sounds is not?
-- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
