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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   1578 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for November 6, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I have spent a few hours playing the Zelda: Ocarina of Time remake (on PC I might add). It's a very charming and well-made game. It lifts the spirit.

The devs added major image sharpening to it though, probably in an effort to make a 1080p game look better on 4K TVs or something. I hope that can be modded out soon.

Oh, it's out? What's changed compared to the original?

Graphics, mostly.

Some flavor text, and some voice acting in cut scenes with key characters, but you aren't climbing on walls like Breath of the Wild.

Yeah OK. Not sure that's enough of a draw for me, especially with the cost of the hardware to run it.

I never played the original.

If someone starts posting about the differences: Please use spoiler tags.

Such a timeless classic. Brings back some memories. Last I caught of it a couple years ago was the speedrunning community found some major sequence break in the first stage of the game, when you have to wade through the meadows as a kid; takes you right to the endgame.

I think it’s vulgar to pirate games (I assume you’re not ripping it from the cart). Call it a matter of honor. If one must do it, it is best not to mention it.

I think its vulgar to pay for games. I pirated this and am emulating it, it's an amazing remake and the developers did a fantastic job. However, I would not be able to sleep at night knowing that I paid for it, and supported Nintendo/ the developers. These people very much deserve to be stolen from.

And the argument "He wouldn't have bought it anyway, so they aren't losing a sale" is not true in my case. I would've absolutely paid for it if piracy wasn't an option. But stealing it is simply the just thing to do in this case.

I found some good settings and it looks and runs beautifully now. No longer so grainy, fuzzy, choppy. I use the 'AMD FSR with softer sharpening' mode. And an ultrawide mod. This is awesome.

I agree with you, with the caveat that piracy is fine if the game is bound to an out of production system and not reasonable to purchase or was never made available to you in the first place. Using shady sites like Kinguin or G2A (are they still around?) that create massive discounts by abusing regional price arbitrage or key scams is just as bad imo.

The situation where piracy is fine tends to apply to Nintendo games quite a lot, though. When I was playing the Fire Emblem series, I had to use an emulator and pirated ROM to play most of the earlier entries, as they never received an official translation or western release. Path of Radiance was locked to the GameCube for the longest time and would have cost me hundreds to play legally. It’s now technically available via subscription to their online expansion pack, but having to rent a shitty emulation of a game via overpriced subscription is a compelling third case for piracy.

Because it’s inevitable that many games will not be supported and kept playable by the developers years into the future, emulation is incredibly important for game preservation. It is the only way to experience so many historic games. It has the unfortunate side effect of enabling piracy, but overall I think that’s a necessary evil.

Bravo. It surprises and disappoints me endlessly to see shoplifter ethics espoused by supposed right wingers.

I mean where's the line. I probably do a lot more 2 hour Steam refunds than most people but for me it's more of a 'If I don't like it I don't swallow' thing and I've never played a short game then refunded at completion but I'm sure I'm also incurring costs to the devs and whatnot.

This seems fairly obvious to me. The line is the contract offered by the developer/seller. They allow 2 hour refunds, then you're fine to do 2 hour refunds. If they know you can finish the game and then get a refund, then that's on them for offering that option. If it becomes a problem for them, then they will stop offering the option. If the platform is the problem, another platform will develop. Capitalism.

There is literally no way that you can legally buy a game. You can only purchase a revocable, non-transferable, full-price license to play the game until the publisher changes their mind or the servers shut down. That license is gimped in a dozen different ways, not least of which is that they do not permit it to work on a general computing device but only on their special hand-marked and very expensive machine. It's as though you bought a Hermes bag but were only allowed to wear it if you had your entire outfit from the same store.

We are not talking about normal products and we are not talking about normal markets.

Isn’t the only reason these licenses exist because they provide the legal framework to challenge piracy in court? Otherwise, I could simply copy my “digital product” and sell it to fifty thousand people, right?

That can hardly be the only reason, because they impose way more restraints than that. And copyright law covers that case anyway: you own a physical book in all respects but you can't legally make 50,000 photocopies of it and sell them. There's no reason you can't give away, share, edit or inherit software and media in the same way that you can with the book, except that it's mildly more annoying to handle the DRM and the companies want to maximise copies sold.

In practice there's a huge amount of space devoted to control freakery: 1980 Nintendo's insistence on signing all games released for their console so as to protect their family-friendly brand, for example.

I thought the difference was that book republishing is subject to centuries of established law specifically about reprinting printed works, whereas digital copyright law is very recent and incomplete, so the ‘perpetual license’ served as a blanket assertion that resale (or copying and distribution for free) was prohibited.

I'll look into that, I wasn't aware. You may be right, but I do think that current licensing has remained extremely restrictive long after better arrangements could have been sorted out, primarily because publishers find the extra restrictions extremely beneficial in other ways. They have consistently resisted attempts to organise e.g. inheritance of digital property.

It's as though you bought a Hermes bag but were only allowed to wear it if you had your entire outfit from the same store.

See, what I'd do is not buy the bag or wear it. I wouldn't steal it, or have a Chinese copy made of it. Not least because I would consider such a product/company so wildly unethical that I wouldn't want to support them, even spiritually by honoring their product.

What's the justification for using the product without paying for it? I guess I could see the logic for jailbreaking a game you already own, or downloading a copy of it for more convenient use, or pirating a new server for an online game that's dead.

But the logic of "the big corporation are greedy and unfair and just want to take advantage of me, maaaaaaaaan, so I'm justified to take what I want without paying" is the ethics of a shoplifter. It's the way people that loot stores justify their actions, on the basis that the owners and corporations are all against them, or that the insurance covers it anyway so there's no real loss, or other vague marxist noises.

I'm not saying I'm perfect: I use anna's archive and dodge paywalls and run adblockers and play ROMs and I'm not by any means meticulous about the IP ownership when I watch something online.

But we should admit that we do it out of greed, convenience, venality etc. If a seller offers their product in an unfair manner, the ethical thing to do is to simply refuse to purchase it, one is not justified in stealing it.

It's not a great analogy because copyright infringement (what you've been psyoped into calling piracy and theft) does not deprive anyone else of the good.

It is deprivation - they spent resources to create the game under the legal promise of copyright, i.e. that they have the right to gate-keep the experience from other people.

It's a more abstract kind of theft than, say, stealing someone's bike, since it's at the level of implicit legal contracts. But I don't see why your logic doesn't excuse hacking into someone's bank account to transfer funds to yourself: again there is no tangible good being deprived - just an implicit promise being broken.

I guess I could see the logic for jailbreaking a game you already own, or downloading a copy of it for more convenient use, or pirating a new server for an online game that's dead.

But the logic of "the big corporation are greedy and unfair and just want to take advantage of me, maaaaaaaaan, so I'm justified to take what I want without paying" is the ethics of a shoplifter.

Right, that's what I'm saying. There's a spectrum. The more boneheaded and aggressive the company's behaviour, the more justified I feel in circumventing it. For example, I own a copy of Bloodborne but no longer own a PS4, so that game is useless. I would therefore feel completely justified in downloading the ROM and playing it on an emulator. The same for something that isn't offered in my region. If you buy software at full price, but they deliberately content behind premium purchases or a system deliberately designed to feel like you can grind them out but you can't... I probably wouldn't pirate it but I would mind considerably less about people who did. Likewise lootboxes.

I feel like there is an awful lot of scope, in a world where games are not just a product but a sophisticated content delivery and monetisation system, and the walled-garden strategy is pursued ruthlessly, for business norms to produce practices that are genuinely inappropriate and don't earn my sympathy.

There is a big difference in my mind between say:

  • Playing a multiplayer game on PC for free: dude, you couldn't be bothered to sign in to steam and pay $20 for it?

vs.

  • Playing a multiplayer game on Switch 2 for free: dude, you couldn't be bothered to buy a $500 dollar games console to replace the $500 games console you bought 5 years ago that had basically the same functionality, and then spend $20 on the game, and then spend $10 a month on Nintendo's multiplayer service offering?

I personally believe that one should be honourable: there is scope for circumventing anti-consumer bullshit and the milking machine in different ways, but you should try to buy a copy somewhere and if you are playing everything for free then you are likely doing it wrong.

I don't believe that unilaterally forcing a healthier and more appropriate relationship between you, the supplier and the product is necessarily wrong, and I think flat out saying that, "there is no meaningful difference between downloading a cracked game that's not otherwise available on your device, and smashing the window of a store to take a TV" is overly reductive.

Not least because I would consider such a product/company so wildly unethical that I wouldn't want to support them, even spiritually by honoring their product.

Honestly, I don't think this works. There are too many whales in the world, the industry can stay unethical pretty much permanently as far as I can see. I'm not necessarily willing to accept a choice between jumping through every bullshit and expensive hoop placed before me, or just flat out boycotting massive chunks of the industry. I don't pirate, actually, but I feel increasingly less sympathetic to the corporations who complain about it. Steam proved decades ago that piracy is a service problem not a price problem, and if the industry refuses to learn that lesson because they make more money and have more control this way then I'm disinclined to oblige them.

I don't believe that unilaterally forcing a healthier and more appropriate relationship between you, the supplier and the product is necessarily wrong, and I think flat out saying that, "there is no meaningful difference between downloading a cracked game that's not otherwise available on your device, and smashing the window of a store to take a TV" is overly reductive.

I think that the looter who smashes the window of a store to take a TV believes that is what he is doing: unilaterally forcing a healthier and more appropriate relationship between himself, the supplier, and the product. It's the same philosophical leap. The individual is deciding that the owner of the property is not allowed to control the property, because the owner has transgressed some ad-hoc ethical line that the individual has drawn. Online piracy tends to point to, variously, exploitative monopolistic practices, advertising, wokeness, the size of the corporation, lack of alternatives. BLM-adjacent looters point to, variously, racism, capitalism, exploitative monopolistic practices, and lack of alternatives to justify their behavior.

Honestly, I don't think this works. There are too many whales in the world, the industry can stay unethical pretty much permanently as far as I can see. I'm not necessarily willing to accept a choice between jumping through every bullshit and expensive hoop placed before me, or just flat out boycotting massive chunks of the industry.

Of course they can if consumers are never willing to pursue alternatives. I'm consistently amazed by the contrast between the tremendous stated desire of consumers to regulate what companies are allowed to do, and their complete unwillingness to choose goods made ethically at a slight cost/convenience premium.

You seem to be talking past me. The point isn't what some looter thinks he is doing, the point is the actual case in question, which I have argued is different.

Do you agree that it is different in at least some respects, or do you believe that everything I'm writing is the delusion of a thief convincing himself theft is moral? In the former case we can discuss where the moral line actually sits, in the latter I don't think we have anything useful to say to each other.

if consumers are never willing to pursue alternatives.

I am not 'consumers'. I am a consumer. 'If everyone only...' never ever works.

The game came out almost 30 years ago. At what point can I just download it?

That’s facetious, this is a complete remake that seems to have been made largely from scratch by hundreds of people. If someone spends $100m remaking a movie from 1950 that is free on YouTube I don’t see why that would justify not paying to see the new version.

The remake came out only this month though

How are they doing it on consoles these days? Are they MOD chipping PS5’s with soldering irons like they did in the old days? Presumably the mechanisms have changed with time.

Browser exploits. Get RCE, break sandbox, patch kernel. But the dearth of exclusives worth playing on the PS5 means that this was the first generation of the console not worth jailbreaking.

I think it’s vulgar to pirate games (I assume you’re not ripping it from the cart). Call it a matter of honor. If one must do it, it is best not to mention it.

Why? With what the game industry as a whole has earned such a respect? AAA, microtransactions, wokeness (even worse than wokeness - cringe wokeness), bugs, abusive drm, overbearing licenses, consistently terrible writing, hostility and contempt towards their own audience and customers ... the list goes on. Even before gamersgate the industry was busy destroying the goodwill earned in the golden age of 1995-2006

If, ideologically, the developers aren’t worth supporting with your money, then you definitely shouldn’t support them with your time and attention by playing their game. The latter two things are much more valuable to them. Surely there are smaller creators much more deserving of those things out there to support?

You're conflating is and ought: the big names have more resources so they can make games that are sufficiently better (and in the case of multiplayer games having a large userbase) than indie stuff that it remains better even after worsening it with cash-grabs and political content.

Maybe the smaller creators are more morally worthy of support, but that doesn't mean they have the same quality/quantity of goods as the mainstream studios.

Also this is a weird 50 Stalins criticism to claim that actually the piracy is helping the studios. It is violating their wishes, so it is straightforwardly harming them. IMO piracy is immoral and a form of theft, but also even amongst otherwise law-abiding middle class people so I do it too and accept that I'm doing something wrong.

It seems like this Zelda is a well made and reviewed game, I see no reason why the creators shouldn’t be compensated. Life involves thousands of decisions in which one can be pro or antisocial at little or no cost.

Life involves thousands of decisions in which one can be pro or antisocial at little or no cost.

That cuts both ways, does it not? Are console exclusivity and restrictive EULAs pro- or antisocial?

If you had looked into this for a few seconds you would have seen that this game is released exclusively on the Switch 2. The Switch 2 is an expensive and yet very underpowered console that would not have let me take advantage of the qualities of the hardware and displays I've already got.

So it's not a case of compensating or not compensating deserving developers of a high quality game. It's about whether or not to buy a bad console at the same time. If they'd released the game on PC I would happily buy it.

If you bought the cart for $70 and then played an emulated version on PC (whether or not you ripped your own copy) I would consider that much less morally objectionable, but I’m guessing you did not do that.

I will buy the cart and then gift it to someone who actually needs it but is short on cash.

But you are in fact playing it on PC, and emulation is provided on the assumption that people are ripping legal copies of the game (and morally you could purchase a copy then download a ready to use version for your emulator I suppose)

The creators were Japanese people in the late 90s. I got nothing against them. I dispute any claim that decades later piracy harms them. If anything I think they are currently retired and beyond compensation.

Why? With what the game industry as a whole has earned such a respect?

One does not need to earn "don't steal stuff". You are perfectly free to not respect the games industry (AAA or otherwise) all you wish. But then just don't play their games. It's not hard. If your disdain for the industry is so great, you won't be missing anything by not playing.

One does not need to earn "don't steal stuff".

Piracy is not stealing.

Yes it is.

Damn, can't believe this is where the forum disagrees so heavily!

Whenever I pirate anything, I know it's stealing and immoral, at least at some level. I have a lot of justifications as to why I do it, but it's obviously an uncool thing to do.

I pirate (steal) movies and books because I don't know of a way to buy them DRM-free. The ones that are great I buy a physical copy of.

I buy music and games because it's easy to buy them DRM-free or with DRM + Features + a track record (Steam). It's that simple.

Copyright infringement is different from stealing.

In the legal realm perhaps, but not in the moral realm which is the more important.

No it is not. Now that we have moved our best daffy and bugs impression out of the way

Not only piracy is not stealing, but actually downloading for personal use is fairly legal (uploading is not), and on top of that because of the way cracks work it could be classified as fair use - it is security research after all.

Legality is not relevant here. You asked why you should refrain from pirating games, given that the companies haven't earned your respect. I am saying: you should refrain because, contrary to your assertion, piracy very much is stealing, and stealing from people is wrong whether or not you respect them.

If I pirate the game and then choose not to play it, have I financially deprived them in any way? I’ve not consumed their product.

A better argument is to (1) say that you wouldn't have bought it anyway, and (2) as actual supporting evidence cite the official EU study finding that the alleged displacement of video-game purchases by copyright-infringing downloads is fake: rather, infringement leads to an increase of +24 % in legitimate sales (vs. +0 % in music, −27 % in film and television, and −38 % in books).

1 wouldn’t have made any difference to the point, I don’t see what value it has to my statement. I wouldn’t defend 2 either, if nothing else but from a logical or a legal standpoint. It’s irrelevant whether or not committing a crime in the case of copyright infringement has the side effect of being beneficial to the producers of the product. The laws are already on the books and they say what they say. Now if I disagree with the law that’s the separate issue, but there’s no defense to be made at that point to determine if I’ve committed the crime by illegally consuming the product.

I’ve pirated movies I’ve never watched. I’m sure I had the intention at some point of doing so, or at the very least clicking through and catching a snippet of something to see if it piques my interest, but I don’t aimlessly download things I don’t use or need. And when I realize I can’t or won’t watch it, I delete it. It’s difficult for me to understand where exactly the financial harm is in that, but I’m sure someone could argue it.

The relative complexity of games today vastly outstrips the amount of work it took during the days of 8 bit cartridges you could mass produce. The original MK1 was one programmer, two artists and a sound designer. That’s it. 4 guys. These days, projects have in excess of 50+ people, and you often need the work of some of the most talented people in the video game industry. The economics make it cheaper to just go full CoD or Madden and endlessly reskin the same game year after year, than to try something novel and innovate.

What a vulgar assumption!!

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