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Bleem's Gravestone Online
An Anonymous Coward writes: "I just went over to Blue's and saw that Bleem is dead. What happened? Have the lawyers finally gotten to them?" Maybe they just got tired.
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Working at Electronics Boutique, I can tell you that at least on Friday, we were still selling Bleem! products.
However, looking at how few Dreamcast systems we're selling (we have two new ones left, and the rest are preowned), and how few new PS games are coming out, it really doesn't make sense. The only way to make money for them now would be to find a way for something like XBox to play PS2, PS, Gamecube, and Dreamcast games. But that would invoke serious ire.
Bleem! was a great idea, and made great products, but perhaps the strategy just reached the end of its lifecycle. I wish the guys the best in whatever new ventures they pursue.
The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it. - G.B. Shaw
Then open-source it so somebody else can continue to develope the emulator for the x86.
--- No, english is not my mother tongue.
I was initially very excited about the PC version of Bleem!; I even pre-ordered it. Well, after getting my disc 6 weeks late because they screwed up the order (their fault) I finally got it and was disappointed. Even up to and including their final release, Bleem! on the PC was buggy as hell.
Out of all the games I tried, very very few of them actually worked toally okay. I wasn't expecting perfection, but most times the graphics glitches were so significant that I didn't really consider the game playable. When I say "graphics glitches", I'm talking about texture corruption, 99% of the time. I had bought Bleem specifically to get higher visual quality out of these games (bilinear filtering, higher res, etc) so I wasn't as tolerant of graphics glitches as I otherwise might have been.
Also, Bleem! for Dreamcast was just executed very poorly. For those who don't know, they originally planned to sell three or four "Bleempacks" that would each run 30-40 PSX games. I guess the idea was to get a limited number the games working *perfectly* on each disc, as well as to charge the customer numerous times. Alas, even that was unacheivable, and they had to create versions of Bleem! that ran only ONE GAME- they released Bleem! Metal Gear and Bleem! Gran Turismo.
Sorry, but it was WAY too expensive. I'm not paying $20 or whatever for a graphical upgrade for a single 3-year old game... especially considering that they don't look THAT much better than the originals and even the enhanced versions were far surpassed by other Dreamcast games.
Interestingly, Connectix's VGS emulator worked almost flawlessly with all the PSX games I tried, although it didn't run on NT/2K, and didn't support 3D hardware so the games weren't graphically enhanced at all. This is the emulator that Sony bought and then yanked from the market.
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But this, this my fellow emulaton fans, is a sombre occasion that even the most stoic and hard-bitten game journalist/aficionado would find a tear marching its slick trail down the side of his jaded, tightly-clenched jawline.
"But Steve," you say "Bleem was a hunk of ass, I mean, it capped out at resolutions of only 800x600. Teh Playstation was w33k d00d. My Pentium 4 2 gig 0wnz! J00 are a pussy for crying like a little, broken-hearted girl over a stupid emulator."
To which I reply emphaically "Shut your bleemhole, ass. Remember when Raine was buried in its cardboard casket? Not a dry eye in the goddamned house, you little prick."
But you, you're always quick to berate and tear me down and hate, and hate you do... "Raine is still around, f00l. J00're a dumbfuck."
Yeah, that's right. Raine was ressurrected via some strange, arcane voodoo ritual, slain again, raised from the eternal depths once again, then burned by superstitious and cowardly townsfolk, then thrown into a river.
And that, baby, is why I weep. Not because Bleem died, not because Sony (god bless the 4 pin iLink...) is a horrid, evil corporate demon, but because I've drank about twenty whisky sours tonight, and are somehow still ambulatory AND lucid.
Yes, we journalists lead a tough life, but its one that we've chosen, baby...
Why is it when I hit ^R that ZSH calls me a cocksucker?
In a final achievement they managed to make a webpage that simply loads one picture, that only works in internet explorer. iCab and Netscape just show a blank page. This is quite a metaphor for their past performance.
"Remember, there never were pineapple-almond cookies here."
For those who go to the site and get a black screen - it appears that the site only works on Internet Explorer. No big deal though, it has 100 lines of Javascript just to fade in a picture of a tombstone with Sonic the Hedgehog crying and placing flowers next to it. Semi-cute I guess.
Bleem may be dead, but its spirit lives on in PCSX.
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I agree with those that say it was Bleemcast that killed Bleem, kinda. Its was actually Sony that killed them, Bleemcast just provoked them. But it is really sad they way they went. Sony may have won, but they did it extremely unfairly. Sony tried to stop them in court, but when the courts ruled in favor of Bleem, and Sony was defeated, they then went on to win the battle unfairly. Last year (when PS2 was extremely popular but in such short demand) Sony went so far as to inform retailers that if they carried Bleemcast, they might just coincidentally find themselves on the wrong end of the PS2 shortage (if you know what they mean). So, first they drained them to the edge of bankruptcy, then they cut off their revenue.
Slashdot didn't cover the last few months of Bleem's existence when their web site detailed the news that Sony were trying to shaft them by threatening stores stocking their products with withholding of PS2 stocks (this was last Christmas). This was after they had successfully defended an attempted injunction by Sony to stop them selling Bleem! for PCs; so after failing to stop Bleem by legal means, they semi-successfully hurt them by traditional strongarm tactics.
:-)
However I don't think they made the most of their martyr situation with regard to the Dreamcast Bleem port they had. Firstly, I think the whole idea of selling it as 'Bleempaks' rather than a warts-and-all 'complete' emulator was flawed; if you don't know, they decided that they wanted to sell the emulator on several separate CDs costing a few dollars, each of which would pay 20-odd Playstation games that were guaranteed to work perfectly. Their line was that customers would know exactly what they were getting and wouldn't be disappointed when a game they hadn't tested didn't work. What it looked like was a short-sighted attempt to boost sales by potentially splitting somebody's PSX library across all these Bleempaks, and making them pay more for it. I sent them an email to this effect at the end of last year, and had no response.
But I've since been convinced otherwise; from what I've heard, despite the fact that it was impressive at what it did, PC Bleem was never particularly reliable or compatible, even with the latest update which they stated would be the last. And this might explain why Sega weren't more supportive at the time when the Dreamcast was in its death-throes; sure a Playstation compatibility CD would give the console a shot in the arm, and if Bleem could successfully take on Sony's lawyers, surely Sega could, and then some? It seems likely that the same quality control problems which the PC Bleem! owners have witnessed would explain why they've only been able to release two single-game compatibility products for the Dreamcast so far, let alone a complete emulator or even a single 20-game Bleempak that they had planned.
Obviously this is total speculation, as nobody ever saw any other games working under Bleem!cast. Even if it were true, I wouldn't blame the single Bleem programmer for not being able to get the whole product done & tested, start-to-finish, while simultaneously fending off Sony's lawyers, working (apparently) from home and still trying to have a life. I'd even heard it was written in 100% assembler which makes the job even more fearsome.
Ah well, I guess that means the PS2 stays on my Christmas wishlist
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