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Nintendo Patents Insanity
theodp writes "Nintendo scored a patent Tuesday for a Sanity system for video game, which covers causing a game character to hallucinate - e.g., see bleeding walls and hear maniacal laughter - as its sanity decreases in response to encountering a creature or gruesome situation."
I wonder of the writers/copyright holders of Call of Cthulhu would say to that.
"Prior Art"
I hope.
"Oops, I always forget the purpose of competition is to divide people into winners and losers." - Hobbes
The only game I can recall with a decent sanity system was Eternal Darkness for the gamecube. I'm sure there were others, but that was the only one that left an impression on me.
The Silent Hill games have an insanity system, but it's less related to the characters and more related to the world.
In theory, the new Cthulhu game has a sanity system, which may count as prior art, and that brings up an interesting idea. Does a system that has been developed but not yet released count as prior art?
I'm just hopeful that this leads to some new games exploring insanity.
The Spec means nothing. The considerably broader claims are what is actually covered by the patent. That spec could read on several embodiments of the same system and in the end only one of those embodiments may be specifically covered by this patent, or the claims could be so broad to cover then all. However, their coverage is not limited to these embodiments, so any other system that reads along the claims could still be infringing the patent. As I have said tons of times, please read patent law and procedure of the United States. There are many things that you (the Slashdot community) really DO NOT KNOW or UNDERSTAND.
"Some days you just can't get rid of a bomb."
Of course, while I don't remember hallucinations in that game, there were hallucinations if you wandered aimlessly through the desert in Infidel, another Infocom game.
Illbleed for the Dreamcast had something sort of like a sanity system, in that your mental state was affected by the horrors you witnessed, and could lead to a heart attack.
Maybe Nintendo was afraid of what happened with SEGA's Crazy Taxi where a Simpson's licensed Crazy Taxi-like game was released by another company (Simpson's Road Rage). (Not that this excuses this kind of patent, of course.)
"MIT betrayed all of its basic principles."
On the patentability: Yes, there's oodles of parallel prior art.
On the game itself:
Mustn't be missed. The sanity system is *effective*; it really honestly does warp the player's perspective, make it honestly difficult to know what's real and what isn't, and does actually inspire a creepy sense of dread.
It makes you go out of your way to not create the situations that end up with you being insane. Loss of sanity happens through a few different ways, but basically it's "do something nuts, and go nuts; get hit by something freakish, and go nuts".
If a creature gets the jump on you, your sanity drops. If you get the first shot in, you keep your sanity unless it hits you physically - and then your sanity drops. Physical damage gets fixed, but the psychological damage can only be fixed through a different mechanism.
It's absolutely brilliant, and makes for *riveting* gameplay. Patents like this, which make it harder for people to innovate gameplay, shouldn't be allowed, IMO, if they're overly broad. It's too good an idea to only end up in one game from one company on one system - something like this belongs all over the place.
It's just brilliant.
-- A mind is a terrible thing.
But this patent isn't like a poison or drug effect, it was filed in response to Eternal Darkness.
This game is UNIQUE. You have a sanity meter, and as it goes down your character starts hallucinating. You bring the meter back up by killing enemies, and thus regaining your confidence. Sometimes, the hallucination was obvious, designed to make you laugh (walls bleeding, walking on the celing, strange noises, etc).
But some instances were devilishly clever. One time, I was playing late at night, with the lights off. Suddenly, the sound cuts out and I see a big pixelated "MUTE" on the screen.
I start looking around in the dark, trying to see if my stupid ass had rolled over the remote, when the sound suddenly cut in and my character screamed "WHAT IS GOING ON!". Freaked me out.
It doesn't matter that the "MUTE" didn't look quite like my TV's overlay, at that point I was too into the game to think that out. Best trick ever pulled on a player. Why is this unique? The nastier tricks were rare, and never repeated (something you can't say for, say, status ailment effects, which are usually the same, or predictable).
Other nasty tricks that only happened once:
Hallucinating and seeing additional ghouls in an area I'd already cleared, with them appearing right behind me.
Hallucinating that I'd blown my head off trying to reload a flintlock pistol. Thought I'd have to restart the whole battle until the hallucination ended.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.