According to sorehands, it is an acronym for Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation. Essentially, it is when a company sues you so they can silence you because you are saying things which, while true, would hurt their reputation. Sorehands says it is illegal. I say if it is not it should be, because using lawsuits to stop competition or to silence people warning about the danger of a company's products (or their terrible business practices) is definitely an abuse of teh process. It is too bad our courts are clogged with crap like this; it stops legitemate claimants from obtaining justice.
Maybe they should have worked in some bit about usenet posts and "you don't have to be a Kreskin to see the UNIX code in Linux..." Then they could have a goatse.cx link like "SCO feels that the following patents are clearly infringed by Linux.";)
If Novell's IP claims stand up, these vague threats against everyone except IBM (they may have a breach of contract suit there) would seem to be barratry.
Too bad it is not even defined as an offense here in the US. If it has, lawyers in the US are pretty quiet about it, perhaps in hope of protecting their own. Essentially in the US lawyers can do whatever they feel like doing. Judges (who are lawyers) make arbitrary rulings that have nothing to do with facts, prosecutors lie in open court and hide/plant evidence, defense attorneys sell their clients down the river on purpose (or if their clients are rich help them commit crimes), and "civil" attorneys make lying, baseless threats like the ones SCO is making in order to bully people while maintaining a veneer of lawfulness.
Confucius warned that when a country's laws become meaningless civilization is ready to fall. If the US does not rein in its lawyers (including those who become Congresscritters) this is exactly what will happen. People who think it has already happened have no idea how bad it can really get (think Western Rome after the barbarians took over...)
Unfortunately, they weren't. And they did not sell well. Perhaps a precursor to SCO Products?
Pantywaists were an attempt at a unisex undergarment for children in the US in the early 20th century. Unfortunately in US culture anything associated with women (even as unisex) tends to get a stigma of being effeminate (this was especially true in the "good old days". The term was later extrapolated to mean an effimenate male (a sissy, one with no cojones, etc...).
Trade secrets are different than patents as they can have no expiration date, but if it gets out, you have no recourse. Which is why you don't see patents for Coca-cola. It's a trade secret. If you know the secret and ever divulge it, there's probably enough legal paperwork you signed to make you wish you were in pound-me-in-the-ass prison instead of the hell the Coke lawyers will send you.
Or to paraphrase the immortal words of Sgt "Bat" Guano, they will have to answer to the Coca Cola company.;)
This has been covered to death the last few days, but jeez, SCO can't claim true enterprise scalability of any sort in its own products, so where can they claim the IP was theirs?
More to the point, how is it insightful to see something is covered to death but not read the articles? Then again, in slashdot all is lawful.
SCO UnixWare apparently has enterprise features, and ESR was unfortunately wrong but corrected himself. Of course most people read the 5 second blurb about his paper and did not read his paper. Oh well.
McBride added that unless more companies start licensing SCO's property, he may also sue Linus Torvalds, who is credited with inventing the Linux operating system, for patent infringement.
Pretty transparent, eh? What, give the troll money or he'll get you and your little Finn too? Jiminey!
IANAL, but I am reasonably certain you cannot legally say you will sue someone unless someone else pays you money/ buys your product. If that person damages you and you have a legal right to sue, that right is irrelevant to whether others pay you money not to do it. In short McBride is seriously hurting his/SCO's case here (such as it is) with his wild and stupid statements. I can just see the lawyers turning red and going "ixnay, man!"
Seriously this sort of thing would embarrass any lawyer, even if they are slimeballs;).
Yes, I notice a copious amounts of soldiers sleeping and eating in my house (3rd Amendment) and then following it up my taking my guns (2nd and 9th Amendments) and confiscating my socialist propaganda (1st Amendment).
Well, if your dad were in the military (or your mom), they might do just that!:)
Re: your sig. I think congresscritters should be required to write the definition of these words on a blackboard 1000 times or until they get it, whichever is more. I would also support legislation to that effect. How can people swear to defend the constitution when they don't even know what it is? How can they swear that oath, tear it apart and then not be tried for perjury and treason following some form of censure/impeachment?
But the thing that made River City Ransom was the fighting elements, the elements of RPGS, and Soccer goodness!
Hmm, it sounds like I missed out on something really good. I never got to really play River City Ransom (and honestly the nes emulators never seemed to deal with the martial arts games properly... especially when you consider the NES controller was half the fun of these games...) though I do remember trying it briefly. I never saw any soccer; that sounds interesting.
Double Dragon III for NES tried to add some RPG elements (indeed, I briefly tried making a paper and dice adaptation of it. I was a bored tennager.) But River City Ransom definitely went far further in this department. I found the martial arts in the Double Dragon series (especially the arcade) made far more sense and were better varied than pretty much anything else. I think fighting games today have more moves, but the execution involves a lot of wild circles and button mashing, whereas the Double Dragon moves all had a logical progression. (All punching moves use the punch button, all kicking used the kick button, etc.
River City Ransom's moves were comparable to the double dragon port to the nes in complexity and ease of use IIRC though they used a slightly different model (also IIRC, as this one did not make it into my collection:( ).
You have been bitten by an old troll. Every once in awhile this exact troll appears in the Mac stories on/. It is a good troll because it works; people will try to help the troll fix his/her mac, people will counter with their experience, etc. After you think a bit and realize that an 8600 is far faster than a 486 by any stretch of the imagination you realize what it is.
I might settle for that. What I hate is that there are 5000+ fighting games out there, and not one that comes close to Double Dragon. Hell, the martial arts adventure (ala Double Dragon and River City Ransom) essentially died off when it was replaced by tournament fighting games, which made people sick of fighting games.
Someone somewhere should make a new martial arts adventure!
I was thinking this would be fun as well. The only really good wild west game I can rememeber was SunsetRiders, which was just a sidescrolling platform shootemup. I was recently wondering what would happen if you made an open-ended GTA3/VC type game in this genre. Or make it multiplayer. I think it would be fun to play.
How original is it? Probably not very. But how many wild west rpgs or open-ended games have you seen?
Hell, Star Wars is so unoriginal you can find all its archetypes in Joseph Campbell's works on myths and heroes.
But this was by design. Star Wars was meant to incorporate the basic elements of myth Joseph Campbell wrote about. George Lucas was an avid student of Campbell's work.
We were playing GTA3 for PC, and there's no multi-player mode, but it's fun to watch. We each have our own saved game and we took turns. He let me take his tank for a spin.:)
Actually, there is. Apparently, there was supposed to be a multiplayer version, but it did not get done, so the open source community finished the game. Too bad there is not the same thing for VC, or the PLaystation versions.
I've got 80 Dreamcast games, and I'd say almost all of them are at the least good, with many, many great games in there.
Well, part of the problem here may have been the stores, which only seemed to carry 8. Hell, I can't even name that many titles for the DreamCast. I remember Crazy Taxi was plugged to hell and back (and the impression was given that it was the only decent unique title). It shocks me that new titles are coming out when Sega proclaimed Dreamcast was dead years ago (and then people promptly bought them for $50 and put BSD on them, a proper OS for something dying (dead);) )
Nintendo has the same problem. As far as I can tell the Game Cube seems to have Luigi's Mansion, Zelda, Metroid Prime, and not much else. The difference here is that is probably enough to sell a GameCube (I remember buying an N64 just for Shadow of the Empire, and my PSX was originally simply to play FFVII).
Consoles are sold when you have titles that are compelling enough to buy your console and do not exist on other consoles. I personally prefer games to be ported to as many platforms as possible, but like most people I am happy when it comes to a platform I maintain. The other aspect of this is whether ports for your console are as good as other ports or better. I am still annoyed that BMX XXX was censored on all but Xbox, which kind of defeats its whole purpose. Oh well.
Don't forget nuclear reactors being temporarily plugged with a chocolate bar:-D
I missed the infamous chocolate bar episode, but it was featured in an article where they interviewed the scientist resposible for all the "macgyver moments" on the show. Basically the writers would come up with a sticky situation (no pun intended) for MacGyver, and the scientist would come up with a novel approach to getting out of the situation ("Hey! can he have a chocolate bar in his pocket?").
This episode was also an example of the exaggerations creative license allowed on the show. In the referenced story there was a way to plug the leak with chocolate based on a chemical reaction with the sugar in the bar, IIRC, but you would actually need more like 50 pounds of chocolate to do this. So, yes, everything in the show had a scientific basis, but no you could not necessarily do exactly what MacGyver did. Also the MacGyver character was a complete pacifist who did not believe in harming people, and anything he did which might be extrapolated into a harmful experiment (like a bomb) was deliberately crippled on the show. Part of that is the reason already discussed (not being seen as terrorists) but also it was meant not to be a vehicle for allowing people to do harmful things (like make bombs).
I remember this show was one of my favorites and I did like to poke fun at some of the inaccuracies. I do however recall a quote by one of the main characters that MacGyver could fix a computer with a paper clip and duct tape. I am sure many of us here have actually done that, though usually one or both of those essential tools were not necessary.
In junior high I started working on a text adventure of macgyver, but I eventually decided licensing would be an issue. I wonder if someone could make a macgyver game now, because it is something that was actually discussed at various times (in fact I seem to recall a recent stab at reviving the series) but never got off the ground. I thought macgyver was a very good show because it was fun to watch, had compelling likable characters, and encouraged science and peaceful conflict resolution.
Apart from that, "capitalism" (often horribly misspelled on slashdot as "capitolism", I absolutely hate that mistake) is a economic doctrine (or philosophy, as you like). Not a form of government. I tend to like socialism more, but to everyone his favourite economic doctrine.
You can blame the Americans. Not only have we completely mangled Liberal (since when should Liberals want tighter government control of everything under the sun?), Conservative (conservatives want radical change and do not conserve? how confusing!), and don't know left from right from whatever, for the last 100 years or so we have been pushing the idea that Communism is a kind of government and must be combated by the only real American government, capitalism. Of course this has led to the subversion of democracy in America and its replacement by the almighty dollar. Then again, we stole the word American from the Western hemisphere. Maybe the 19th century Japanese were right to call us red-haired barbarian hordes!:)
The closest thing so far has been Id's track record of GPLing older engines - but Id's behavior is the exception. And although there are several interesting projects out there using Id's codebase these, by using GPL code, will never serve as the foundation for commercial startups (getting coding experience is one thing - getting funding for a new idea entirely something else), and will never result in a game that pushes the technological envelope.
I agree with you on the technology issue to a point. Having a GPL'd engine would give someone the opportunity to update that engine and therefore "push the technological envelope," but it is not likely; then again if you are using someone else's engine usually you ahve decided this engine is the baseline of the technology in your game. However, if John Carmack is right about recahing a plateau soon in terms of technological innovation in engines this will not matter.
As for your problem on funding or doing commercial projects, the GPL does not preclude having a commercial game. First of all, the content of the game would not be GPL'd simply by virtue of having a GPL'd engine. Neither would all components of the game necessarily be GPL'd as long as they are seperate executables (for instance, you could have an executable that handled saved games, etc.). Then there is the matter of value added utilities like level creators, which would certainly be seperate projects in themselves.
I would think having a proven GPL'd engine would actually help a game project in some ways. Then again, I never had to run one;).
I know the original Star Trek had the same limitations, but it was a low budget show from the 60s. I would expect more originality from modern shows. Not just humans with "a new set of skins".
Sadly, the original Star Trek was far more original w/r/t aliens, at least in the department of visiting aliens (not recurring necessarily). The closest thing to an original alien in the new series' would be the Crystalline Entity (which was not nearly so well developed as it merited) and perhaps the Borg if you ignore the fact they are humanoid like all sentient aliens in the series.
The Classic Star Trek had things like Tribbles, the Hoorta, giant vampire bat leech things (I forget the episode and the creature's name, but they were all over the ship), various little green men (though bipedal), lizard men (ok another biped), and in one episode there were the tiny creatures who were extremely telepathic and gave the Enterprise Crew (well the three that counted) a 3 dimensional hallucination in which the tiny aliens were magical humanoid giants.
The newer Star Treks seem to focus more on reflecting current events and discussing society's ills (usually by using humanoid aliens that reflect more terrestrial "aliens") whereas the original Star Trek seemed to be in an alien design contest with itself to come up with ever more cleverly designed alien species to deal with.
A game engine is not a tool. It's a framework. I'm not sure if using the same framewok for game after game after game for years stifles creativity, but your argument for the opposite is weak:
I think a good example for both sides of this argument would be the old Sierra adventure games. They all used the same engine, essentially, which meant they all had the same controls and graphics (which made things easy on the user/player) and since the person making the game essentially was modding it rather than having to start from scratch, it gave a springboard for creativity.
The argument could be made that it also limits creativity in that the Sierra engine only made point and click adventure games, just as the FPS engines only make FPS games, but at the same time it is true that the line of Sierra adventure games was rich, extremely varied, and had a long lifespan mostly due to the fact it was apparently easy to work with and general enough to give the game creator a lot of leeway in making their game. This meant the same engine could be used for sci fi space adventures (like Space Quest), 20th century urban comedies (Leisure Suit Larry), 20th Century military simulations (Codename: Iceman), 20th Century urban simulations (Police Quest) or even medieval fantasy (King's Quest). It also worked on a variety of computers and was regularly updated.
Slashdot Mirror
maybe start iLoveTheScoInformationMinister.com???
As long as you don't capitalize it that way, otherwise you will violate Apple's patents on i[A-Z]* and InterCaps! :)
According to sorehands, it is an acronym for Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation. Essentially, it is when a company sues you so they can silence you because you are saying things which, while true, would hurt their reputation. Sorehands says it is illegal. I say if it is not it should be, because using lawsuits to stop competition or to silence people warning about the danger of a company's products (or their terrible business practices) is definitely an abuse of teh process. It is too bad our courts are clogged with crap like this; it stops legitemate claimants from obtaining justice.
SCO is dying...
Maybe they should have worked in some bit about usenet posts and "you don't have to be a Kreskin to see the UNIX code in Linux..." Then they could have a goatse.cx link like "SCO feels that the following patents are clearly infringed by Linux." ;)
If Novell's IP claims stand up, these vague threats against everyone except IBM (they may have a breach of contract suit there) would seem to be barratry.
Too bad it is not even defined as an offense here in the US. If it has, lawyers in the US are pretty quiet about it, perhaps in hope of protecting their own. Essentially in the US lawyers can do whatever they feel like doing. Judges (who are lawyers) make arbitrary rulings that have nothing to do with facts, prosecutors lie in open court and hide/plant evidence, defense attorneys sell their clients down the river on purpose (or if their clients are rich help them commit crimes), and "civil" attorneys make lying, baseless threats like the ones SCO is making in order to bully people while maintaining a veneer of lawfulness.
Confucius warned that when a country's laws become meaningless civilization is ready to fall. If the US does not rein in its lawyers (including those who become Congresscritters) this is exactly what will happen. People who think it has already happened have no idea how bad it can really get (think Western Rome after the barbarians took over...)
What's a pantywaist? It sounds fun :-)
Unfortunately, they weren't. And they did not sell well. Perhaps a precursor to SCO Products?
Pantywaists were an attempt at a unisex undergarment for children in the US in the early 20th century. Unfortunately in US culture anything associated with women (even as unisex) tends to get a stigma of being effeminate (this was especially true in the "good old days". The term was later extrapolated to mean an effimenate male (a sissy, one with no cojones, etc...).
Trade secrets are different than patents as they can have no expiration date, but if it gets out, you have no recourse. Which is why you don't see patents for Coca-cola. It's a trade secret. If you know the secret and ever divulge it, there's probably enough legal paperwork you signed to make you wish you were in pound-me-in-the-ass prison instead of the hell the Coke lawyers will send you.
Or to paraphrase the immortal words of Sgt "Bat" Guano, they will have to answer to the Coca Cola company. ;)
Dr Strangelove rocks...
This has been covered to death the last few days, but jeez, SCO can't claim true enterprise scalability of any sort in its own products, so where can they claim the IP was theirs?
More to the point, how is it insightful to see something is covered to death but not read the articles? Then again, in slashdot all is lawful.
SCO UnixWare apparently has enterprise features, and ESR was unfortunately wrong but corrected himself. Of course most people read the 5 second blurb about his paper and did not read his paper. Oh well.
McBride added that unless more companies start licensing SCO's property, he may also sue Linus Torvalds, who is credited with inventing the Linux operating system, for patent infringement.
Pretty transparent, eh? What, give the troll money or he'll get you and your little Finn too? Jiminey!
IANAL, but I am reasonably certain you cannot legally say you will sue someone unless someone else pays you money/ buys your product. If that person damages you and you have a legal right to sue, that right is irrelevant to whether others pay you money not to do it. In short McBride is seriously hurting his/SCO's case here (such as it is) with his wild and stupid statements. I can just see the lawyers turning red and going "ixnay, man!"
Seriously this sort of thing would embarrass any lawyer, even if they are slimeballs ;).
1001 Arabian Trolls, of course!
What, you expected legitemate literary criticism on slashdot?! :)
Yes, I notice a copious amounts of soldiers sleeping and eating in my house (3rd Amendment) and then following it up my taking my guns (2nd and 9th Amendments) and confiscating my socialist propaganda (1st Amendment).
Well, if your dad were in the military (or your mom), they might do just that! :)
Re: your sig. I think congresscritters should be required to write the definition of these words on a blackboard 1000 times or until they get it, whichever is more. I would also support legislation to that effect. How can people swear to defend the constitution when they don't even know what it is? How can they swear that oath, tear it apart and then not be tried for perjury and treason following some form of censure/impeachment?
But the thing that made River City Ransom was the fighting elements, the elements of RPGS, and Soccer goodness!
Hmm, it sounds like I missed out on something really good. I never got to really play River City Ransom (and honestly the nes emulators never seemed to deal with the martial arts games properly... especially when you consider the NES controller was half the fun of these games...) though I do remember trying it briefly. I never saw any soccer; that sounds interesting.
Double Dragon III for NES tried to add some RPG elements (indeed, I briefly tried making a paper and dice adaptation of it. I was a bored tennager.) But River City Ransom definitely went far further in this department. I found the martial arts in the Double Dragon series (especially the arcade) made far more sense and were better varied than pretty much anything else. I think fighting games today have more moves, but the execution involves a lot of wild circles and button mashing, whereas the Double Dragon moves all had a logical progression. (All punching moves use the punch button, all kicking used the kick button, etc.
River City Ransom's moves were comparable to the double dragon port to the nes in complexity and ease of use IIRC though they used a slightly different model (also IIRC, as this one did not make it into my collection :( ).
Oooooh.. Trolling the troll fans, I see. Excellent! :)
You have been bitten by an old troll. Every once in awhile this exact troll appears in the Mac stories on /. It is a good troll because it works; people will try to help the troll fix his/her mac, people will counter with their experience, etc. After you think a bit and realize that an 8600 is far faster than a 486 by any stretch of the imagination you realize what it is.
And I want a remake of River City Ransom.
I might settle for that. What I hate is that there are 5000+ fighting games out there, and not one that comes close to Double Dragon. Hell, the martial arts adventure (ala Double Dragon and River City Ransom) essentially died off when it was replaced by tournament fighting games, which made people sick of fighting games.
Someone somewhere should make a new martial arts adventure!
I was thinking this would be fun as well. The only really good wild west game I can rememeber was SunsetRiders, which was just a sidescrolling platform shootemup. I was recently wondering what would happen if you made an open-ended GTA3/VC type game in this genre. Or make it multiplayer. I think it would be fun to play.
How original is it? Probably not very. But how many wild west rpgs or open-ended games have you seen?
Hell, Star Wars is so unoriginal you can find all its archetypes in Joseph Campbell's works on myths and heroes.
But this was by design. Star Wars was meant to incorporate the basic elements of myth Joseph Campbell wrote about. George Lucas was an avid student of Campbell's work.
We were playing GTA3 for PC, and there's no multi-player mode, but it's fun to watch. We each have our own saved game and we took turns. He let me take his tank for a spin. :)
Actually, there is. Apparently, there was supposed to be a multiplayer version, but it did not get done, so the open source community finished the game. Too bad there is not the same thing for VC, or the PLaystation versions.
I've got 80 Dreamcast games, and I'd say almost all of them are at the least good, with many, many great games in there.
Well, part of the problem here may have been the stores, which only seemed to carry 8. Hell, I can't even name that many titles for the DreamCast. I remember Crazy Taxi was plugged to hell and back (and the impression was given that it was the only decent unique title). It shocks me that new titles are coming out when Sega proclaimed Dreamcast was dead years ago (and then people promptly bought them for $50 and put BSD on them, a proper OS for something dying (dead) ;) )
Nintendo has the same problem. As far as I can tell the Game Cube seems to have Luigi's Mansion, Zelda, Metroid Prime, and not much else. The difference here is that is probably enough to sell a GameCube (I remember buying an N64 just for Shadow of the Empire, and my PSX was originally simply to play FFVII).
Consoles are sold when you have titles that are compelling enough to buy your console and do not exist on other consoles. I personally prefer games to be ported to as many platforms as possible, but like most people I am happy when it comes to a platform I maintain. The other aspect of this is whether ports for your console are as good as other ports or better. I am still annoyed that BMX XXX was censored on all but Xbox, which kind of defeats its whole purpose. Oh well.
Don't forget nuclear reactors being temporarily plugged with a chocolate bar :-D
I missed the infamous chocolate bar episode, but it was featured in an article where they interviewed the scientist resposible for all the "macgyver moments" on the show. Basically the writers would come up with a sticky situation (no pun intended) for MacGyver, and the scientist would come up with a novel approach to getting out of the situation ("Hey! can he have a chocolate bar in his pocket?").
This episode was also an example of the exaggerations creative license allowed on the show. In the referenced story there was a way to plug the leak with chocolate based on a chemical reaction with the sugar in the bar, IIRC, but you would actually need more like 50 pounds of chocolate to do this. So, yes, everything in the show had a scientific basis, but no you could not necessarily do exactly what MacGyver did. Also the MacGyver character was a complete pacifist who did not believe in harming people, and anything he did which might be extrapolated into a harmful experiment (like a bomb) was deliberately crippled on the show. Part of that is the reason already discussed (not being seen as terrorists) but also it was meant not to be a vehicle for allowing people to do harmful things (like make bombs).
I remember this show was one of my favorites and I did like to poke fun at some of the inaccuracies. I do however recall a quote by one of the main characters that MacGyver could fix a computer with a paper clip and duct tape. I am sure many of us here have actually done that, though usually one or both of those essential tools were not necessary.
In junior high I started working on a text adventure of macgyver, but I eventually decided licensing would be an issue. I wonder if someone could make a macgyver game now, because it is something that was actually discussed at various times (in fact I seem to recall a recent stab at reviving the series) but never got off the ground. I thought macgyver was a very good show because it was fun to watch, had compelling likable characters, and encouraged science and peaceful conflict resolution.
Sadly, the book cover you link to in your sig reminds me of goatse.cx ... damn I have been reading too much slashdot! :P
Apart from that, "capitalism" (often horribly misspelled on slashdot as "capitolism", I absolutely hate that mistake) is a economic doctrine (or philosophy, as you like). Not a form of government.
I tend to like socialism more, but to everyone his favourite economic doctrine.
You can blame the Americans. Not only have we completely mangled Liberal (since when should Liberals want tighter government control of everything under the sun?), Conservative (conservatives want radical change and do not conserve? how confusing!), and don't know left from right from whatever, for the last 100 years or so we have been pushing the idea that Communism is a kind of government and must be combated by the only real American government, capitalism. Of course this has led to the subversion of democracy in America and its replacement by the almighty dollar. Then again, we stole the word American from the Western hemisphere. Maybe the 19th century Japanese were right to call us red-haired barbarian hordes! :)
The closest thing so far has been Id's track record of GPLing older engines - but Id's behavior is the exception. And although there are several interesting projects out there using Id's codebase these, by using GPL code, will never serve as the foundation for commercial startups (getting coding experience is one thing - getting funding for a new idea entirely something else), and will never result in a game that pushes the technological envelope.
I agree with you on the technology issue to a point. Having a GPL'd engine would give someone the opportunity to update that engine and therefore "push the technological envelope," but it is not likely; then again if you are using someone else's engine usually you ahve decided this engine is the baseline of the technology in your game. However, if John Carmack is right about recahing a plateau soon in terms of technological innovation in engines this will not matter.
As for your problem on funding or doing commercial projects, the GPL does not preclude having a commercial game. First of all, the content of the game would not be GPL'd simply by virtue of having a GPL'd engine. Neither would all components of the game necessarily be GPL'd as long as they are seperate executables (for instance, you could have an executable that handled saved games, etc.). Then there is the matter of value added utilities like level creators, which would certainly be seperate projects in themselves.
I would think having a proven GPL'd engine would actually help a game project in some ways. Then again, I never had to run one ;).
I know the original Star Trek had the same limitations, but it was a low budget show from the 60s. I would expect more originality from modern shows. Not just humans with "a new set of skins".
Sadly, the original Star Trek was far more original w/r/t aliens, at least in the department of visiting aliens (not recurring necessarily). The closest thing to an original alien in the new series' would be the Crystalline Entity (which was not nearly so well developed as it merited) and perhaps the Borg if you ignore the fact they are humanoid like all sentient aliens in the series.
The Classic Star Trek had things like Tribbles, the Hoorta, giant vampire bat leech things (I forget the episode and the creature's name, but they were all over the ship), various little green men (though bipedal), lizard men (ok another biped), and in one episode there were the tiny creatures who were extremely telepathic and gave the Enterprise Crew (well the three that counted) a 3 dimensional hallucination in which the tiny aliens were magical humanoid giants.
The newer Star Treks seem to focus more on reflecting current events and discussing society's ills (usually by using humanoid aliens that reflect more terrestrial "aliens") whereas the original Star Trek seemed to be in an alien design contest with itself to come up with ever more cleverly designed alien species to deal with.
A game engine is not a tool. It's a framework. I'm not sure if using the same framewok for game after game after game for years stifles creativity, but your argument for the opposite is weak:
I think a good example for both sides of this argument would be the old Sierra adventure games. They all used the same engine, essentially, which meant they all had the same controls and graphics (which made things easy on the user/player) and since the person making the game essentially was modding it rather than having to start from scratch, it gave a springboard for creativity.
The argument could be made that it also limits creativity in that the Sierra engine only made point and click adventure games, just as the FPS engines only make FPS games, but at the same time it is true that the line of Sierra adventure games was rich, extremely varied, and had a long lifespan mostly due to the fact it was apparently easy to work with and general enough to give the game creator a lot of leeway in making their game. This meant the same engine could be used for sci fi space adventures (like Space Quest), 20th century urban comedies (Leisure Suit Larry), 20th Century military simulations (Codename: Iceman), 20th Century urban simulations (Police Quest) or even medieval fantasy (King's Quest). It also worked on a variety of computers and was regularly updated.