AFAIK, Apple hasn't actually sued any journalism sites, just sent vaguely threatening lawyer letters, so this is really in a grey area. I doubt if there is any law that specifically prohibits this. Of course, "anyone can be sued for any reason," so I suppose that a web site could sue Apple for trying to intimidate them. But they'd probably have to prove that Apple knew that they had no foundation for legal action, and that is at least debatable. After all, if a web site was somehow directly involved in the theft of Apple secrets or documents, they would certainly be liable, and if Apple suspected that this was the case, they would have reasonable grounds to sue. Besides, the whole point is that these sites can't afford to get into a legal wrangle with Apple, which is why nobody dared to call Apple's bluff, if bluff it was. The bottom line is that there is simply no way of preventing a large, wealthy firm such as Apple from throwing its weight around in this way.
Why is it that so many developers are releasing these compilations? Two years ago, there certainly weren't nearly as many such products on the market. The thing is that emulators such as MAME have shown the game companies that there is a market for old games.
This is probably true, but it's irrelevant. MAME may well have done the copyright holders a service, but there are no "squatter's rights" in copyright law.
On the other hand, I can't see getting terribly upset about emulation of old ROMs. If a copyright holder complains, or if the games are reissued for a current console, they should be taken down (at least while the reissue is in release), but I suspect that won't happen very often. Only a tiny fraction of these old games have any prospect of ending up on a classics compilation. Sure, it's a violation, but I put it in the category of "driving 10 mph over the speed limit on a deserted freewat at 3am."
I wouldn't consider Dragon's Lair the worst game of all time, at all. It had great animation and humor, and was fun to play, despite its primitive play mechanics.
However, I think a good case can probably be made that it was a disaster for the videogame industry. Everybody thought it was the wave of the future, rather than an example of a poor concept being surmounted by great execution. Sega rushed out a CD add-on for the Genesis (even though it lacked the graphics capability to do a very good job of it), based upon the expectation that full motion video was the Next Big Thing (and Nintendo nearly did the same, but had an attack of sanity). Hollywood stars were hired to act in video based games. It all flopped utterly, because there really was no way to take the Dragon's Lair concept any further, or even improve upon its execution.
All that money lost all because of a single, hit game...
There is a bit more than nostalgia to the appeal of classic games. The ways in which people play games have changed. Classic games emulated real-world games in the sense that they were repetitive and score-driven. The appeal was attaining a high level of skill (reflected by a high score) in a deceptively-simple task. Most games had no real end; a successful player could continue forever, and the closest thing to beating the game was rolling over the score counter, thereby proving that you had attained a higher level of skill (or at least patience) than even its designer believed possible.
As computer technology developed, designers realized that they could offer an additional type of reward: novelty. Do well, and you will be rewarded with new things to look at, and new types of tasks to master. And generally, there is an ending, rewarding the player with some extra-special last bit of novelty.
Most modern games are almost exclusively novelty driven. There may be no score at all, and players often pay little attention to it. The drive is to get to the end, to beat the game. Obviously, this is a very successful motivating strategy, and has played a big role in the great popularity of videogames. But something is lost. When you are thinking about getting to the end, you aren't strongly motivated to play one level over and over to truly master it. And once you have gotten to the end, and wrung every bit of novelty out of the game, it loses a lot of its appeal. The goal in the classic games was mastery; the goal in most modern games is to be just good enough to see the end.
But as much fun as the new games are, they don't provide the level of challenge that the classic games did--the challenge of mastery--and many older players miss that. Of course, the old style of gameplay has not vanished utterly. It survives mainly in sports games, which emulate score-driven real world games. But even here, novelty has crept in as a motivator. A racing game with only one track is no longer competitive. Players are motivated in part by the desire to see more tracks. Team sports games have to include a lot of different teams, stadiums, and play modes, so they provide adequate amounts of novelty to appeal to the novelty-motivated player.
Still, occasional games bring back memories of the older style. Sega has a game in the arcades, and for their home console, called "Crazy Taxi." It has the graphical glitz of modern games, but fundamentally it's as simple-minded as a classic game. You pick up a passenger, drive as recklessly as possible through a city to his destination, let him off, and do it again. You have a limited amount of time (although you can extend it by doing well enough), and the object is to make as much money as possible. You see most of the city pretty quickly, but it takes a lot of practice to attain a high score. Not surprisingly one often hears the complaint, especially from younger players accustomed to novelty-driven play, that it is "too repetitive--you just do the same thing over and over." Nevertheless, it has done reasonably well--as have the re-releases of classic game compilations for home console--demonstrating that there is still a demand for skill-driven gaming.
Leaving aside the debate about the ethics of playing old games on emulators, there are plenty of absolutely legal sources of classic games. You can still find many of them in arcades, testament to their enduring popularity (and the limited budgets of modern arcades). In addition, many of the great classics from companies like Williams, Namco, and Atari are available in licensed compilation disks for modern home consoles, including the Playstation and Saturn. Typically, these run the original arcade code under emulation.
The main problem is that what you hear in the popular press does not convey all of the uncertainties and caveats of the scientific literature. So a statement along the lines of "There is no clear evidence of neuronal regeneration in adult mammalian brain" becomes "Neurons can't regenerate." Of course, this was not merely an assumption--people had looked for regeneration and failed to find it. But absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. If you fail to find something, it may be that you are looking in the wrong place, with the wrong method, or simply that your technique isn't sensitive enough. And in fact, there was some evidence that occasionally new nerve cells might be "born;" it just wasn't very convincing evidence. And it was known that neurons regenerate in certain brain regions of certain birds, and in olfactory epithelium, so it clearly wasn't an absolute impossibility. So the latest results simply provide evidence of something that a lot of people suspected before, but couldn't prove.
The glial story is similar. It's been known for years that glial cells have neurotransmitter receptors and that they can release neuroactive substances, so a lot of people suspected that they play a role in neurotransmission. They just couldn't prove it, because most of the effects observed were either small, or required somewhat extreme conditions. The new report comes closer to demonstrating that glial neurotransmitter release can occur under physiologically relevant conditions, but it probably won't convince everybody. The real skeptics will insist on direct evidence that this glial function actually plays a role in neural function--perhaps by somehow knocking out this glial feature and demonstrating some kind of cognitive deficit.
Slashdot Mirror
AFAIK, Apple hasn't actually sued any journalism sites, just sent vaguely threatening lawyer letters, so this is really in a grey area. I doubt if there is any law that specifically prohibits this. Of course, "anyone can be sued for any reason," so I suppose that a web site could sue Apple for trying to intimidate them. But they'd probably have to prove that Apple knew that they had no foundation for legal action, and that is at least debatable. After all, if a web site was somehow directly involved in the theft of Apple secrets or documents, they would certainly be liable, and if Apple suspected that this was the case, they would have reasonable grounds to sue. Besides, the whole point is that these sites can't afford to get into a legal wrangle with Apple, which is why nobody dared to call Apple's bluff, if bluff it was. The bottom line is that there is simply no way of preventing a large, wealthy firm such as Apple from throwing its weight around in this way.
I wouldn't consider Dragon's Lair the worst game of all time, at all. It had great animation and humor, and was fun to play, despite its primitive play mechanics.
However, I think a good case can probably be made that it was a disaster for the videogame industry. Everybody thought it was the wave of the future, rather than an example of a poor concept being surmounted by great execution. Sega rushed out a CD add-on for the Genesis (even though it lacked the graphics capability to do a very good job of it), based upon the expectation that full motion video was the Next Big Thing (and Nintendo nearly did the same, but had an attack of sanity). Hollywood stars were hired to act in video based games. It all flopped utterly, because there really was no way to take the Dragon's Lair concept any further, or even improve upon its execution.
All that money lost all because of a single, hit game...
There is a bit more than nostalgia to the appeal of classic games. The ways in which people play games have changed. Classic games emulated real-world games in the sense that they were repetitive and score-driven. The appeal was attaining a high level of skill (reflected by a high score) in a deceptively-simple task. Most games had no real end; a successful player could continue forever, and the closest thing to beating the game was rolling over the score counter, thereby proving that you had attained a higher level of skill (or at least patience) than even its designer believed possible.
As computer technology developed, designers realized that they could offer an additional type of reward: novelty. Do well, and you will be rewarded with new things to look at, and new types of tasks to master. And generally, there is an ending, rewarding the player with some extra-special last bit of novelty.
Most modern games are almost exclusively novelty driven. There may be no score at all, and players often pay little attention to it. The drive is to get to the end, to beat the game. Obviously, this is a very successful motivating strategy, and has played a big role in the great popularity of videogames. But something is lost. When you are thinking about getting to the end, you aren't strongly motivated to play one level over and over to truly master it. And once you have gotten to the end, and wrung every bit of novelty out of the game, it loses a lot of its appeal. The goal in the classic games was mastery; the goal in most modern games is to be just good enough to see the end.
But as much fun as the new games are, they don't provide the level of challenge that the classic games did--the challenge of mastery--and many older players miss that. Of course, the old style of gameplay has not vanished utterly. It survives mainly in sports games, which emulate score-driven real world games. But even here, novelty has crept in as a motivator. A racing game with only one track is no longer competitive. Players are motivated in part by the desire to see more tracks. Team sports games have to include a lot of different teams, stadiums, and play modes, so they provide adequate amounts of novelty to appeal to the novelty-motivated player.
Still, occasional games bring back memories of the older style. Sega has a game in the arcades, and for their home console, called "Crazy Taxi." It has the graphical glitz of modern games, but fundamentally it's as simple-minded as a classic game. You pick up a passenger, drive as recklessly as possible through a city to his destination, let him off, and do it again. You have a limited amount of time (although you can extend it by doing well enough), and the object is to make as much money as possible. You see most of the city pretty quickly, but it takes a lot of practice to attain a high score. Not surprisingly one often hears the complaint, especially from younger players accustomed to novelty-driven play, that it is "too repetitive--you just do the same thing over and over." Nevertheless, it has done reasonably well--as have the re-releases of classic game compilations for home console--demonstrating that there is still a demand for skill-driven gaming.
Leaving aside the debate about the ethics of playing old games on emulators, there are plenty of absolutely legal sources of classic games. You can still find many of them in arcades, testament to their enduring popularity (and the limited budgets of modern arcades). In addition, many of the great classics from companies like Williams, Namco, and Atari are available in licensed compilation disks for modern home consoles, including the Playstation and Saturn. Typically, these run the original arcade code under emulation.
The main problem is that what you hear in the popular press does not convey all of the uncertainties and caveats of the scientific literature. So a statement along the lines of "There is no clear evidence of neuronal regeneration in adult mammalian brain" becomes "Neurons can't regenerate." Of course, this was not merely an assumption--people had looked for regeneration and failed to find it. But absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. If you fail to find something, it may be that you are looking in the wrong place, with the wrong method, or simply that your technique isn't sensitive enough. And in fact, there was some evidence that occasionally new nerve cells might be "born;" it just wasn't very convincing evidence. And it was known that neurons regenerate in certain brain regions of certain birds, and in olfactory epithelium, so it clearly wasn't an absolute impossibility. So the latest results simply provide evidence of something that a lot of people suspected before, but couldn't prove.
The glial story is similar. It's been known for years that glial cells have neurotransmitter receptors and that they can release neuroactive substances, so a lot of people suspected that they play a role in neurotransmission. They just couldn't prove it, because most of the effects observed were either small, or required somewhat extreme conditions. The new report comes closer to demonstrating that glial neurotransmitter release can occur under physiologically relevant conditions, but it probably won't convince everybody. The real skeptics will insist on direct evidence that this glial function actually plays a role in neural function--perhaps by somehow knocking out this glial feature and demonstrating some kind of cognitive deficit.