Microsoft consumes Activision; and a plea • Hacker News Board

Re: Microsoft consumes Activision; and a plea

#161

Post by demondemidi » Wed, Oct 18, 2023, 7:02 PM UTC

benstein wrote: post #55

demondemidi wrote: post #43

I think Zork sank into the swamp long ago. "Want some rye, 'course ya do..." I mean, come on, let's not clutch our pearls after that abomination.

Why hate on that game? It had both great puzzles (challenging yet approachable) AND was pushing the envelope of CD-ROM as a new technology, specifically the use of video + celebrities.

I hate on it because I personally didn't like it. I found the puzzles trivial, the butchering of canon painful (worse than Zork Zero), and the graphics comically awful. 7th Guest, Myst, and even Gadget were better in the GFX department for 1993.

Re: Microsoft consumes Activision; and a plea

#162

Post by demondemidi » Wed, Oct 18, 2023, 7:03 PM UTC

bluGill wrote: post #124

thaumasiotes wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a lot to love about Return to Zork, but it was made in the Sierra model of suddenly killing you whenever you made a mistake that, in most cases, couldn't even have been foreseen to be a mistake. Oddly, the text adventures were nowhere near as punishing.

Infocom wasn't that punishing, but back in the day a lot of other IF was. It was very common for a while to have some random "guard" who would kill you - this was entirely a random number generator that you would be killed when walking into the room. Players hated it: the only thing you could do is save often and restore and try again, which was a big waste of time (really bad if you were loading from floppy on an 8…

Except for Spellbreaker, which had an early path in the game that seemed like an easy solution but would break the game until the very end and you had NO idea what went wrong. (Incorrectly using Girgol to solve the ragweed problem, when you need it for the VERY LAST PUZZLE in the game to freeze shadow you before he jumps into the tesseract). I think Starcross had a path like this too, but I don't recall. And Infidel never allowed you to get the full score because you were ... an infidel. But that irony was lost on 15 year old me.

Re: Microsoft consumes Activision; and a plea

#163

Post by shiroiuma » Mon, Oct 23, 2023, 5:30 AM UTC

bluGill wrote: post #125

shiroiuma wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think only 5 years should be free, then maybe $100 for another 5, then exponentially increasing after that. A lot of stuff simply has no commercial value after 5 years. This is for software, BTW; for movies or books, different terms might make more sense.

A lot of things take more than 5 years to create. If save all your garbage and find the notes from your rough draft that you started more than 5 years ago does that mean your work is not copyright, merrily a derivative work? Some authors write a novel in 6 weeks, but others take years to polish it.

>Some authors write a novel in 6 weeks, but others take years to polish it.

I think 5 years might be too short for a novel, but regardless, the lesson here is: don't publish your work until it's ready. Copyright protection should start when it's published, not when the first word was typed.

>If save all your garbage and find the notes from your rough draft that you started more than 5 years ago

Maybe there should be a provision about rooting through someone's trash? This seems a rather rare edge case.