The Super Mario Maker community faces its final boss
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
He's not really clear about how exactly he did it, but it's pretty easy to just take a controller cable, wire it into a microcontroller, and program inputs. A lot of people were saying "there was no TAS in 2017", meaning I suppose there were no specific tools for emulator at the time, but that's just irrelevant when you can take a day or two to trial-and-error it.
The original purpose of the video was to coyly announce the TAS tool the maker created, but the video was mostly ignored because it looks like a regular clear vid.
That’s how it so effectively accidentally flew under the radar. The level lacked a TAS label, and TASs are usually obvious and flashy.
But then you play it and realize those jumps are insanely precise.
Yes, frame perfect, but also mostly pixel perfect x,y precision.
There is even RNG manipulation necessary to ensure a bomb is spawned from a note block in a specific direction.
Streamers had already beaten it in chunks so it was theoretically possible for a human to do, but once people started offering monetary bounties the uploader felt it was time to let everyone in on the 7 year old joke.
The streamer featured in TFA, ThaBeast721, said that he and some other high profile streamers playing the level were contacted by the maker, whom many in the community knew prior and so there was chat history to authenticate the claim, and shown a video of the device breaking the level.
Thab described the device as a “raspberry pi or arduino type device hooked up to an actual controller somehow”
When the clear video failed to go viral the maker dropped the gag, and forgot about it until recently, because the device was a pain to use anyway.
The maker said it took 3 months to upload the level. Something about the device causing the console to crash when programming the inputs.
Took more googling than expected to figure that one out, probably should have gone with a GPT.
Thabeast was pretty close to mid-way I think, and he wasn't the person who'd spent most time attempting this.
Has it? There's a confession, but this was an issue of major public significance (within a limited sphere). Do people never confess to things they didn't do?
We should definitely not rely on for profit businesses to preserve gaming history. They have repeatedly declined to do so in the past.
In line with the spirit of that, I think it's reasonable to require companies to release their source code and assets after the copyright duration expires (and I'm in full agreement that the current term is far too long).
I think that the hard part is assessing "profitability" though - Nintendo has shown that they're able to re-release games decades after initial release and turn a profit. Trying to legislate "profitability" could result in Nintendo (and other big game companies) holding on to their IP for longer, as opposed to just getting Congress to reduce copyright term back down to 15 years or something.
I agree with the intent, I just think that it'd be extremely hard to legally implement and a fixed term would work almost as well.
With trademark we have the "use it or lose it" clause, we could have the same with copyright, "publish or lose it". If it's not available for purchase or free consumption for some duration (6-12 months seems reasonable) anyone can publish it. This should also extend to other works of art like books and movies. I'm uncertain if you should get the copyright back if you go back to publishing later. Probably not since that will deter anyone else from making the work available.
Now, all these arguments are pretty poor, and wouldn't stand much chance of winning in court, but the fact that there's a bunch of arguments that could be made makes stalling a lawsuit out until the defendants run out of money a much more dangerous possibility.
I think a bigger issue is that video games and movies frequently have licensed other media like music in it. The musician might be very actively selling and licensing their music but now I can just get this abandoned video game and extract the song?
A company may not have the rights to give away all their source code and assets. For source code, this is probably less of an issue than it once was because open source libraries are used so widely. But I can tell you from first hand experience, if a company buys another company with a proprietary product and wants to open source it, that can actually be a pretty big project. (As is then building working product outside of a company's build system.)
Years and years ago, I took ages to open source a shareware product I was no longer developing. Not because I thought the code had any real value or because I was a meanie. But it had assembly code from a commercial library I had purchased. I eventually did release it--not that anyone cared at that point--only because the company that wrote the libraries was out of business and their product seemed to have passed to the other side as well.
See 3D Pinball for Windows – Space Cadet
If I buy an album or a book I can be reasonably certain I can enjoy that content in 25 years. If I buy an online service video game I can be reasonably certain I cannot enjoy that content in 25 years.
The simple solution seems to be tying the copyright to the duration something is available for.
If they shut down the servers, they aren't planning on profiting on that specific game anymore, and cede the monopoly on running those servers.
If that causes Nintendo to keep the servers up, that's a fine outcome too. I'm less interested in forcibly wrangling Nintendos IP away from them than making sure their cultural contributions are still available.
Assuming there's no third-party backup of these levels somewhere, they're destroying countless people's creative work. I don't care what the terms of service say. Companies shouldn't have the legal authority to delete the only copy of third parties' copyrightable work.
The current situation is mass censorship.
If Nintendo decides tomorrow to shut it down, tough luck! These servers cost money, and it's even more work to responsibly open it up to the community.
A hypothetical book publisher could adopt a similar models for books - if you're an author, you have to use the publisher's app to write your novel, and anyone who wants to read it has to access it from the publisher's servers via the publisher's app. For whatever reason, said publisher could corner the market on some niche, culturally-important genre of book. Would be a bummer if they decided server maintenance was no longer worthwhile and just deleted all the books as per the license terms.
I don't care if the servers cost money. Boo hoo. Nintendo sold access to people. They should be held responsible for upholding their end of the deal. At the very least they should stop being able to use misleading terms like "buy", the terms of the deal should be much more strictly defined instead of this "we can do whatever" nonsense, and the relevant parts of that deal should be made clear and apparent to consumers prior to any exchange of money.
I don't think it's "censorship", but I do think the way it currently works is unethical and should be illegal.
If you have levels uploaded on the official servers it's a straightforward process to get them copied over (and that step can be done with an unmodified game+console).
In practice this is another “abandonment off to the community” moment like when Rebble spun off of Pebble the last week of the Pebble online services existing as Pretendo already has working replacement online services for the Wii U. After April 8th the only remaining Nintendo service for the Wii U will be redownloading already purchased games so if you own a Wii U it will pretty much make sense to set it up to handle all online through Pretendo, especially since a bunch of the existing Wii U online services have been broken for a long time like Miiverse and WaraWara plaza.
Similarly if you jump through a bunch of hoops you can still play Mario Kart Wii online even though the game has been offline for a decade.
This doesn't sound like a real issue. They could just firewall it off in a separate amazon VPC or publish a docker / vdi version of it, etc.
You might not personally think your Wii U play data is worth securing, but the GDPR does.
Mario Maker 2 is different, it seeds its RNG from the player's input. If you press the same inputs with the same timings, the same "random" events will happen every time. This makes it much easier in theory to make a level that can never be beaten unless you know the secret code. Though it does require frame-perfect inputs.
RNG seeding happens once. Player input during the level would all be occurring after the RNG was seeded. What did you mean?
And corporate entities that do so should become pariahs.
Surely, deleting the last copy of a thing deprives more people of the work (and does more damage to the original author) than failing to pay for a copy of the thing.
Note that this may screw over individual authors, but the copyright system was not built to benefit them. Otherwise we wouldn't allow copyright assignment, we'd have "inalienable" copyright instead.
But there's plenty where it isn't.
Right now, I can head down to my basement, jack two AAs into my Game Boy, and play Pokémon Red, a 28 year-old game. I have zero confidence that will be possible with any of today’s games in 28 years.
Quite different to a modern game where what’s on the physical cartridge/disc may not even be playable without a day one patch from a long-decommissioned server.
And from my experience, I can just refuse the update every time. Heck, from a speedrunning perspective it's probably better not to update them, since the updates patch out a bunch of tech that makes them more fun to mess around with (easy item dupes in Tears of the Kingdom, easy out of bounds in Mario Wonder).
Any number is too many, I agree.
My switch is (and will remain) offline. I wasn't aware some games may not play - even some first-party games like super mario 3d allstars needs updating, according to this.
This payment only funds the console's matchmaking services. The cost of maintaining dedicated servers falls on the devs for third party games, and presumably a different budget for first party ones. So the, admittedly few, games with dedicated servers (e.g. Splatoon 1) can't survive in this payment model either.
I'm guessing the matchmaking is part of the Wii U's shared online services and not game-specific.
When you buy something, you own it. If nintendo doesn't want to pay for hosting anymore, the ethical thing would be to dump the server code and the levels so that players can host the servers themselves.
Given how nintendo, activision, and other publishers have been acting the past decade, I really think its time for a Right-to-play law.
If Hitler stayed in art school we probably wouldn't have cared much about him. But he didn't, so now we think his life or belongings and events are significant. But it might have been insignificant too.
Who knows? Time must play out.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lost_films
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Lost_television_episo...
Isn't that fine, though? I think it's good for some things to be ephemeral.
Personally I find it a pity we don't have quality recordings of most theater. How many great performances are lost to time? If you're into opera, the Met's Live in HD are great.
ADDED: A fairly small local theater I have a subscription to did make some digital recordings during COVID. But they were only available for a limited lime and weren't free.
Sure, saving some of it is useful so we can look back and reflect. But we don’t need all of it. It’s mostly junk.
Some stuff is interesting to preserve. I scanned a Year in Life of Development book from a long-ago company and it's a neat look into mid-1980s computer development.
But you can't save everything and you probably just need to let go sometimes.
The point is that a real human has actually gone through the level and beat it. If a run an AI against a gameboy game and it wins I wouldn’t consider it me beating the game
And that boss, in Mario fashion, needs to be butt-stomped.