Nintendo's 'Palworld' Lawsuit Takes a Turn

Really deserves more attention from the HN community. The article author analogizes this to patent trolling on Nintendo's part and, from the patent descriptions, I'm inclined to agree. There's plenty prior art in gaming that one would hope ought to invalidate the patents easily.

The patents:

>The first patent is about aiming and firing some sort of item toward a character “in a field” (it literally specifies that) triggering a combat state.

>The second patent is something about being able to capture creatures in the wild, rather than just in a battle setting.

>The third patent is about riding creatures in an open world, and transitioning between those creatures.

For #2, I'd argue that by the nature of open world games, the capture event is already in a battle state before it starts. And maybe even you are already in a battle state all the time, which counters #1. And for #3, I've seen games do this since the SNES era and they've never tried to protect their patent.