I'd love to play it again some day, since my first playthrough was without a guide and despite 60+ hours logged into the game, I ended up getting the worst ending thanks to the completely unexplained mechanic that your ending was determined by how many forts you "liberate" vs "conquer" (basically was your character of a higher or lower alignment than the fort when you captured it).
Nothing since has come close.
It is absolutely a love letter to March of the Black Queen and Ogre Battle 64. As usual for their games, Vanillaware's art is outstanding.
But yeah, OB64 sits stop a pedestal in its own gallery for me.
It's absurd how long we've made copyright terms, and it's really endangering preservation.
The game has big attention for detail in both sprites and text. For example, at some point it unlocks a screen that lists all characters in a graph chart, with colored edges as their relation type - and it updates multiple times as the game progresses.
The strategy part of the franchise is mostly forgotten nowadays, there was only a recent remake for "let us cling together"(which is awesome as well, but it's in the tactics genre).
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All AI recomps are not to be used, nor considered true recomps. They likely contain stolen or copyrighted code.
deeply unserious
Now there is some nostalgia.
I'd take 1000 GameFAQs .txt only pages over whatever slop Fandom wikis push. Goddamn videos on every page, etc.
Luckily preservationists are found outside such ridiculous jurisdictions, and most recognized titles have been preserved for a long while already.
We probably have a pretty brief window where projects like this can even be done where there's people alive who worked on the original systems. It would be nice if these were encouraged rather than being in some gray area.
The closer analogy would be fan-translation patches, which are also pretty clearly copyright-infringing derivative works though generally tolerated by rights holders.
Companies often encourage (or at least turn a blind eye to) creative derivative works from fan communities, especially if they're non-commercial and aren't cutting into the market share of their own official products enough for them to take notice.
I do agree that decompilation projects are obviously not transformative (the only fair use feet they really have to stand on are purpose and market effect), but recomp projects are a little more interesting and might live on much less shaky footing.
A hypothetical relating to the legal aspects: Since this was mostly done by an LLM, the legal considerations would become incredibly interesting in cases where the original code (source or binary) was illegally leaked. What happens if the LLM saw the leaked code in its training material?
(My non-lawyer brain thinks it's completely obvious that in that case you have a derived work, but apparently the world has decided that it's completely fine to train LLMs on e.g. GPL code without the output being considered derived, so what the hell do I know…)
Note that this isn't the same as a "decomp" where the goal is to make readable source code that resembles something that the original developers would have worked with. A "recomp" simply translates the assembly instructions to C. You end up with "assembly code but in C" rather than idiomatic C code.
At least in the way that I see it, a recomp is like building your own turntable to play your vinyl records, after stydying their grooves and infering how they would sound (so I guess that it would be less gray than an emulator).
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> The game won the award for "Best Strategy Game" at GameSpot's Best and Worst of 2000 Awards,[41] and was nominated for the "Best Game No One Played" award, which went to Samba de Amigo. The staff noted that the game's sales had "fallen prey to [its] console of origin, the N64."[42] The game was also nominated for the "Best Console Strategy Game" and "Gamers' Choice: N64" awards at The Electric Playground's Blister Awards 2000, both of which went to Front Mission 3 and Perfect Dark, respectively.[43][44]
> It was rated the 111th best game made on a Nintendo System in Nintendo Power's Top 200 Games list.[45] Reviewing the Virtual Console re-release, IGN said that it "was (and still is) lordly indeed".[34]
> In 2023, Time Extension included the game on their "Best Nintendo 64 Games of All Time" list.[46]
Sounds like it was received well even if it didn't sell well
How would that be possible when it's trying to byte-match the original binaries
It's not only possible but I would argue highly likely that any LLM has absorbed that proprietary code into its training data making effectively any decomp not a clean room effort if they incorporate assistance from LLMs or coding agents into their tooling. If Nintendo wanted to be particularly onerous they could easily claim that their codebase makes use of proprietary tooling/knowledge and there would be zero recourse for the devs.
You may not like that the author is mostly an LLM, but the output clearly works.
I think it's more of a "the constitution is not a suicide pact" approach to GPL: while the GPL is obviously violated by its inclusion in the training corpus, we have two options:
- demand the destruction of LLMs that are trained on copyrighted or copylefted works and the training of new ones
- accept that LLMs that are trained on copyrighted or copylefted works are more important to humanity than the rights of the authors
How is any of this going to work out if we just decide to throw out copyright like this?
(I am well aware that it is not currently technically feasible to copyright-wash GTA 6. Replace that game with a best-selling novel or whatever.)
And, if we do decide that copyright is just gone, can we please make laws to that effect? Instead of just shrugging our shoulders and going "oh well, this new thing is useful, so we'll let it slide, but don't you dare to pirate movies, because reasons!"
Exactly the same that would happen if the LLM saw GPLed code in its training material and was asked to replicate it
The Git repository contains tens of thousands of lines of assembler code that seem to come from the original.