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Penny Arcade - Comic - The Other Blur
Dog
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Penny Arcade - Comic - The Other Blur
Videogaming-related online strip by Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins. Includes news and commentary.
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Like, I use those sites. I just don't pretend it's some noble thing I'm doing for the sake of history.
It was a kart racer disguised as a realistic racer with licensed cars. I thought it was absolutely brilliant.
Again, I'm totally cool with ROM sites. I just think the moral justification is ... shaky.
The ideal way for anything to be preserved and documented is for one person to systematically save, catalog, and index everything according to a consistent system that makes retrieval easy and accounts for every metric by which anyone would want to sort it, while letting irrelevant metrics be disregarded. But that's never going to happen, so having some games be preserved because people like them and happen to make them available, patch them for use on modern machines, etc, while not as good as intentional archiving, is superior by virtue of being something that can actually happen.
Yeah when I read the comic my first thought was, "Good! Blur was a good fucking game!" and then, "Wait is it public domain now or something?"
EDIT: Oh hey it's on the abandonware site, that's cool!
https://archive.org/details/blur-2010-video-game
What they do all day is mostly hunting down information about game development histories, because they know that in most cases the software has been preserved, but the stories and context around those games is what gets lost quickly. They regularly have to fight back against the "oh you just play games all day I bet" image, which this comic perpetuates. This is disappointing.
Yes, people play the archived games from digital libraries, but they do that with the physical copies at their local library too, these days (see the recent Last Week Tonight if you want to learn more about the many services a modern library provides). I don't think that's a bad thing. And considering they recently had to argue before congress for a DMCA carveout for museums, this comic is especially poorly-timed.
edit: one more edit to leave a link to Stop Killing Games because it's relevant to what the alternative is, which is not merely losing games to time and history, but having them taken directly out of your hands by the people you bought them from.
But also people just want to play games. And a person who loses access to The Crew because Ubisoft decided to literally yoink it out of their digital library, they just want to play the game. They don't care about the history of the game. They just want to drive in some races.
They're both valuable, but they're also vastly different.
And that would be a valid acknowledgement, but i can guarantee you that a lot (and i say "a lot" and not "the majority" since i obviousely haven't pooled the entire pirating population of the internet, but only for that) of the people using the preservation argument are really claiming that they pirate to preserve game, or at least claiming that they care a lot about preservation, as opposed to because they want to play games for free and preservation just happen as a happy side-consequence. You even have people using that argument to justify pirating a new, widely availaible, extremely popular game. The latest Halo, God of War or Zelda is never going to be lost to time.
The same way if you ask everyone is only ever using emulator or flashcard to back-up the roms/savefiles of the games they own a legitimate physical copies, honest, fr fr.
Also, If everyone was so militant about preserving stuff, they'd also make sure to purchase physical copies of everything (since having both a lot of physical copies as well as digital maximize the chances of preserving it).
Or act for the creation of a system with some official authority like the british library requiring publishers to send copies of their books for archiving.
i remember when realistic racers were popular, i said i didn't have anything against real cars (i didn't have anything for them either, of course) but just didn't find that fun and a friend recommended me blur. It was indeed a pretty fun time.
Interesting that you brought that up, since The Crew first stopped working when they turned off the servers (which were required even for single player). We need a whole different solution for those kind of problems.
The people who think Mario Kart is for baby weren't gonna play Blurr. They were already playing Need for Speed.
Like @Lucascraft said the genius of Blur was that It was a kart racer disguised as a realistic racer with licensed cars, their argument should have been "the grittyness of NfS, but fun."
Also anyone who have played Mario Kart knows that racing is not about making friend, it's about crushing your enemies and friends alike and hearing the lamentations of your little sibblings.
Had a lot of fun with it, the power ups were really cool, emps, shields, etc.