Another fangasm of Sonic

[Jagos]

Yeah...

I would go on a rant about how Sega really seems to understand that fans will still do things just for the hell of it, but Kroze beat me to it.

So I'll just look at it one more time and hope that the makers go ahead and recreate S2.

Sometime in the next century. The game seems to be running just fine right now.

[Magus]

Yes, it is so horrible when some people make a fan game based on a series and releases it for free. Such horrible horrible people. Truly a crime against humanity.

The reason, Blues, that people consider it to be "a favor to the creator/publisher", or really, a favor to themselves or the fans of said series (as this is truly who they are doing it for), is that they have been churning out mostly pure shit with Sonic for the past several years. The greatest favor that could be done would be to euthanize the crapsacks in charge of the 3D games and put them out of their misery.

Yeah, whatever, it's against copyright law, I guess (if it is). Who cares? It's not unethical just because it's illegal. It's not some horrible thing to like something so much to imitate it, when it's not for monetary gain but pure love of the thing. It's the sincerest form of flattery.

You can rail against it for copyright reasons all you want but it's about as much an actual societal crime as fanfiction.

[Kyanbu The Legend]

Actually if memory serves. Sega is fully aware of this game and have been since it's development. They've been monitoring it and most of if not all of Sonic Team is given this a thumbs up.

They are more likely to Support it at this stage in the game.

So this has the 50/50 chance of being the first fan game to get adopted by the company it belongs to.

As for the copy right complaints. It's actually in the green. They are showing all rights expect for it's development to Sega. And Sega is aware of it from what I read on their site a year ago.


EDIT: Never mind, someone beat me to it already.

[bluestarultor]

Originally Posted by Magus

Yes, it is so horrible when some people make a fan game based on a series and releases it for free. Such horrible horrible people. Truly a crime against humanity.

The reason, Blues, that people consider it to be "a favor to the creator/publisher", or really, a favor to themselves or the fans of said series (as this is truly who they are doing it for), is that they have been churning out mostly pure shit with Sonic for the past several years. The greatest favor that could be done would be to euthanize the crapsacks in charge of the 3D games and put them out of their misery.

Yeah, whatever, it's against copyright law, I guess (if it is). Who cares? It's not unethical just because it's illegal. It's not some horrible thing to like something so much to imitate it, when it's not for monetary gain but pure love of the thing. It's the sincerest form of flattery.

You can rail against it for copyright reasons all you want but it's about as much an actual societal crime as fanfiction.

You know, I have nothing morally against fan games. I've made some pretty detailed plans for one or two of my own. The difference? I was smart enough to realize that despite them being well within my ability to make solo that it could turn into trouble.

See, that's what I take issue with the most. People go into making games thinking they'll slip it under the radar or that they have a right to or whatever. In a perfect world, that would be just peachy. We do not live in a perfect world.

The reality is that morality isn't so simple in this case. What usually happens is they get shut down and then there's a moral outcry over how bad those evil corporations are. I'm sorry, but if you go and bash your face into a beehive, you have no right to act surprised when they swarm out and sting you. People making fan games are like that, only they've had a line of people standing straight in front of them doing it, and then they sit there and say, "well, I'm just super-extra-special and it doesn't apply to me." Then they end up in the same place as everyone else before them. The idiocy of it all has expended its stores of my sympathy. As I said, insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.



Let me just reiterate that I'm not against fan games as a concept. If companies want to allow them to happen, power to them, everyone's happy. But companies aren't generally in that habit. Every time I hear about a new fan game, my vision goes red in advance of the inevitable crash and burn and whole song and dance all over again.

See, maybe the companies are being asses on a moral standpoint, but I find it objectionable that people are being retarded from a legal standpoint. You don't have to agree with the laws, but you're still expected to follow them. That is ethics. Ethics have a lot to do with legality. More than morality. Ethics are much more closely tied to law than you're giving them credit for. In fact, in a business sense, ethics are the entirety of the law and more. So yes, it is unethical to use someone else's IP. Amoral? Arguable. Unethical? Much less so. Because ethically speaking, you're not only using something that's not yours, but you're setting the owners up for bad publicity if they do anything about it, even though they have every right to do so.



So please, Magus, cool your jets. Morally, fan games are fine. Ethically, they are much less so. Legally, they generally are not. When two out of three factors are against something, I think I reserve the right to not be surprised when the inevitable happens and to hold it against people lining up for their turn through the merry-go-round circus that the Internet always turns these things into.

[Kerensky287]

Question.

What if this exact same preview of this exact same game had come out advertised as the next entry in the Sonic series? I mean, made by the Sonic team and everything?

In fact, let's bring up a hypothetical. What if the pair who made this game were to theoretically reveal themselves to be Sega employees? What would the reaction be then?

I mean, look at it. The animations are sloppy - when Sonic's running, there's no weight to his movements. The graphics are pretty, but a game can't run on eye candy. And for pete's sake, it's Green Hill Zone - identical to the original iteration. If the Sonic Team had released this, the reaction would've been more along the lines of "Look at it, such garbage, how dare they ruin my childhood, I could expect nothing more from the Sonic Team" because it's cool to hate on them.

But just because it's a fangame, people are going "Oh wow, look! People who actually understand the game I grew up with! Too bad it'll be C&D'd, I could expect nothing more from the Sonic Team."

I mean yeah, the last few billion sonic games (except some of the handheld ones, really) have been bad. But the fact is, people have this incredible ability to ignore obvious flaws in a work because it reminds them of something they did when they were younger - people see that gameplay, remember the shape and feel of the level, remember getting hit by that same fish in that same spot... and suddenly they don't notice the weird goddamn wobbling of the sign at the end of the level.

Plus, I mean, some company decides to make a remake and everyone yells at them for being money-grubbing whores. Some fanteam makes a remake and everyone praises them for being the true geniuses of the game industry.

Forgive me for exploding I guess. Nostalgia blindness is a bit of a sore spot for me. As for the Sonic Fan Remix itself, I couldn't possibly care less about whether it succeeds or fails.

EDIT FOR BELOW:

Originally Posted by Fifthfiend

EDIT: Seriously that is one of the worst "They are just hating it because they think it makes them COOL to hate on it like COOL GUYS HATE" arguments ever

EDIT: Like it is one of the worst arguments in an inherently terrible genre of arguments.

This wasn't a "They hate it because they think it's cool to hate on it" argument, this was a "They have no ability to tell what is good or bad so they love what they remember loving as a kid and hate what everyone else hates" argument. I mean yes, I feel like a lot of people hate on Sonic Team because a lot of people hate on Sonic Team, but that wasn't my main point. The point is that fangames are always received far better than they would be if they had been made by professionals.

Why the hell can't anyone these days take a game on its own merits rather than applauding it for being indie, or condemning it for being a cash cow/rehash/etc?

[Kim]

Animations are better than Sonic 4's animations, but I'm not really bothered by the animations in either of them. Sonic re-releases the old games enough that I've stopped caring, but I will give this a chance simply because I don't mind updated versions of old games.

[Kyanbu The Legend]

Originally Posted by Kerensky287

Question.

What if this exact same preview of this exact same game had come out advertised as the next entry in the Sonic series? I mean, made by the Sonic team and everything?

In fact, let's bring up a hypothetical. What if the pair who made this game were to theoretically reveal themselves to be Sega employees? What would the reaction be then?

I mean, look at it. The animations are sloppy - when Sonic's running, there's no weight to his movements. The graphics are pretty, but a game can't run on eye candy. And for pete's sake, it's Green Hill Zone - identical to the original iteration. If the Sonic Team had released this, the reaction would've been more along the lines of "Look at it, such garbage, how dare they ruin my childhood, I could expect nothing more from the Sonic Team" because it's cool to hate on them.

But just because it's a fangame, people are going "Oh wow, look! People who actually understand the game I grew up with! Too bad it'll be C&D'd, I could expect nothing more from the Sonic Team."

I mean yeah, the last few billion sonic games (except some of the handheld ones, really) have been bad. But the fact is, people have this incredible ability to ignore obvious flaws in a work because it reminds them of something they did when they were younger - people see that gameplay, remember the shape and feel of the level, remember getting hit by that same fish in that same spot... and suddenly they don't notice the weird goddamn wobbling of the sign at the end of the level.

Plus, I mean, some company decides to make a remake and everyone yells at them for being money-grubbing whores. Some fanteam makes a remake and everyone praises them for being the true geniuses of the game industry.

Forgive me for exploding I guess. Nostalgia blindness is a bit of a sore spot for me. As for the Sonic Fan Remix itself, I couldn't possibly care less about whether it succeeds or fails.

This is because it's being made by a group that may very well not know what they are doing. We see them as amateurs at best and praise them for making it look this good when we're expecting it to look like complete utter crap. ET levels of crap.

Mean while we bash Sega because we expect them to make something so perfect and pure that it'll leave us speechless with just its demo alone.

In short we praise fan games because our expectations of them are VERY low. While we bash Sega games because our expectations of them are too high.


EDIT: Plus you have to remember that this game is still in it's beta stage. It won't be done for another 2 to 3 years.

[Fifthfiend]

Originally Posted by Kerensky287

Question.

What if this exact same preview of this exact same game had come out advertised as the next entry in the Sonic series? I mean, made by the Sonic team and everything?

People would probably be pretty irritated is Sonic Team had released a deliberate, overt remake of a previous game, as the "next entry" in this series of games.

I don't really see what that's meant to prove, though.

EDIT: I'm going to go ahead and say that if they released this remake as a remake, fans would joysperg over it the way they joysperg over literally goddamn every somewhat-graphically-improved remake.

EDIT: Seriously that is one of the worst "They are just hating it because they think it makes them COOL to hate on it like COOL GUYS HATE" arguments ever

EDIT: Like it is one of the worst arguments in an inherently terrible genre of arguments.

[BitVyper]

I think the background there is kind of overdone, but everything still looks pretty cool. I'd rather they work on their sprites than have super detailed, animated backgrounds with all kinds of unnecessary action going on.

Edit: Okay, looking again, it's only really Eggman moving around in the background, but it still just seems weird and uneeded.

This is exactly the kind of thing that's going to generate a C&D, then subsequently mountains of fans looking to the heavens and wailing like they never saw it coming.

Yeah, it looks good enough, but they're remaking old levels and using at least one character that's not theirs. The law's on the books, people.

Are the like, twenty threads where this argument has been beaten to death and beyond not enough? I mean, no one was even talking about it.

[Fifthfiend]

19 year old characters belong in the public domain!

Information wants to be FREE!