The recent Fire Emblem games have classic/casual mode, yes, but they also have more traditional difficulty levels that govern the challenge of battles. You can mix and match the two as you please, so that you’re playing casual mode on the hardest difficulty, or classic mode on the easiest, etc.

It’s not that they can’t ever let anyone use the mark, even with permission. It’s that if they just hand out permission to anyone and everyone, it calls into question why they’d be wasting everyone’s time trying to claim an exclusive right to the mark in the first place.

It’s not that simple with trademarks. Copyright, sure, they can issue a blanket license to any and all comers. It’s their call. But trademarks need to be protected against genericization. If they just allowed anyone to use the mark, even with all the proper paperwork, that would indicate to the courts that they’re not…

It doesn’t really matter if you buy it or not. Legally, trademarks must be defended. You can’t wait until the mark is on the verge of becoming genericized: if you’re aware of a violation, it needs to be addressed or it can (and most likely will) be dredged up down the line and used against you when you are trying to…

Wasteland 2 was developed by inXile, which was founded by Brian Fargo after leaving Interplay. Over the years, he’s bought back the rights to many early Interplay games from EA, including both Wasteland and The Bard’s Tale. EA doesn’t have anything to do with it anymore.

You didn’t actually have to hold reset while powering off. It was just that the NES didn’t actually power down in the sense that a more modern system did: it just cut the power. If, by chance, the system was writing to the battery-backed RAM when you did that, it could corrupt the save. Later consoles (SNES onwards)…

The PSP releases are the best looking and best sounding, to be sure. But they have the same problem as the Dawn of Souls releases: the “fixes” to the mechanics that were optional in the PSX releases are mandatory in the later (post-PSX) remakes. I know that a lot of people (inexplicably, IMO) prefer the…

To be fair, Final Fantasy III (the original Famicom version, at least: the less said about the 3D remake, the better) uses pretty much exactly the same magic system, and it doesn’t have save points, either (which weren’t introduced until the SNES games). It has one cheat, though, where it adds a brief exterior section…

Mega Man could’ve been worse. They could have based him on the first game’s American box art....

Baltimore is not cheap living, actually. You could probably manage with $53k/year, but it would be a fairly thin margin, especially if you’re renting instead of owning your home. And the suburbs, if anything, are worse, because suburban Maryland is actually quite wealthy, with a fairly high cost of living (116 where…

I agree. I’m actually feeling much more positive about DC than I have in the past. But I do understand the skepticism: for a lot of people, it’s a “once bitten, twice shy” kind of situation. People were excited for a lot of previous events, relaunches, and changes in direction, and many feel let down by them. But I…

I would argue that they need exactly the opposite. For years, Dan Didio did his best to mould DC Comics into an editorially-driven line where he and a handful of others (primarily Geoff Johns) set the tone, direction, and major story lines. That approach resulted in both the abysmally bad Countdown and, ultimately, in …

Yeah, that was basically what I said when io9 posted an article on this last week. I think Snyder is a lot better than he gets credit for, but I cannot and will not follow him down this particular rabbit hole.

It has them scrambling and desperate - so desperate, that they sent back Suicide Squad for reshoots to “add more humor like Deadpool,” (that is a direct quote from the studio, yes)

I certainly hope the author doesn’t make a decision to alter or hide his opinions solely because they’re out of the mainstream. Pay attention to what other people say and consider it, certainly, but, in the end, what you’re flatly suggesting is chilling. “You’re wrong because everybody else says you’re wrong” is…

Interestingly, I notice that the first three X-Men films tend to get left out a lot when discussing the evolution of superhero/comic book movies. I’m still not entirely sure why that is. I think there’s a fundamental difference between the X-Men movies (at least, the pre-First Class ones) and what we generally…

I believe that Marvel also retained most (if not all) of the merchandising rights, and pulled in a fair bit of profit from that. I know that’s the case when it comes to Sony and the Spider-Man license. Your basic point stands, though.

God, I’m tired of this argument. I have liked bad movies. Batman v Superman is not one of them. I legitimately believe that it is a good movie, and none of the criticisms I’ve seen have made a convincing case otherwise. Critics of this movie seem to have a pathological need to have their opinions upheld by everyone…

Doom 64 isn’t a port of the PC version. It’s a full sequel, with entirely different levels, changes to the monsters and the mechanics, and so on. And the levels are really well made, even if I personally don’t like some of the aesthetic changes (the redesigned monsters have never really done anything for me and I…

The earliest installments were all parodies of the sort of infomercials you might find on local TV at 4 AM in the morning. They’ve kind of strayed from that a bit recently (likely starting with the success of Too Many Cooks), but the basic premise is broadly the same: they’re supposed to look largely innocuous at…