Archie Comics put out some amazing licensed comics in the 1990s. I’ve always been partial to their Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Adventures, which started out as straight-up adaptations of the cartoon before very quickly veering into very outre territory, and winded up in a much, much different place than any other…

Beamdog’s never gotten a license to the Planescape setting, but they’ve gotten Forgotten Realms from Hasbro for the Baldur’s Gate and Icewind Dale remasters, and even gotten a new expansion and an interquel out of the deal. So it can be done, but it may not be worth the asking price.

Honestly, it wouldn’t surprise me that much. I don’t expect it soon, since there would likely need to be a shakeup in Konami’s management first, but given how closely Kojima is associated with MGS, I can easily see Kojima getting licensed to do another game to be published by Konami. I just doubt he’ll ever return as…

It’s not a lie: they’re bringing in less, but they’re spending way, way less. So it’s a net profit. The question is whether or not they can keep this up going forward. They’ve likely already trimmed all of the fat they can realistically trim, and there’s no guaranteed their revenue won’t continue to fall, particularly…

Well, I meant “all bets are off” in the sense of “standard trademark law isn’t necessarily the be-all and end-all,” but you’re right, and I appreciate the clarification.

Assuming it’s anything like trademark law, they’re all but required to do that. But I’m just surprised because of the number of fairly high-profile games of the mid-1990s that seemingly got away with appropriating the symbol. It seems unlikely to me that the Red Cross would have reached out to Nintendo on the matter…

Fair enough. As I said, it could have been a combination of the two. But Earthbound definitely was impacted by Nintendo of America’s content guidelines, and the presence of a cross would have likely violated that rule even if the ICRC hadn’t been in the picture.

I actually really, really like the level design in Mega Man 6. The introduction of a more non-linear approach and multiple exits was a great one that I wish hadn’t been abandoned after one outing. The robot masters weren’t among the most inspired, but they were a considerable improvement over Mega Man 5's altogether…

As great as Mega Man Unlimited is (and it is great, don’t get me wrong), I find its difficulty to be a little too unforgiving for my tastes. Though its been substantially nerfed in more recent versions, Rainbow Man’s stage is still harder than just about any official level, and it flies well past “challenging” en…

Both are superb, but I’ve always found Dive Man’s music to be my favorite regular level track of the franchise.

Mega Man 4's soundtrack is superb, frankly. I know Mega Man 2 gets more love in that department, but I think I have to give a slight edge to this one. It’s definitely an improvement over Mega Man 3 (which had a couple of good songs, but far too many forgettable ones).

Mega Man X is one of the better games of the Mega Man franchise, but I’ve never seen it as the be-all and end-all so many of its supporters make it out to be. The robot master/maverick designs are good, and the idea of changing up certain aspects of the levels based on the order you visit them is a great one (Flame…

Look, Mega Man 4 has some problems in its boss design, certainly. Poor Toad Man clearly only graduated from video game boss academy on a technicality, and its not like Ring Man was the most inspired of concepts. But I won’t accept anyone telling me that a game that featured both Skull Man and Pharoah Man was “less…

Trademark law definitely works like that in most jurisdictions, which is why there is a requirement that the mark hold take steps to protect their rights. When they don’t, they risk the mark becoming genericized and losing it in court (as happened with several formerly-trademarked words like “kleenex” and “cola”).

Some of the Castlevania games got away with flaunting Nintendo’s censorship rules to an extent. But other games definitely did not: all of the pre-PlayStation Final Fantasy games released in the US had offending crosses removed, as, for that matter, did numerous Castlevania games (the subweapon cross is still there,…

Yeah, it’s not like the symbol itself is a new thing, either. So the smart money is likely on the International Committee of the Red Cross not knowing about or not caring to enforce their rights over video games in the same way they had been doing for movies until the last decade or so, I guess.

Under normal trademark law, certainly. But since the Geneva Convention has been mentioned, I’m thinking there are considerations above and beyond normal national trademark laws here. If it’s a matter of international treaty, all bets are of when it comes to mark genericization.

Was that really because of Red Cross objection, though? Lots of other games of that era featured the symbol without any publicized objections. I figured the Earthbound censorship had more to do with Nintendo of America’s blanket restrictions on depicting any religious imagery (crosses, in this case) than with the…

I think this is a relatively recent thing, actually. The Red Cross either couldn’t or didn’t care to go after video games featuring their symbol until the last few years. Obviously, lots of older games used it as a graphic, but I’ve noticed a bunch of newer titles, and rereleases of older titles (like the first two Doo…

I remember this coming up when id Software rereleased the first two Doom games as part of Doom 3: BFG Edition. The stimpacks, medikits, and berserk packs, all of which had featured the standard red cross symbol in the original release and all rereleases up to that point, were replaced with a red and white pill…