No, they patented a plastic shell containing buttons which charge capacitive screens but do not rely on transference. In other words, they can be used with gloves or anything else that inhibits capacitive touch.

They cited about a zillion other patents for what you described: plastic cases with capacitive buttons (physical keyboard attachments, etc.).

This is a perfectly acceptable usage of the patent system.

Read it for yourself: https://patents.google.com/patent/US20180275769A1/en?oq=20180275769

Incidentally, this company tries to cite their own patent:

PlayCase – U.S. Provisional Patent Application No. 63/668,169 (filed on July 6, 2024)

But a provisional patent is not a patent. Depending on its claims and citations, it’ll be interesting to see whether or not it’s granted by the USPTO, but my money is on no.

They also use unlicensed trademarked images on their webpage.

Reminds me of the commercial with the Turtles song

CDs are particularly susceptible to this. DVDs far less so, and Blu-ray (modern games) will likely outlive all of us—if not stored in a shed.

Fortunately, ripping the games most at risk is usually quite easy.

The “learning” isn’t the same kind of learning that humans do. There is no abstraction or meta layer, only whether or not a sequence of inputs achieved an output deemed successful by a human. Programs like these interact with the game, essentially, as one static screen shot at a time. For any given configuration, the input that is most likely to result in success (based on prior experience in the form of training) is reinforced so it becomes more likely, a bit like training a dog. Except a dog knows what a ball is.

This is similar to how Google’s Go models worked. For any given configuration, a set of probabilities are generated based on the weights in the model, which are based on the training (initial values are arbitrary). The main difference is that Google could simulate zillions of AI vs. AI games at a high rate of speed. Anything with a live stream attached is mainly for entertainment value and subscriber count, otherwise you would have the game run at 1,000x speed so the computer could actually train faster.

But the side effect of this kind of training is that each level is a new experience. This is somewhat analogous to how infants learn to avoid holes while crawling, but then have to relearn that when they begin walking.

I bought a VM2. DreamMods makes high-quality products, but they’re a small company based in Greece, and getting their product through customs is apparently extremely time-consuming (read: months).

expected to launch within Q4 2024

If you order at launch, expect to receive one in Q1 2026.

No evidence this is authentic and no way to authenticate it. But sure, I suppose some people have $35,000 to spare.

I was interested in this until it said something like 4-5 hours of gameplay. Just can’t imagine spending like $75 with shipping on an RPG I’ll finish in one sitting.

If you’re like me and you’ve never heard of EGX before: it’s in London and used to be called Eurogamer Expo.

And everything will have impossible to remove price decals directly on the covers that ruin whatever condition and collectibility there was.

Do you believe that Pokémon’s creators intentionally included these revelations in their products to subtly provide emotional closure?

😂

This level of over analysis about a children’s brand was a joy to read

I had to unsubscribe from the Wulff Den YouTube channel because it was a new Android retro handheld each week and how many of these things can you realistically care about

Edit: Evidently at least one person is buying every one of these

If this were a real game back in the day it would have been really fondly remembered. Too bad this is just an animated video instead of an actual game.

They’re for sale on eBay from Japan. There’s three varieties (Genesis 1 CD and 32X, Genesis 2 CD, and Base Converter).

There is a threatening little dwarf in the room with you

I really can’t stand it when people feel the need to denigrate other people’s hobbies.

Everyone: God is a wise old man looking down on us from Heaven

God:

I’m guessing the discussion was, “Let’s make a Sega Cinematic Universe to compete with Nintendo’s.”

I’m also going to give 1:1 odds that there are plans for an Altered Beast movie.

I backed this pretty much the instant it was announced. The first thing to know is that it’s much larger in scope than the original games, while keeping the NES-style visuals and interface. There are also callbacks to Deja Vu, Uninvited, and other titles. It really does seem to be shaping up to feel like a true sequel, with the writing front and center.

It also seems to be a do-over of the TurboGrafx CD game of the same name: some similar story elements, but not the same plot.

That game was decently well-reviewed but never felt like a true sequel, since it was an example of first-sequel experimentation: it swapped the first-person dungeon crawler perspective and writing for a point-and-click adventure perspective with very little writing. More like Zelda 2 in variation from the original than Mario 2 (USA).

Price Charting and a text file for game items that PC doesn’t track. I don’t really like any of the available options, though, so I’m very slowly building my own system from scratch to track all my stuff properly. (Baldur’s Gate 3 is currently interrupting my progress on that.)