tetrisconcept no longer condones tetris clones

I guess so. Just don't openly tell people to pirate it.

Long live originality and being able to play arcade games on a PC.

 

Eh ?

 

As in, don't link to ROMs on the forum and give detailed posts of how to use them.

 

There is two different problems.
Clones annoy TTC because people playing clones won't buy tetris games anymore. Cloning Tgm makes the clones more attractive to people, thus their success which "frightens" TTC.
Playing TGM on mame doesn't arm anybody holding rights on the games since arika doesn't commercialise the game anymore (thus not making money with it). Only people having problems with it is arcade center responsibles. That's why mihara asked couple of years ago to the mame people to remove support for tgm2. More to tell arcade people "you see, they don't emulate tgm2, so you can buy my tgm3 without being scared".

 

NULLPOMINO!

Go ahead, ban me

 

this is caffeine 2.0 lmao

 

I think it isnt a valid argument.
I would understand this if you had received legal threats, but if you didn't then I'll explain why this argument is invalid in my opinion:

Either Nullpomino will be better than TGM4 and it will indeed be a threat for the TGM license. But in that case, what's the point of waiting for TGM4 / whats the point of making TGM4.

Or TGM4 will be better than Nullpomino (more likely) and in that case they have nothing to fear from Nullpomino.

Really I dont understand this.

 

I think the logic behind all of this is simple.
I'm an arcade center owned, people from arika come to sell their new game for like 5000 bucks. What do I answer ? "why would I buy your tgm4 when it will be probably be hacked in two days and available as clones in two months ?"

 

ah ? Kotetsu is back with us ?

 

I see one of two things happening here.

1) clones are halted, and TGM games actually continue coming out, and possibly even make it over. This is what we all hope for here.
2) clones are halted and TTC comes up with some other excuse to deny TGM. If this happens, Mihara might decide to no longer care about the license. MIGHT.

Both of these require that distribution of the major clones (which we all know the name of) actually cease, and new clones not to become public.

Now of course there is nothing wrong with creating your own clone for personal use and practice, as long as you keep it to yourself and out of the largest forum for commerce ever. Since Henk agrees that tetris is a sport, there's nothing preventing you from making your own tetris court and practicing on it.

TGM4 may be dead. He still wants to try for TGM5.

 

thanks for asserting that as fact but anyway i guess the only thing that determines the 'morality' (lol) of clone use is the means by which you got it? i guess bootlegging tgm3 would be perfectly alright if i just wrote all of the 1s and 0s myself

 

If you made it yourself completely, and kept it to yourself, and didn't give it to your friends, and didn't run it in a public arcade cabinet, then you've caused very little harm. But in that particular case it's probably easier to just buy the type-x. And if a local arcade cabinet does exist, you should play on it instead.

But if you make your own PC clone and keep it to yourself, no one else even knows, and no harm is done, provided you buy the official game when it comes out.

 

jesus christ lol

 

Sigh. the edit button seems to be non functional. While i admit to not having programmed the clones that have entered into my possession, I have made a commitment to buy the first TGM game that is released for a system I can actually run it on. This means any portable that is not region locked that I own (Nintendo DS at the moment), PC, or a local region console that I own.

Ace doesn't count, because it'd region locked to a region other than mine. (I'm not even touching the argument of if it counts as a TGM game or not)

I advise anyone who plays TGM clones make the same commitment, however they obtain them.

 

I suspect that clones are just an easy scapegoat, and that the real reason behind TGM4's cancellation is that Henk Rogers' restrictive guidelines forced Mihara to produce a game that fans just didn't want to play. I remember after one of the loke tests that Koryan mentioned on his blog how move reset "sucks balls". (Okay, so he didn't use those exact words, but the sentiment was the same).

The real fight we have is with Henk Rogers. Fans have been clamouring for console ports of TGM games. Ports of TGM1 and TGM2 were developed (and pretty much completed) for PlayStation and PS2 respectively, but were unreleased due to opposition from Henk. People have asked for TGM to be released outside of Japan; but again, Henk made it prohibitively expensive for Arika to purchase the license in order to do so. Look at the relative lack of success of ACE, in part caused by having to conform more closely to Henk's guideline. If TGM4 were to be released, its quality would have to be compromised in order to meet Henk's approval. After witnessing the rape of SEGA's "Tetris: New Century" by the guideline four years ago, a certain perceptive person commented: "Will there be a TGM4? If there is, will it be worth playing?" Four years on and we have the answer.

Personally I think that, with regards to the future of the TGM series, banning clones will achieve very little. Clones or no clones, there simply isn't room for Mihara's vision to exist within Henk's guideline. We will never have a TGM4 with the guideline in its current state. However, that is not to say that banning clones isn't the right thing to do.

Henk is shrewd; he will find ways to blame everything on other people and use any excuse to stop us from having the games we want. I'm sure he will claim that the reason there needs to be such stringent rules determining what should and should not be in a Tetris game is because there are so many unofficial clones diluting the "brand image". He will likely try and claim that there's no need for another TGM game, especially in the West, because the market is small and "we all play clones anyway". And it's not just us TGM fans that are being disrespected by TTC. If you've been keeping an eye on harddrop.com, you'll know that there are a lot of top tier guideline vs. players that are getting really frustrated with how incompetent and complacent Henk and the other higher-ups at TTC are.

If we carry on the way we are, saying "fuck you" to TTC, supporting amateur clones with the mechanics that we want, we will struggle to gain publicity without being shut down, and our communities will remain small and fragmented. In other words: nothing will change. The TGM scene will die out, and the guideline will remain as broken as ever. There is no way we can carry on as we are and get what we want.

On the other hand, if we were to try and effect change to the guideline, we may actually enable TGM4 (or 5) to get a release and not suck, and we may be able to get an official multiplayer Tetris game with some of the features that we want, and build up a strong competetive community around it. Before any of you put on your "Marvin the Paranoid Android" voices and claim that we'll never achieve this, you should realize that there is a definite glimmer of hope: obviously, TTC are accutely aware of Blink and his opinions, and Kitaru has recently exchanged words with Henk himself, with Henk entertaining the idea of "relaxing the guideline a little".

However, with Henk being the downright obstinate idiot that he is, we really do have to be united and speak with one voice in order to get through to him; and we certainly don't want to give Henk or his lawyers any ammunition to use against us. It is for this reason that I feel that we should ban clones. Not because we're admitting that TTC can copyright the mechanics of Tetris, (they most certainly can't), but because it's the only way of giving ourselves a leg to stand on if we want to fight the guideline.

 

The golden age of Tetris licensing and sub-licencing will soon come to an end. The beginning of the end for TTC and Arika.

Started as jagoris, then moonshine.. decentralised "Metastasis" is more than ever on his way. Once unleashed, "cease and desist cursed cure" will surely have the opposite effect of what is happening here again.

 

This.

All you guys harping on about how we should keep clones are completely not seeing the bigger picture. Personally, I don't want to see clones. I want to see professionally developed games being released in the west and being popular. I'd like to log into multiplayer lobbies and see something more than the same dozen or so players logged in every damn time.

For example, Nullpomino isn't ever going to be popular to the mainstream. The interface is ugly and confusing as fuck, the number of modes is unsettling to any player who doesn't know the ins and outs of Tetris game history, and the online mode is overly complicated. And it will remain that way because apparently that's how the hardcore players prefer it. Which is fine for hardcore players, but it makes it pretty much entirely inaccessible to anyone who isn't going to go through a readme, or who doesn't have an experienced player to hold their hand and walk them through everything. Then there's the fact that a huge number of Tetris players aren't ever going to find the damn thing anyway, unless they're pretty much specifically looking for it.

Official games can gather expansive player bases and can create an online community with real size, strength, depth and competitiveness. Most of you guys haven't been here long enough, but in the early days of TC it was Tetris DS that pretty much filled this place with people. There were a few TGM players dotted around, but from what I remember of the majority of 2006, this place mostly had Tetris DS driving it's numbers. This being a game that was on the DS, and had no chat whatsoever. If I had some entertaining matches with someone online, I had no way to give them a link to this place. Yet it still grew pretty substantially from a nothing forum with a handful of members into something meaningful over a fairly short space of time.

We don't have the money to make a fan-made Tetris game that will be solid, accessible, and we wouldn't have the money to push it out into the world and advertise it even if we did. We can't get the hundreds of thousands of players that TTC can. Even if we could, we'd then have to spend more money we don't have on lawsuits against TTC defending our Tetris-like game. It ain't happening. Keep living in your ideal magical worlds where we'll fight against TTC and win, but this is real life, they're a multi-million dollar company and we're a handful of douchebags on an internet forum.

Fundamentally if we want the Tetris franchise to be driven into a state we're happy with, and into a state with strong multiplayer and single player communities, we're never going to achieve that with underground clones that will get C&D notifications if they ever get too popular anyway. The only way we're truly going to get the games we want is by getting TTC on our side.

Now sure, we've tried reasoning with them, and telling them what we want, and it's failed, but the whole time we've been doing that we've never actually properly tried getting them on our side. The whole time we've been playing clones and as a community flouting and boycotting the games they make. How the hell is not paying for their games a good argument to why they should tweak their business model to include our wishes?

Tetris Friends isn't that bad. It has some flaws, but fundamentally it can be pretty fun and it's not an awful starting point (aside from being browser-based). Yet pretty much none of us play it. We bitched that the DAS was slow and it sucked, they added in custom DAS, and then we bitched because they were making us pay/grind/register to dating sites to do it. If they add in features we ask for and then we refuse to pay for them and turn our backs instead, how exactly is that helping our cause that they should put in the features we ask for.

Tetris Friends also has this awesome feature where I can sign on and instantly find matches against various opponents, without having to wait for people to be online or prod people to play matches with me. Some of the clones should really try putting that into their netplay

All the decent single-player clones are mostly ripping off TGM gameplay. Seeing as TGM, TAP and Ti are already playable in current clones, and there's not going to be any new single-player worth cloning, what the fuck is the problem?
And do you guys ever seriously think that a major national sponsored Tetris competition is going to use Nullpo or Blockbox? If the long-term goal for multiplayer at least is to make it widespread, competitive and popular, it's going to be an official game whether we like it or not, so we might as well do our best to try and make it so that we do in fact like it.

Fact is that TTC have at least partially listened to us. They've shown that they're prepared to do things for us. Yet until now we haven't shown that we're willing to do things for them, quite the opposite in fact. Banning discussion of clones isn't the most unreasonable step to show the powers that be that maybe we're prepared to be civilised about things and be reasonable. TTC hold all the power - they're the ones that make the real games, and they're the ones that have the money to sue the shit out of anyone making clones if they so choose. It's not that crazy to suggest maybe we should make the first moves of diplomacy, and that maybe we should do what they ask before we can expect them to do what we ask.

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tl;dr - shut the fuck up you whiny assholes and actually think about the serious long-term implications and potential benefits for Tetris and the people who play it, instead of whining about your shitty clones that aren't going to get threads any more yet will probably remain in identical states of development (ie. either ongoing [Nullpo] or dead [Texmaster]). God help you retards might actually want some new Tetris material worth playing rather than the same rehashed cloned modes we've had for the last five years now.

A long post, but if you're allergic to reading walls of text, then you void your right to actually have a say in this community anyway because you're clearly not right for TC.

Plus if we get six months or twelve months or whatever down the line and absolutely fuck-all has changed, I really doubt this ban will remain in place forever.

 

haha if you are a user on this website and not one of the people who made this decision your 'right to have any say' is - get this - already void

 

ಠ_ಠ

 

also lol at anyone who thinks tgm players have a market share that is more than negligible to ttc