The Mad Catz Dreampad for the Dreamcast is the only 3rd party controller I've ever encountered that's better than the original. Better grips, extra face buttons for fighters, a nicer analog stick. The whole thing just felt really high quality. The exact opposite of what you'd usually expect from Mad Catz.
Only issue is for whatever reason the white ones have a crooked d-pad. All the other colors are fine.
Mad Catz will surprise you.
They got tapped to make the Rock Band keytar and they knocked it all the way out of the park by making a genuinely good midi controller that just happened to also be a video game controller.
Keep in mind, they could have phoned it in and not lost a cent, because what does Rock Band need? Four buttons? Red yellow green blue? Nope, here's 25 velocity-aware keys and a DIN port, and that's just for starters.
Here's a decent write-up I found: https://cdm.link/2010/10/hands-on-rock-band-3s-keytar-a-surprisingly-serious-80-midi-keyboard/
I think people are missing the fact that most fanmade content that Valve has historically been ok with is all original material. Black Mesa, Portal Stories, and others all used the Valve IP but were all original content. This port actually uses Valve-created content so, regardless of Nintendo’s involvement (although it makes the demand for this action stronger), they legally have to enforce it or risk losing the legal protections for that property.
Nintendo just gave them a convenient way to stop it before they needed to do it anyways.
I don't think thats how it works for copyright. You have to defend your trademarks to keep them but for copyright, you can decide who can use it rather arbitralily.
Especially allowing a release of an old game on platform you don't support which would not really compete with you.
It’s not about whether it competes. It’s about whether a “reasonable person” could confuse it for being an authorized product of the IP owner. In this case, people could confuse it with both a licensed Nintendo product (since it runs on original hardware) and it could be confused with an official Valve release (since the content is an exact (as possible) recreation of the levels and assets from the original game.
So you are clearly talking about trademark. A game design can't be trademarked. Only the name. Yes, if the name could be confused, that could be an issue. Maybe the cover art to some extent, if it is trademarked.
But if the game origin can be confused, so what? No law against that.
Valve is actually one of the companies that treats fan projects very well, sometimes they'll even let you sell your project on Steam (see Black Mesa remake).
I picked up a Miyoo Mini Plus earlier this year as an impulse buy, and ended up liking it enough that I regret not buying a higher end model with analog sticks. Still, don't know if it's worth trying to upgrade now - I'm waiting for the day we can get a full SteamOS device in this form factor.
RetroGaming
Top