It had different names depending on publisher/region:

Little Big Adventure […] was published in Europe by Electronic Arts, and by Activision in North America, Asia and Oceania under the name Relentless: Twinsen’s Adventure.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Big_Adventure

Its out? Its out!!

Now I know what I’m doing tonight.

This sounds like a jump the shark moment

Middle of the pack

This has a few comparisons: https://youtu.be/K7EmuHBslhk

I’m not sure “in a 3D space” qualifies as an “inventive step” these days.

It definitely feels like something a person with ordinary skill in the art to which the invention pertains could easily have made on the basis of an invention or inventions that are already known.

Co-optimous has the best db of co-op features.

For couch co-op they list:

• PS1 - 85 titles
• PS2 - 212 titles
• PS3 - 500 titles
• PS4 - 1207 titles
• PS5 - 393 titles

These numbers place the PS4 couch co-op library as larger than all the preceding PS generations combined. (At the moment you could group PS5 in with them too but that won’t be true for long.)

Edit: thinking about this a bit more the interesting pattern is that each of PS2, PS3, and PS4 more than doubled their preceding generation’s figure. We don’t know how long the PS5 generation will stick around but we are probably half way though and its unlikely it reaches 2400 co-op titles.

This ones probably more current.

https://youtu.be/UtG11pmBe3U

Admittedly my understanding of patents is pretty rudimentary but I thought you had to apply before releasing the idea into the world.

If that was right the general concept of a container that you throw at a creature to capture it would be considered unpatentable after Pocket Monsters Red and Green released in February 1997. Of course they could trademark the specific markings of the pokeball but the general mechanic would be fair game.

It looks like these guys have you covered:

https://retrobadge.co.uk/retrobadge/slogans-sayings-badges/normal-small-retro-badge/

A great example, immersion held a patent and blocked the competition.

However if Sony (or anyone else) had developed and released a product (or even published a design) using the same technical implementation before 1996 then that would have established prior art and no one would be able to patent it.

Is a crappy situation but patents don’t enable the patent holder to make a product, after all you can make the product without claiming a patent. Instead they stop people who are not the patent holder from making that product.

So if we put on our tinfoil hats its likely that some “just in case” patents are really just stopping their competition from heading in that direction.

This needs to be killed as we have prior art (Emulators, Braid, Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, heaps of racing games, etc).

If their only significant addition is “we a have a button for it” then we need to ask if a button qualifies as “inventive” in 2024?

Edit:

Announcer: Will he succumb to the maddening urge to eradicate history? At the MERE PUSH of a SINGLE BUTTON! The beeyootiful shiny button! The jolly candy-like button! Will he hold out, folks? CAN he hold out?

- Space Madness (1991)

I would like to play a reimagining with only the two factions and not two many unit types. If they updated with modern QoL but kept the actual mechanics simple it would make a nice casual game.

But what do I know, I think that Anno on Wii is the best Anno.

I this is the most effective search I could find:

https://www.google.com/search?q=“Mozilla’s+Firefox+Send”

Not great for a product that is not Mozilla’s Firefox Send!

They have a crazy history of buying and selling companies and IPs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_SA#History

When they have good times they buy what they can, then when they hit hard times it all ends up offered in a fire sale.

To add to the confusion Atari announced earlier this year that they would restore the Infogrames brand as a publishing label.

Now we get stuff like this :

I guess that would do it.

At home I’ve got a pihole

How is the pihole from a maintenance perspective?

I have my family using adguard DNS on our mobile devices and it does a great job of killing ads in the mobile games my son plays (and browsers of course).

I unfortunately can’t run adblockers at my job.

Ouch! We have deployed ad blockers on all supported bowsers as a matter of policy to meet our security goals.

I haven’t seen any more than the single tile on my xbox home screen.

I wonder if its regional or just that my ad blockers are working.

The Mac Mini product line has been running since 2005.