5 GAMES FOR JANUARY 2019

In the first of my batch of monthly mini-reviews, we have a variety of gamestyles to keep you busy. There's the action-strategy of Airborne Ranger, some Norse god role playing in Dusk of the Gods, some mini-game shenanigans in Jumanji: A Jungle Adventure Game Pack, some explosive combat racing in L.A. Blaster and to top it off, why not beat some wrestlers up in WWF: In Your House.

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QUEEN: THE EYE

With Bohemian Rhapsody winning all kinds of awards, the awesome musical stylings of Queen are again on everyone's minds - if they ever left. But on the outskirts of their rock anthems and operatic concept albums sits a band with a keen interest in science-fiction. We all know Flash Gordon, and some may have seen the Orwellian We Will Rock You on the stage, but most fascinating is Queen: The eYe (yes, that's how it's spelt), a little-known action-adventure published by Electronic Arts in limited numbers back in 1998.

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ALICE: AN INTERACTIVE MUSEUM

Before the influx of multi-media CDs flooded the market, even before Myst or The 7th Guest popularised it, a Japanese computer artist named Haruhiko Shono created a hallucinatory game loosely based on an equally hallucinatory children's book. Originally released in 1991 in Japan and 1994 elsewhere, Alice: An Interactive Museum stands as being one of the most trippy experiences ever put on CD.

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Discovery ordered for Star Trek Discovery

Star Trek Discovery claims for a frivolous lawsuit has no steam.

Yesterday, January 8th, the judge had a pretrial hearing in her courtroom with all lawyers involved. The meeting resulted in very positive outcomes that help find the truth and serve justice. The defendants request to dismiss the case based on it being a "frivolous claim" was not entertained by the judge. The defendants' argument kept going around me trying to own copyrights to the real life tardigrade (I never claimed that).

The judge set the timeline for summary judgment motion which means that the defendants attempt to dismiss the case is limited to actual legal defects instead of generic claims.

The judge also gave us 'discovery' which means that we can request and the defendants are compelled to provide information to support our case.  The discovery order was only one sided which means that the defendants cannot request information from us.

Finally, the judge granted us the third amended complaint as of right.  This means that we no longer need the expressed permission from the defendants to file the third complaint.

TOP 10 GAMES OF 2018

Compared to last year, 2018 was one hell of a year for games. Sony hit it out of the park while Nintendo continued their Switch streak with a number of steady releases. Microsoft did some good too, though I only experienced them on the PC. All and all, it's been a good one so let's take a look at what new games I actually got around to play and which one holds my highest esteem...

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TOP 10 MOVIES OF 2018

2018 is over, and it was quite an eventful year. Cinematically speaking it was probably one of the best years for big budget movies, with only a small number of them being terrible (even though their box office was all over the place). Television gave theatres a run for their money too, with many productions besting anything on the silver screen. But this post is about movies, specifically my TOP 10. Read on to see my highly subjective list...

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Scènes à faire

Yesterday, January 2nd 2019, a joint letter was sent to the judge. The defendants are trying to dismiss the case. First they were defending themselves by saying that I'm trying to own copyrights to the real life microscopic tardigrade. I have never claimed by any mean that I owned the rights to the real life microscopic tardigrade. Now they are saying I cannot copyright "enlarged Tardigrades in space". The creatures in the game are huge Tardigrades, blue lit and being the research subject by a blonde botanist of which later will be used to facilitate instantaneous space travel. I've been posting development updates on my blog, Steam, AGS forums, Twitter, Reddit, YouTube... since May 2014 and I have always engaged with comments and discussions with fans and friends.

The defendants are trying to emphasize on the few elements from their show that were not taken from my work. We dug up an old case which has an interesting line: "No plagiarist can excuse his wrong by showing how much work he did not pirate." Sheldon v. Metro-Goldwyn Pictures Corp., 81 F.2d 49, 56. The defendants are also trying to say that my original ideas would qualify as Scènes à faire, like when a sci fi story includes a starship, a space captain, an engineer, a science officer and an alien.  However, the expression of these characters as in facial features like pointy ears or ridged forehead are protected, Mattel, Inc. v. Goldberger Doll Mfg. Co., 365 F.3d 133 (2d Cir. 2004).

So according to the defendants, a blonde botanist doing a research on giant blue tardigrades to be used in space travel should be a common trait in science fiction movies just like "fast draw" scenes and bar fights in western movies.

The distribution of my project before September 2017 is quite excellent too. Before September 2017, my YouTube channel had a total of 3.2M views, the Tardigrades game-in-production thread on the AGS forums had 200K views and 500 comments replies making it the top adventure game-in-production of all time. My blog here had 100K views. Tardigrades was also Greenlit on Steam. For those of you who don't know what Steam is, Steam is the biggest gaming platform on the net. Game developers post demos, alphas, even concepts to the Steam Greenlight website, people start voting by answering this question: "Would you buy this game from Steam?" After getting enough votes, the game gets Greenlit, which means when its development is complete, Steam does some arrangements to host and sell the game on their massive platform. Note that there are several old Star Trek games on Steam even prior to 2014. Funny thing is, they might have even voted for Tardigrades.