Here are the salient details, minus the fluff:

The haul had an estimated value of €47.5m, Mr Langella said, a figure which includes the value of the consoles and hundreds of licenses for the pirated programs.

They were “all from China” and were imported to be sold in specialised shops or online, Mr Langella said.

All the devices were fitted with non-certified batteries and electrical circuits and did not meet EU technical or safety standards. The seized games have been destroyed.

Nine Italian nationals have been arrested and charged with trading in counterfeited goods. If found guilty, they face up to eight years in prison.

No, it’s up to Capcom to produce a product that people want to buy. That’s how markets work.

You can play just about anything via FPGA with the Analogue Pocket.

Facebook offered him nearly a billion dollars personally. I don’t think many people would do something different there.

But I don’t think most people would go on to start a military subcontractor. Between that and his politics, he’s pretty shitty.

Facebook and Luckey both say they fired him for reasons that don’t have anything to do with politics, so there’s probably something else that makes him shitty that we don’t even know about.

The game looks cute. I’m sure it’s only like three hours of gameplay, but I decided to preorder a copy. Also picked up Dragonhym (nice art, and they claim 10-15 hours of gameplay) and Kudzu (fantastic music) while I was at it. My first modern Game Boy games.

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.

How is it possible to complain about this non-issue for 20 minutes straight

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).