Gaming
Nintendo Wins Handheld Patent Case
Nintendo has won a lawsuit that was filed against it by a company that claimed the Japanese gaming giant’s handheld devices infringed on its patents. The suit was filed over eight of Nintendo’s consoles, including the DSi, 3DS, and Game Boy Advance. Quintal Research Group, the company that filed the case, is a patent assertion firm that is run by the plaintiff, who is himself a patent lawyer.
The case against Nintendo revolved around a patent for a “computerized information retrieval system.” The case hinged on one specific section of the patent, which describes a device “having a generally rectangular shape with a display screen on one side that has a frame with an ergonomic placement of finger controls including a pair of thumb controls on the top of the display with at least one of the finger controls being a cursor or pointer control.”
That’s rather vague, and Nintendo wasn’t going to give in to the patent trolls. Fortunately for them, Quintal Research’s case was quite dodgy from the start. For one thing, their patent was awarded in 2008, but they were suing over consoles that were released well before that year, such as the Game Boy Advance, which was released in 2004. For another thing, handheld consoles have been prolific for several decades, so it’s unclear how a patent was even awarded for something that was clearly already a well-established invention.
Quintal was apparently quick to inform Nintendo of its patent back in 2009 and even offered them a license to use the patent. Nintendo, which has been manufacturing handheld consoles since the 1980’s, rightly scoffed and dismissed the patent as ridiculous.
“We are very pleased to have this case dismissed,” said Devon Pritchard, General Counsel and Senior Vice President of Business Affairs of Nintendo of America. “The result in this case continues to prove that Nintendo will vigorously defend its innovations against patent lawsuits and will not pay to settle cases simply to avoid litigation. Nintendo continues to support patent reform efforts that reduce the unnecessary and inefficient burden cases like this one place on technology companies in the United States.”
Nintendo is frequently the target of patent trolls. Earlier this year a Slovakian patent troll firm tried to claim they owned the rights to the Wii Balance Board based on a patent for a “method and device for detecting specific states of movement of a user.” That case was quickly thrown out. Sadly, Nintendo doesn’t always win. They lost a suit against Tomita Technologies back in 2014 for infringing a patent for stereoscopic 3D display technology, and had to forfeit 1.8% of all 3DS profits from then on.
Gaming
Ubisoft says that future Assassin’s Creed games will need more time to be made
As Assassin’s Creed Shadows is about to sneak up on people in November, Ubisoft says that the time between developing games needs to be longer to find the “right balance.” Shadows has been in development for four years, longer than any other game in the series up to this point. That includes the huge open-world epics Assassin’s Creed Odyssey and Assassin’s Creed Valhalla.
Shadows lead producer Karl Onnée (thanks, GamesIndustry.biz) says that the latest AC game took 25% longer to make than Valhalla. He says this is necessary to keep the quality of the series that it is known for: “It’s always a balance between time and costs, but the more time you have, the more you can iterate.” You can speed up a project by adding more people to it, but that doesn’t give you more time to make changes.
Onnée says this has as much to do with immersion and aesthetics as it does with fixing bugs and smoothing out pixels. This is because the development team needs time to learn about each new historical setting: “We are trying to make a game that is as real as possible.” We’re proud of it, and the process took a long time. In feudal Japan, building a house is very different from building a house in France or England in the Middle Ages. As an artist, you need to learn where to put things in a feudal Japanese home. For example, food might not belong there. Get all the information you need and learn it. That process takes a long time.”
You’ll have to wait a little longer for Ubisoft to work on each game. Are you okay with that? In what part of Shadows are you now? Is it interesting to you? Leave a comment below and let us know.
Gaming
You can now pre-order Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP on PS5
You can now pre-order Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP, a remaster that Dragami Games and Capcom both created. You can now pre-order the PS5 game on the PS Store for $44.99 or £39.99. If you have PS Plus, you can get an extra 10% off the price.
The company put out a new trailer with about three minutes of gameplay to mark the start of the pre-order period. Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP is a remaster of Grasshopper Manufacture’s crazy action game from 2012. You play as Juliet, a high school student who fights off waves of zombies.
The remaster adds RePOP mode, an alternative mode that swaps out the blood and gore for fun visual effects. It also adds a bunch of other features and improvements that make the game better overall. You can expect the graphics and sound to be better as well.
The game will now come out on September 12, 2024, instead of September 12, 2024. Are you excited to get back to this? Please cheer us on in the section below.
Gaming
This Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 zombies trailer is way too expensive
Is there really anyone who is following the story of Call of Duty’s zombie mode? We’ve known about the story in a vague way for a while, but we couldn’t tell you anything about it. It looks like the “Dark Aether” story will continue in Black Ops 6, but we don’t really know what that means.
For those of you who care, here is the official blurb with some background: “Requiem, led by the CIA, finally closed the last-dimensional portal, sending its inhabitants back to the nightmare world known as the Dark Aether, after two years of fighting zombie outbreaks around the world during the Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War timeline.”
Wait, there’s more! “Agent Samantha Maxis gave her life to seal this weird dimension from the inside out.” Even worse things were to come: senior staff members of Requiem were arrested without a reason by the Project Director, who turned out to be Edward Richtofen.
Black Ops 6 will take place about five years later, and it looks like it will show more about Richtofen’s goals and motivations. The most important thing is that you will probably be shooting an unimaginable number of zombies in the head. This week, on August 8, there will be a full reveal of the gameplay, so keep an eye out for that.
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