retro64 violates copyright - update

An indi game development company by the name Retro64 infringes copyright with at least one of their games. A member of the Magicball Network found out that Retro64's game with the name "Bugatron Worlds" violates the copyright of Adeline Software.

The planet in the background of the menu of Bugatron Worlds shows the image of a planet that very much resembles the planet Twinsun of the Little Big Adventure games.

This makes you wonder how much of the other art of their games is original. But this simple case of copyright infringement should be enough reason for not buying at least that particular game and maybe enough to think twice to buy any game from them.

Update! the art for that game was provided by an other party, retro64 has updated the game. So it's safe to to buy their games again ;). And actually, this was quite nice by retro64, they resolved this issue quickly without any fuss.

It's actually a sad thing. A developer hires a 3rd party to do some original art but in turn gets copied stuff. The developer will be held accountable because nobody knows that he has been ripped of by the third party.

LBA3 Campaign

One of my all time favorite games is Little Big Adventure. The first game in the series was released in 1994, a sequel was released in 1997. The team behind it also planned for a 3rd release, but things didn't went as they hoped to. A lot of things happened, the team moved to various companies, split up, etc. The posibilities for an LBA3 were quite slim, even tho the whole team wanted to make the game.

But recent developements gave new light to the posibility of LBA3. This got the fans from the Magicball Network excited. They have started a campaign to put LBA in the spotlight to give LBA3 a higher chance to be picked up by a developer.

On a side node: Sebastien Vianny showed some activity on the LBAwin project again, version 0.8.1 might be close. I hope this will be a steady walk to a final release.

LbaWin - Little Big Adventure

I'm a big LBA fan, have been since I first got the game (june 1995). I completed the game so many times I've lost count. After a certain point it's no longer fun to play the game because you know every little thing in the game. So I stopped with that. After a while one of the team members that made the game poped up with a windows port of the game (LbaWin). Since he was doing it by himself he could use some beta testers. I decided to help him out (just like quite some others) and started to play the game again, but this time to find bugs. I did that for quite some time. But before the development of LbaWin came to a stop I already got sidetracked from playing the game. So it has been quite some time since the last beta release of LbaWin. And for some reason I wanted to play LBA once more. Installed the game and started playing, only took me a few hours to complete the game once more (in all it's glory). I still know exactly what to do. The game just looks so small when you know what to do and where to go. But the fact remains that it actually is still quite a large game if you compare it to the time needed to complete other games. I mean, the first time I played LBA it took me quite some hours to finish it. I've played other games that I completed the first time in just a couple of hours. Ofcourse you could strech the game, but that might just make it boring. LBA is still a awesome game, I just want something new to explore. (note: stil have to replay LBA2, haven't done that in some time now)

Coming back to the point of something new, LBA has quite some places that could be expanded (made larger). And there are quite some places where more world could be placed between some scenes. It would be great if these things could be expanded. And maybe even add some side quests.

Some people in the LBA community continued work I started years ago and already made some tools to view and even edit the scenes in the game. Additional tools to compile story code and stuff like that are also being worked on.