In a beautiful demonstration of how not to run a company, Nintendo once again loses fans and public good will by issuing a DMCA complaint against the developers of an hours-old game, developed as part of the Ludum Dare competition.

No Mario's Sky (the title a play on the recently-released No Man's Sky and the classic Mario games), is a game about “exploration and survival in an infinite procedurally generated universe.” The main character in the game is clearly Mario of the Nintendo games. This was enough to wake up the lawyers at Nintendo, and they did what comes naturally to people locked in their dark, nasty little copyright-is-all reality, issuing the DMCA complaint and warning the developers to cease and desist.

But the people behind No Mario's Sky, a group called ASMB, were clearly ready for this move; they immediately changed the game's main character, and re-released the game as DMCA's Sky (hee hee). They also withdrew the game from the Ludum Dare competition.

Let's look at the score card for this incident:

ASMB: received plenty of support and publicity, with very little effort. Had to withdraw their entry from Ludum Dare, but the extra publicity more than makes up for this.

Nintendo: had an opportunity to win fans with no actual downside (since the idea that this game could somehow dilute their brand is simply laughable). Instead, lost even more fans and the positive publicity that comes with not being a bunch of corporate dicks.

If you love Nintendo and their games, it's a good idea to remember that they don't reciprocate. The more you love them, the more they want to hurt you.

The latest demonstration of Nintendo's loathing for its most ardent fans: they shut down a fan remake of the twenty-five year old game Metroid II: The Return of Samus called AM2R.

The people behind AM2R have been working on this labour of love since 2012. Just as it was about to be released, Nintendo decided to shut it down, citing completely bogus trademark issues.

Minecraft 1.10.2 was released within a few hours of 1.10.1 on June 22. According to Mojang, it fixes a single bug that was causing crashing problems for some users. The JDRGaming server is now running Minecraft 1.10.2.

Minecraft 1.10.1, released earlier today, addresses several bugs that were apparently introduced in version 1.10.

The JDRGaming Minecraft page has been updated with the latest information, and the JDRGaming Minecraft server is running 1.10.1.

The FH2 development team released FH2 version 2.52 on June 16.

Multi-player gaming these days almost always involves playing against (and only occasionally with) strangers on the Internet. But there was a time, starting in the nineties, when multi-player meant getting together with friends and their computers in the same room. Like co-operative multi-player gaming, LAN parties are largely disappearing. Why bother schlepping around your PC, when you can connect with other players via the Internet? RockPaperShotgun takes a retrospective look at the LAN party phenomenon.

Minecraft 1.10 was released yesterday. Here's the list of changes from the announcement:

• Many bug fixes
• Added Polar Bear
• Added Husk and Stray
• An auto-jump option
• Improvements to some commands
• Structure blocks for custom maps
• Underground fossils made from bone blocks
• Added Magma Block
• Added Nether Wart Block and Red Nether Bricks
• Some huge mushrooms can be even larger
• A rare chance to find lonely trees in plains
• Find abandoned mineshafts filled with gold in mesa biomes
• Villages generate better paths between the buildings
• More variations of villages, based on the biomes they are built in
• Endermen have been spotted in the Nether

The JDRGaming Minecraft server is now running version 1.10.

The FH2: 2.5 COOP Map Pack is an attempt to make the new Eastern Front FH2 2.51 maps work in co-op mode. Sadly, none of the four Eastern Front maps works properly with a dedicated server, but the pack also includes a co-op version of Pegasus Bridge, and that map works fine on the JDRGaming dedicated server. I've added the 64 player version of Pegasus Bridge to the map rotation. To play the map, you need to download and install the pack to your BF2 FH2 mod folder. You can find the pack on this site's Files and Downloads page as well.

The FH2: Forgotten Maps Pack is a collection of maps from other mods that have been modified to support co-op play and work with the FH2 mod. About half of the 20 maps work with the JDRGaming BF2 server, and I've added those to the map rotation. The new maps are Operation Aberdeen, Siege of Tobruk Night v3, Mersa Matruh Coop, El Agheila, Sidi Muftah, Fort Capuzzo, Argentan, Carentan, Advance on Foy, Malmedy (Operation Greif), and Operation Nordwind. To play these new maps, you need to download and install four packages to your BF2 FH2 mod folder. You can also find the required files on this site's Files and Downloads page.

UPDATE: a play tester discovered the problem with several of the non-working Forgotten Maps (thanks, Andrew!) The following maps are now working as well: Beda Fomm, Bloody Gulch, Juin 44, Longues sur Mer, and Orscholtz Switch.

This morning I discovered that about a month's worth of Battlefield 1942 and Secret Weapons game logs had not been processed by the TPU stats system. I was able to locate the problem (a massive, corrupt log from a BG42 round started in April), fixed it, and re-processed the stats. Everything seems to be up to date and working again.

Sundays and Mondays have been quiet on TPU lately, so as of now, we are no longer running Battlegroup 1942 on those days. It's Battlefield 1942 24/7 now. See you on the Battlefield!