Guild of Writers

Lontahv wrote:Who says if you can't get your hands on something anymore you can distribute pirate copies.

I do. My opinion is that if you're a producer and you want people to buy your product, then you have to make it available.

The phrase is 'abandonware'. The feeling generally is that they cannot make money off of it, and so no-one complains when people make copies available for download. In some cases, the ones who made it are the ones who make it freely downloadable, e.g. http://www.adeptsoftware.com/got/(which is a terribly fun game, by the way^^), and Sierra did this a lot, if I recall.

The problem is that there are tons of copies of Crowthistle available, but once those 2 copies of Hexisle are gone, there will be no way I know of to get it anymore. Cyan may have some old copies that they might sell, but then again, Fanista was supposed to be the exclusive distributor, and I don't know what all was signed.

In the end, someone will probably put up a copy somewhere, and it's just unfortunate that people's only choice will be to get that, or not get it at all.

From chatting with folks at Cyan it seems they would like Hex Isle to be more available unfortunately they can't at the moment due to issues with rights and whatnot.

Let's put all lawyers in a spaceship along with all telephone sanitizers, and send them off to colonize a new planet.

Some random stuff about Fanista:

• It was backed by Amway:
  
  • http://mashable.com/2007/11/22/fanista/
  • http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/20/busin ... amway.html
• Fanista.com is registered to David Castagnola
  
  • http://whois.domaintools.com/fanista.com
  • David's Linked-In profile: http://www.linkedin.com/pub/david-castagnola/4/205/1b0
• Fanista was founded by Dan Adler
  
  • Video interview: http://www.vimeo.com/480203

But I cannot find anything about their current status.

BTW - I have a copy of HexIsle, and my kids and I enjoy it. It's a platformer with a simple premise: hop on all the glowing hexes to get to the next level. If you can scrounge up a copy, I recommend getting one. And I think it would be great to explore these worlds with an avatar - or fly mode.

Chacal wrote:Let's put all lawyers in a spaceship along with all telephone sanitizers, and send them off to colonize a new planet.

Until, one day, we on earth die by an illness which was spread by infected telephones...

Bah, Slartiblartfast has a backup.

Amazon is down to one copy now.

I found some of the levels to be fun, but I found a number to be simply frustrating. And I've played some pretty old "now you must restart the game from scratch" games, so I'm not one to overstate the frustration ;) And abandon all hope of getting to the bonus levels without modifying some files, because getting every single hexagon within the time limit turns out to be so difficult, that I suspect no testers accomplished it themselves for enough levels to unlock all the bonus levels. Also, the controls aren't great (not their fault; keyboard/mouse doesn't work best for this sort of game), but the optional XBox controller might help a ton. (They say XBox controller; I don't know if a regular one would suffice or not.) Anyway, I can't personally say I found it fun, even though I enjoy simple games, but others may well find different. (Also, the comments on Fanista were a sham; Fanista apparently used a pyramid structure(Amway, surprise, surprise) to encourage people to hype a game to sell copies.) Still, I liked the backgrounds, e.g. Catfish Canyon.

Interestingly, Amazon.com is back up to 3 copies, but now they are all from a single seller (I believe this seller had one copy available before), and since this game was not sold in stores, they may have bought liquidated assets from Fanista, or bought from someone who bought liquidated assets. They seem to be using the fixed price of US$27, which is reasonable. (Unlike the copy on eBay that comes with the original Cosmic Osmo and is US$150 :P) So, anyone who lives in the US can order software from Amazon, and other people can perhaps find someone who lives in the US, and will buy it and send it to them on their behalf. (It's Amazon.com's policy not to ship software out of the US, though they do ship books internationally.)

I guess I need to find such a person then