After 9 years of developement, Pokémon Uranium is now released!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8NxPo4S4To
It's a fan game based on Pokémon franchise, featuring 150 new creatures, but with a twist: all of them are of nuclear type! During your usual gotta-catch-em-all quest, you will also have to save everyone from numerous nuclear meltdowns around. And no, sorry, despite being irradiated, our walruses aren't in the game. :P
Because of what recently happened to AM2R, we recommend that you take a small break from Pokémon Go, hurry up and download this game before it's taken down:
http://www.pokemonuranium.com/download/
Source: https://twitter.com/RPGSite/status/763567631009918976
I have a friend who will be interested in this..
Also it looks like the download link is already down :(
edit: nevermind it seems to be back again
I bet the site is hosted on a shared hosting or small VPS. Their forums had 2000 guests earlier so I assume the front page has even more. It probably made Reddit front page or something.
Because of what happened to AM2R a few days ago Pokémon Uranium is probably also getting more attention than usual from people wondering how long it will take before it gets on the wrong end of a C&D letter than people who are actually interested in playing the game.
I hope Nintendo will not fall on them like they did with the SM64HD Bob-omb Battlefield remake on Unity O.O
They just took down the Metriuod 2 remake, so...
They're probably gonna sue themselves by accident one day.
Downloading it was a challenge because they have some issues with their servers.
I was finally able to download it though.
The game has a silly premise but most pokémons games do anyway.
But the awful framerate absolutely kills any kind of enjoyment you might have for this game.
I would especially not recommend you to run this game unless you own a i7.
The framerate occasionally dips around the 5~8 fps on my FX 6350.
I even disabled the virtual cores to get some speed ups.
It helped a bit but not much.
It also seem to suffer from the batman syndrome as it seems to run slightly faster on a SSD than a mecanical hard drive.
The battles are somewhat disappointing : the Pokémons are static, the special effects are not terrible, and that damn f***ing framerate
is even more terrible during battles and it is taking 100% of my FX 6350 ! f*** !
There's apparently a patch for the framerate issue but the servers are down so the game tells me i have the latest update,
even though this is not the case...
On the plus side, it fully implements the Nuzlocke rules, it supports the mouse, the design for the new pokémon is pretty good.
I would suggest you download the game but wait a bit for updates to come out before playing it.
EDIT: I forgot to mention the remixed tracks are pretty good ! At least there's that.
Yeah, I think their server is either 1and1 (what Omnimaga used when it made Slashdot front page during the Casio fx-CG20 unveiling) or some cheap VPS. I bet CodeWalrus would suffer the same fate if it made Reddit front page, but again maybe that Pokémon site has an even cheaper server. On 1and1 when we had 1800 guests online I had a 500 error every few second. Besides, the extra popularity is welcome :P
As for the game premise, there cannot be anything sillier than the original version of Opossum Massage Simulator :P. I am surprised that it has frame rate issues, considering it's a 2D game. Heck, even RPG Maker games, despite RM not being very efficient for professional game making, runs at 60 FPS on lower-end machines (I got 60 from every RMVX game on my Intel Celeron back in the days).
Maybe they're running the game at your current resolution? I know my PC has issues playing uncompressed 1080p vids at higher than 5 FPS.
I'll probably give it a try soon but I doubt I will play much, since I'm not enough into Pokémon. The only reason why I downloaded it is in case Nintendo takes it down, so if, one day, I somehow decide to play it then it's not too late.
Quote from: gameblabla on August 12, 2016, 05:14:54 AM
But the awful framerate absolutely kills any kind of enjoyment you might have for this game.
I would especially not recommend you to run this game unless you own a i7.
The framerate occasionally dips around the 5~8 fps on my FX 6350.
I even disabled the virtual cores to get some speed ups.
EDIT: I forgot to mention the remixed tracks are pretty good ! At least there's that.
That's odd, I have no problems with the game at all on my HD530.
What resolution do you use on your computer?
Quote from: aeTIos on August 13, 2016, 08:55:54 AM
That's odd, I have no problems with the game at all on my HD530.
The game was made using RPG Maker XP, with some additional heavy scripts.
RPG Maker XP is very unefficient and :
- It does not use the graphic card at all. (software-rendered)
- It is mono-threaded only (bad performance on low-end FX procs)
As for the game, it is running at the native resolution of 256x192, like DS games actually.
By default, it upscales it to 2x and can be upscaled up to 3x.
Even in its native resolution, it is slow as f***ing s***.
The game does not make use of your native resolution, it completely ignores it, like most RPG Maker XP games.
I somehow got Pokemon Uranium patches (the filename is PU_patch101.rar, google it) and it does not fixes the slowdowns at all !
Also, if you want to run it on Linux, Wine 1.6 works with this one but not the latest staging version.
I think the reason why it was not taken down now is because Nintendo do not actually own the copyright to Pokemon,
The Pokémon Company does and they did mobile Pokémon games since 2009. (that's how we got Pokémon Shuffle on Android)
While not as agressive as Nintendo, The Pokémon Company still isn't known for being kind to fan-games...
Strange, I have a low end GPU and all RMVX games run perfetlyc. Maybe it's a RMXP-specific issue or intensive ruby script used in the game?
Does anyone know how well this works on Wine?
Quote from: bb010g on August 13, 2016, 08:22:03 PM
Does anyone know how well this works on Wine?
Like i said, it works with Wine 1.6 after installing dx_36, directmusic and directplay.
It does not work with Wine staging.
Be warned, it might crawl on your PC.
Are you sure this used RMXP rather than RMVX btw? I will try it and see and compare with other XP games if it uses XP.
they've already removed the download because they feared about nintendo's lawyers.
Quote from: garvalf on August 13, 2016, 09:24:36 PM
they've already removed the download because they feared about nintendo's lawyers.
I'm pretty those were fake because they do not own the Pokémon trademark and it's the Pokémon company who owns the copyright.
Pretty sure it's a scare tactic.
Thankfully, i downloaded the games with all the patches !
Like AM2R, i will upload it to my website.
I wouldn't be surprised if trolls so.etimes sent fake DMCA notices. Or maybe they removed it due to maxing out their bandwidth? That game is large and 1 TB of bandwidth gets maxed out fast when a 100+ MB game gets 10000 downloads
Yeah, they had some issues with their website but it's clearly not the reason why they took it down...
If you still want to have it, grab it here :
https://gameblabla.nl/files/Pokemon_Uranium.7z (https://gameblabla.nl/files/Pokemon_Uranium.7z)
It's pre-patched with version 1.1 so no need for patching. (as online patching never worked, you had to manually download the file and apply it manually)
I'm not sure if despite this, they will still activate online support but it looks like unlikely to be the case...
It depends. When I stepped down from Omnimaga, my budget for hosting reached zero, so when they dropped TIMGUL from their hosting package and allowed me and juju to host it ourselves, we had nowhere to put it due to not willing to spend anymore money on hosting. Sure, Mediafire and Mega.nz exists, but maybe they are waiting to see if a C&D will come up before risking getting banned from hosting anything on those sites in the foreseeable future. But yeah it's entirely possible that Pokémon Company was just slow at sending a DMCA or that Pokémon Company refused, but Nintendo finally convinced them to do so. I bet the reasons why the files are gone are available on Google, unless the authors are not transparent.
Thanks for the link, though. I only got v1.0.
EDIT:
@gameblabla , I found the source of the lag: I investigated and it's effectively an RPG Maker XP game. And RMXP is garbage when it comes to resource usage. Take a look below:
-I ran the game: 15-25 FPS (usually 30 with lots of hiccups)
-I ran a dummy RPG Maker VX Ace project with a large map: 55-60 FPS
-I ran a dummy RPG Maker XP project with a large map: 15-25 FPS
-I ran an RPG Maker 2003 game (The Mysterious Cities of Gold II: The Curse of Amirax): 60 FPS (except during the intro where I got 15 during the first few seconds)
XP came out a few years before VX and VX Ace came out a few years after VX. I knew that XP games were capped at 30 FPS, but I didn't realize that software was this inneficient (although I heard XP didn't work on Windows Vista, so perhaps it just sucks on newer OSes?)
It's a shame they didn't go with VX for this game. I won't blame them for choosing what they prefer, but VX is a far cry from XP in terms of performance and I think it supports ruby scripts too.
Quote from: gameblabla on August 13, 2016, 10:17:34 PM
Quote from: garvalf on August 13, 2016, 09:24:36 PM
they've already removed the download because they feared about nintendo's lawyers.
I'm pretty those were fake because they do not own the Pokémon trademark and it's the Pokémon company who owns the copyright.
Pretty sure it's a scare tactic.
Nintendo do own the copyright for Pokémon. Actually, three different, but related companies own the copyright: Nintendo (the publisher), Game Freak (the developer) and Creatures (the trading cards and other toys, as well as some games too). The Pokémon Company was set up as a joint venture between those three companies to manage, market and licence the Pokémon franchise. But in this case, it's most likely indeed The Pokémon Company who would send the DMCA, if any, on behalf of the three other companies, since it's part of the "licensing" part of their mission. It is widely assumed it would be Nintendo, but in reality, it's kinda more complex than this.
I checked the game forums and it seems it was removed due to multiple DMCA takedown notices actually, on behalf of Nintendo of America. Apparently the authors were not contacted directly, so I assume they're just not taking any chance. However, the good news is that 1.5 million people downloaded the game. If people like the game and are not hindered too much by the lag or other flaws, then it should hopefully help the Streisand effect.
The game will still be updated (most likely via patches).
http://www.pokemonuranium.com/forum/showthread.php?tid=1987
http://www.jeuxvideo.com/news/525924/pokemon-uranium-le-jeu-retire-par-nintendo.htm
I still wish the project had started a few years later so that it would have used RPG Maker VX instead of XP. It would have run much faster. I wonder if there are converters to convert RPG Maker XP games into VX ones and if the RM emulators out there (such as Android's) could run the game faster?
Quote from: DJ Omnimaga on August 11, 2016, 09:48:18 PM
They're probably gonna sue themselves by accident one day.
Literally lol'ed (a bit)
This is not related to Pokémon, but I wonder if anyone remembers if the cease and desist letter that Digg received in 2010 was part of their April fools joke or if it was legit? Basically, they had Mario sprites on the website somewhere as an April Fools prank, only to get a cease and desist letter from Nintendo afterwards, but it was in 2010 and I don't remember if the C&D was real or not. If it was real then I don't know what to say O.O (but again it's not any worse than TI trying to force TI-News former community aggregator to change their name.)
I wonder what it feels like to work for 9 years at a great project and then having to remove it only days after releasing it... :'(
Trust me, I know similar feelings, but in my case 10 years, but I won't get into details. I think most CW staff knows what I am talking about.