lavandeira.net

(Update: Kai stole the ship graphics from here. See below)

(Update 2: I was wrong about Kai stealing the ship images. He has shown proof that he purchased these models back in November 4th. I apologize to Kai for asserting he had stolen these two images, when he did legally purchase them)

For the last ~20 years I’ve been a user of the MSX Resource Center, but differences with the msx.org staff made me leave yesterday. To be precise, I cannot accept the childish behaviour of one of the administrators: Sander Zuidema (snout).

The problem revolves around the user Oscar Albero (Kai Magazine). To summarize:

• Oscar is releasing a new game called Life On Mars, which he’s selling for 39 euro (about $42).
• Life On Mars uses graphics stolen from Nintendo’s Metroid Fusion and at least two other sources.
• User Arkhan (Andrew Darovich, who is himself a game developer) notices the stolen content and calls Oscar out on this.
• Oscar evades the point, going on a tangent on how much work he has put on the game (he claims “over 1000 hours”) and lying about having created “over 90%” of the content.
• Admin snout joins the discussion, insulting Arkhan calling him a nutjob and posting an offensive image.
• Meits (Jelle Jelsma, another admin) joins the conversation and takes sides against Arkhan. Arkhan is forced to defend himself from the insults of Oscar, snout, Meits and Grauw (Laurens Holst, who joins the others).
• Arkhan obviously gets more and more frustrated.
• snout makes things worse by childishly posting a log from the #msxdev IRC channel at Rizon. The log shows that users on IRC are also discussing Kai stealing the Metroid graphics.
• One of the users on IRC happens to be GuyveR800 (Patriek Lesparre), who snout has personal issues with.
• snout bans Arkhan from msx.org because of his association with Patriek on #msxdev
• I join the thread and explain how I agree with Arkhan’s point (the graphics ARE stolen), and that he shouldn’t be insulted (and much less banned!) for telling the truth. For this I get put down on the thread while simultaneously other users are insulting me on a closed MSX-related Facebook group for agreeing with Arkhan.

I will not put up with this childish behaviour, so I’ve left both msx.org (I’ve requested them to delete my accounts there) and also the MSX Boixos Club Facebook group.

As I said in my farewell post there, I don’t think msx.org is helping the MSX user community in any way. In fact, I believe this kind of behaviour is seriously damaging the community by creating a hostile environment for those of us who dare to call out the dishonesty of users such as Oscar. By attacking and forcing us out, over time only the incompetent idiots remain active on msx.org, and this can be plainly seen nowadays after several years of this behaviour going on.

Regarding whether the graphics are original or not:

Is that true? Let’s compare:

This is one of the screenshots from the intro of Life On Mars:

And this is the wallpaper where it came from. The other screens in the intro (the spaceship and the big crater) show the same dithering as this one, so it is fair to assume they’ve been taken from somewhere as well.

Update: the ships used on the cover and intro of the game are these models from turbosquid.com: big ship, small ship. He legally purchased them. So much for the “most graphics are originally made by me”.

These are a couple of screens from Life On Mars:

And these are the Metroid Fusion levels you ripped the graphics from:

So Kai, it is not true that you’ve spent 1000 hours creating that content.

And as Arkhan correctly pointed out, using the Metroid Fusion tileset is illegal.

Regarding snout:

Really, Sander? This is not how somebody representing the MSX Resource Center should behave in a forum post. You’re supposed to be objective and impartial. You’re supposed to be able to understand what’s being discussed and tell truth from hype. You’re supposed to descalate the situation instead of posting even more inflamatory messages.

You did no such thing, you fucking idiot.

It’s a shame that what once was such an important site for the MSX community has devolved into this big steaming pile of garbage. Unfortunately, the problem is that the MSX Resource Center is today the only place one can go for MSX-related news and discussion forums.

For now.

P.S.: From now on I’ll be in the #msxdev channel in irc.rizon.net.