According to leaker Zippo, two of these games are classic GameCube titles in the form of F-Zero GX and Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door. This isn’t the first time that HD remasters of Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door or F-Zero GX have been rumored, but Zippo believes that both will be released by the end of the year.
And the plot thickens why Dolphin was recently removed from Steam…
We know why Dolphin wasn’t put on Steam.
- Dolphin ships with a decryption key for Wii games
- Valve’s legal team got worried about hosting that (as hosting circumvention tools in the US is a direct violation of the DMCA, even if the tools are created by third parties), and reached out to Nintendo
- Nintendo did their usual thing and said no (because they wrongly believe all emulation of their hardware is illegal, except if they do it), but in this case correctly identified the circumventing nature of Dolphin
- Valve pulled down the Dolphin page on their own, without a legal demand from Nintendo
Valve continues to host RetroArch and the various cores, so it’s not like they’re opposed to emulation in general. The ability to copyright “magic numbers” in the US (Valve is an American company) isn’t up for debate, and it would also put them in violation of the DMCA, so it’s not hard to see why Valve would be worried about this specific emulator.
As for Dolphin, they have options:
- they can choose to keep shipping as-is, without being on Steam, as they host from a non-US site (France, specifically) with looser copyright laws
- they can choose to not support encrypted payloads, and require that users supply independently-sourced decrypted games
- they can require users to enter their own decryption key they dump directly from their consoles (which, realistically, means that users would get one off the web separate from Dolphin) and use a dumped system BIOS, which would fully emulate the “real” decryption process
Steam was the one to take the action tho. Did Steam know about this before these leakers??
No thanks. Special hardware to play old games. And of course, I’m sure it won’t be compatible with their next console, that way they can continue to sell you the same games over and over.
Thousand year door is so good. It would be great for more people to be able to play it easily.
If it is true F-Zero GX is to test how profitable F-Zero really is and hopefully will work well online if it has any online play.
I honestly doubt Paper Mario TTYD would get remastered cause how strict they are with the characters and how they’re portrayed but I’ll be glad to be wrong.
Nintendo’s gone 20 years since they last acknowledged their F-Zero fans with something other than a wink in Smash Bros. or a cosmetic in Mario Kart. That’s so long that I’ve had time to really reflect on all the other ways they hate their fans, so if the best they can do is offer that 20 year old game again through a rental service, then the best I can do is not pay attention to them anymore. I’ll get my fix from Aero GPX or just emulate that old game myself.