Random: Running Zelda: Breath Of The Wild With 29 Mods Is As Chaotic As You'd Expect

I don't think Ryan exists. I think he is some kind of Akira-like entity just consisting of wires, tubes and modules that is synched to the net. Like Ultron but with a Bolton accent.

XD This was rather entertaining. The only mod I've done with BotW was the VR one that was in development, before it got wiped off of the internet. That was magical. However, a playthrough as the goose may now be in order.

Well, his user name is certainly appropriate, because he cackles like a crow. Don't like his over-exaggerated demeanor either. Highly annoying, which made it a rather cringe-inducing watch.

Some things were funny, but in general, I don't care much for mods, especially not if they're just stupid ones that add nothing but debatable comedic value.

On a side note: I could also have done without the stupid continuous comment/chat stream on screen all the time, as well as his stupid, nerdy mug. Just show the game itself, your voice is already annoying enough without adding all the other highly distracting crap.

This si kinda old news. BOTW mods have been around for ever.

@ThanosReXXX
My thoughts as well.

NintendoLife, would you like to have your pages "modded" as well with content you didn't create? If not, then quit advertizing and promoting illegal practices such as modding in video games without authorization.

Big N is going to come down on this. BeatemUps was dropped from the Nintendo ambassador program a week after airing a similar mod video. He didn’t want to believe it was the mod video but the timing was pretty clear.

@Cosats Agree. This is almost disgusting. These mods, this video and thus this article shouldn't even exist. But here we are and it's a shame...

Bye bye Nintendo ambassador program. :<

@ryancraddock @Cosats
How's this?

Seriously, Dry Bone Bowser feels like he would fit in the BOTW world.

@Rafke While the law varies by country, and I can not speak for all countries, your statements are definitely incorrect. Speaking of the US, and many other countries, a game being "single player" does not make modding and emulation legal. It might make you feel it's ok, or maybe in Belgium the law is much more forgiving in such instances. In the US, emulation is technically legal, but defeating encryption is not. Thus emulating an SNES game where the game data is not encrypted is technically legal, but the dumping of the rom is still a contested area even if you own the cart with a lot of legal debate on if that is legal or not. For now it's gray and at least excusable. However you have to rip the rom yourself for it to truly stay within that gray area. Distribution of the roms, even if you own the cart, is not. PS1 emulation is legal because the game can be read directly from the original media and is not encrypted, but PS2, for example can not be legally emulated because getting to the game data means defeating the encrypted data on the disc.

As far as I know, Switch games are encrypted on the carts, and therefore emulating them means defeating the decryption which, in the US is a DMCA violation, and therefore illegal. Again, I can not speak for EU/Belgian law on that, however.

That's not to say I'm a fan of many aspects of the DMCA, it was a bad law from day 1, and that was 20 years ago. Seems like yesterday. But in terms of legal, that's the laws...and it truly is frustrating that NL keeps posting things they know are illegal as though to legitimize them in front of a young and impressionable audience who will get the message that illegal activity is fine if the lawyers don't catch you and "everybody does it."

@shaneoh You have that ***** what he deserved 😂

@Cosats I bet you also like to buy ports of old games for 60$ each, you sure give off that impression.

@TuxDC
Yeah I saw that one and when he mentioned the modded video he posted I got the feeling that was the case. You're right I think because of the timing as you said, I still watch his videos though, I like his honest opinions on games.

@ThanosReXXX
I agree and pretty much felt the same way

@ThanosReXXX I thought you were just being mean for no reason, then I watched some of the video. He has one of the most annoying voices in human history.

@Cool_Squirtle No, I actually did watch the entire video, mostly because I wanted to see all the mods, but it was most definitely NOT a pleasant experience.

Having said that, I would never judge or criticize something or someone without reason or without actually having taken the time to look into the source material.

@shaneoh Haha, that's hilarious. That has earned you a like from me.

@NEStalgia If I'm not mistaken, this mod has been done with the Wii U version of the game. I saw some pictures of GamePad controls in there, during the swapping of stuff and mods, so the whole decrypting cartridge bit would be irrelevant if that's the case.

@Lordplops Bultron?

@ThanosReXXX WiiU discs are encrypted as well. All optical games have been encrypted post-PS1, and the encryption was a large selling point to publishers in the move to DVD (CSS, for whatever limited value it had, was a selling point of the DVD standard, and implemented largely to fit into the keyhole of DMCA. And yes, Sony was a big part of all that )

Unless expressly disabled, DVD and BD are encrypted mediums by default, specifically so that manipulating the data falls under DMCA violation. Yes, I know DeCSS came out right about when DVD standard landed (remember the guitar song that distributed the algorithm? Fun times.) but the legal point applies. No matter how easy or common a rip is, it's still officially illegal, and NL reporting on it as they do so often is....somewhere between shameless and hypocritical.

@NEStalgia I've never tried or had the inclination to try and copy a Wii U disc, but I've ripped plenty of DVDs back in the day, and besides Disney DVDs, none of them were encrypted. The general rule was that if it was playable on a PC, you could also copy it to a PC. Or simply copy the video folder and recompile them into a new DVD. Easy as pie.

And as I've already mentioned in another thread: yes, it's a grey area on the one hand, but on the other hand, as long as you don't copy it for financial gain, for example by mass-producing copies, then you actually can legally make a copy for home usage. And that goes for music AND movies. Games not so much, because that's an entirely different category with its own rule set, but I've ripped all my GameCube discs to an external hard drive regardless, because I don't care either way, and no officer of the law is going to come and visit me to rummage through my collection...

@NEStalgia And on a side note: copying/reading data from a disc is not manipulating that data, because the original source material is not altered in any way.

@ThanosReXXX They are nearly all encrypted. The decryption is built into the player, or, these days, the player software. And BD has versioned, updatable "stability improvement" patches which is one of the reasons you may need to wait for a BD player to "update" before playing a newer disc. (a.ka. new encryption key or algo.)

If you were copying onto a PC and burning it onto a new DVD you were just copying the encrypted data untouched, which doesn't cross legal lines. If you were playing back the unencrypted data on authorized software, you were using fully licensed decryption for it. And if you were playing it back on unauthorized playback software, you were defeating the encryption (no clue what EU/Dutch law is on that, of course.)

And yeah, there's a whole legal debates that's still legally debated on backups for own use and all that, going back and forth between legal and not, so it's pretty gray and therefore ok-ish unless it's decided otherwise at some point. Distribution is a no-no, and modifying the underlying content such as mods in a WiiU game is unquestionably a violation (or datamining, as well.) And yeah, copying from one storage medium to another may not violate the DMCA depending on the playback method....as long as the encrypted data remains encrypted, and is decrypted only by authorized playback devices/software no legal boundaries are crossed.

And yeah, deciding what you do with your own stuff is its own thing. But these things are public display of definitely defeated encryption and modification of the data, and promoted by NL hypocritically against their own rules.

Whoops accidentally turned on GTA

@NEStalgia Well, I honestly don't know. It doesn't sound plausible. If data is encrypted, I shouldn't be able to copy it and make it run in any old video player, much less recompile it into another disc image and burn it like a normal DVD or Blu-ray.

If you mean region-locking or whatever, then that's something else entirely. Disney DVDs and even their VHS tapes back in the day actually DO have some real encryption on them, which makes it harder to copy.
I remember from back in the video tape days, that copying a Disney movie, or rather: trying to, resulted in a tape with a warped image with all kinds of rainbow-colored effects in them. Almost looked like watching an encrypted video channel without a subscription...

I also still have no idea how they even managed to do that on a video tape.

@ThanosReXXX The data is encrypted, not the file system. You can copy encrypted data files around all you want. You just can access the data within without decrypting the archive/stream. A DVD player decodes it in hardware in real-time. PC software does the same in software with a decryption library (Windows Media Player for example.) BD is a bit more sophisticated than the simple DVD system. DVD uses CSS. It's 40-bit encryption and doesn't actually use all the keys (so simple players of the early era could handle it.) Basically it's "useless" as encryption. Modern machines can brute-force it almost in real-time. But in the mid-90's it seemd reasonably secure. Regardless it qualifies as encrypted, even if it's a cardboard lock on a glass door.

Those old VHS systems were something a bit different than encryption (there was no decryption mechanism on the player.) They used tricks of how the read head works to produce valid video while not copying accurately. That was some pretty clever stuff they were doing. Much more clever than when Sony tried to produce anti-copy music CDs that had the side effect of ruining CD drives and installing spyware that had a habit of causing problems with Windows....

Then for games there was Starforce that used disc check that tracked in vertical strips from spindle to rim that caused drive tracking servos to rapidly oscilate and ripped quite a few drives to shreds.

Fun history on all this stuff. krak keys were everywhere for starforce games because downloading an actual pirate copy was actually more likely to run correctly than your legit purchased boxed disc......and much less likely to break your hardware....

@NEStalgia Yeah, I know all about Starforce, and other annoying DRM PC stuff. I've always been able to find "no CD/DVD" cracks for ALL of my legally acquired PC games, though.

As for the whole playing media without having to decrypt: come to think of it, that might actually make Windows Media Player, and by extension Microsoft, an accessory to the fact, seeing as the player itself contains a music ripper, and it can also play the individual VOB files on a DVD or Blu-ray, and copy them, which probably shouldn't be legal, or as we already established, is at least somewhat of a grey area.

@ThanosReXXX WMP is properly licensed software to decrypt it for playback. Redbook CD isn't encrypted do there's nothing of issue there. But yeah, the whole "back up your dvds legally" aspect is amusing, to say the least. I remember when you needed VLC or something to even play back vobs... Then it showed to built into windows!

@Rafke You are the one who is ignorant and don’t know what you are talking about. While emulation (of hardware) itself is legal, use of software is a completely different thing. Software is owned, under different laws, by legal entities such as individuals or companies like Nintendo. I am just gonna use Nintendo as the example here. As the owner of the software, Nintendo has the right to decide the terms of that license they are selling (under applicable laws of course). License is the thing that gives other people certain right to use that software btw. Does Nintendo sell or license software to be used with other hardware than Nintendo’s own? I think you should know the answer, but answer is definite no. So unless you are running your own software on emulator or other copyright free software, emulation is, in fact, practically illegal.

Why do you think Nintendo and other game companies go out of their way to take down rom distribution sites and all kinds of fan projects? It’s because it hurts their business and brand and they have a right to do so. Playing games on emulator may seem harmless if you are doing it alone in your own world and there is not much that can stop you. However, what is illegal is illegal (for a reason) and sharing it publicly is like begging for trouble.

@NEStalgia I am pretty sure the encryption is just a modern protection measure for intellectual property rights, or enforcement method, not necessarily the thing that determines whether any kind copying is legal or no, though I don’t know for sure.

I don’t know what kind of licenses Nintendo and the like had back in the old days but these days it’s pretty clear. You can see about this on backside of Switch game boxes for example (at least in Europe) or in more detail in Switch system settings-system-Important information. In short Nintendo for example, clearly states in case of Switch “Any software in this console and any updates of such software (together “the software”) are licensed by Nintendo only for personal and non-commercial use on the console. The software must not be used for any other purpose. ... “. It is also specifically stated that you must not copy or modify the software without Nintendo’s permission. There might be some differences to this in local laws, but I imagine it’s the same everywhere where Nintendo is doing business.

@Rafke There you have it. Personally I respect and like Nintendo and other such legal entities as creators and think that emulating, copying and modifying their games without their permission is mockery to them. I do not actually know all the legal details and stuff, but I just want people like you to understand that emulating games is definitely not legal!

All this mods is crazy!

@NEStalgia This whole conversation also reminded me of my old stereo, back in the day, which had a double tape deck. If I remember correctly, it did have some kind of disclaimer about copying tapes, in the user manual, but still. I always found it funny, because what else would one use a double tape deck for?

@ThanosReXXX LOL, for copying those homebrew karaoke tapes, of course!

That was so silly with tape, too....the original planned obsolescence. They wore out and ripped up so darned fast....

@NEStalgia And rewinding them by sticking a pen or pencil in one of the spools...

@Rekiotsu Indeed, though there is some legal subtlety behind some of that. Particularly the old pre-encrypted formats, at least in US law. You're right that the point of weak encryption has less to do with denying the technical ability to access it but just to make it cleanly fall within DMCA and similar laws. Even if it's 8-bit encryption that could be broken by a solar calculator, it counts as encrypted, and thus anyone copying or modifying can be hit with DMCA violations and C&Ds without any legal technicality.

But at the same time printed licenses can say whatever they want, but that doesn't necessarily make them able to withstand legal scrutiny (I.E. a lot of ToS agreements and shrink wrap agreements have terms that are not valid under the laws and/or not valid in all states, and are summarily discarded by courts.) As such, precedents falling under fair use, private use, etc can overrule what the terms of the licensing state. That's where old, unencrypted ROMs such as NES and SNES games fall. Where the new games are all encrypted and thus blanket protected under DMCA by default, the old games aren't, and challenges over fair use, private use, etc are still contested versus the terms of the licensing which may or may not be superseded by the broad scope of existing case law. I don't know that answer will ever really be found, so the old 8 and 16 bit + PS1 & N64 consoles will forever remain a gray area muddied in conflicting law. Everything PS2/GCN onward is encrypted and DMCA protected.

The one thing that is agreed upon though is distribution of any of those roms is wholly illegal (akin to producing new licenses.) But the ripping, modifying, and emulating of them from legit copies for the old systems remains contested.

No contest though for PS2 onward, GCN onward, all XBoxes, and DS onward, though.

@Rafke lol it's not legal if it was legal stuff wouldn't get takin down lol

@NEStalgia when you say encrypted, what do you mean? cause i can pop a disc in my pc and play it off that. doesn't seem that well protected in prevention.

@DarkLloyd The built in and commercial player software on windows and Macs includes the licensed decryption library, just like a hardware player does. That's a legit authorized player and the licensing fee is part of the OS.... Probably cost $0.25 at this point. If it's Linux, it's just brute forcing through the encryption because, yeah, it's 1993 cryptography....

Can someone please help me figure out how to install the Relics of the Past mod on the Nintendo switch? If someone can give me detailed instructions, I’d really appreciate it and so would my 6 year old. Thank you!

Brooke

This is getting Skyrim-ish lol

@Cosats Modding is not illegal. This is a common misconception, however the truth is that game piracy is illegal, and modding your game is completely fine if you have a legitimate copy.

@Badegr02 So Switch Modding is a little too complicated for me to explain here, but here's a page to get you started: https://switch.homebrew.guide/