DCEmulation

The Irides video is actually the iPhone version of the game, I think the FoF video is pretty funny -- I like how they keep showing Player 2 during the gameplay which is the computer -- but it really isn't a huge review of the title.

Regardless, the plan is to set up a better rig for taking screenshots and things like that in the not-too-distant future with the GOAT Store, and we are planning on doing some videos at that time and putting them on the publishing site. I do like the idea of linking to other people who have made videos too, I just want to make sure we get our own thing started first, hopefully in the next three months or less.

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Dan L.
http://www.goatstore.com - http://www.midwestgamingclassic.com

Hey I just found out that the limited edition of Irides doesn't have a soundtrack CD.

Irides was critically praised for the tunes, and it is a conventional norm for them to have sound track disk's with limited ediiton, why did you decide against it?

Edit: I have finished the Irides Page, please proof read it
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irides:_Master_of_Blocks

If you can fix whatever mistakes I may have mad, I think I can forward this article to the wiki admins and request them to make it a featured article, if that happens it will be on the main wikipedia featured article section till someone makes the next featured article (which is usually 24 hours but has often been longer). I am fairly proud of this with what I've done, I have added over 20 referencs, from almost 20 websites!!! (that wasn't easy!)

You have to help on this Danny, we get this article featured and I can skip everything and just make the Goat Store article and then no one will ever be able to delete an inde page again, we will be exponentially noteable.

Also you can act like RSG and claim that GSP has acheived an inde record by having the first featured article on wikipedia, without checking with any indy entity to see if they have made featured articles or not.

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www.dreamcast-scene.com

Being an ignoramus who can't string together a constructive comment, I'll leave this topic with this:

Why GOAT Store as a publisher?

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The beauty of Facebook, Twitter and all the other online media distractions is that those who have no place in real society are kept occupied. In the meantime we useful people will continue to experience real life without the unnecessary hindrance of imbecilic attention.

His posts are 9 months old, and he is probably refering to the open letter where Dan was talking about why the games were never released, at that time their was a lot of animosity and RSG looked real shiny, it is unfair to use this as an example.

I think the most he is pissed off is about why the shipping prices are so high, well I don't like RSG's shipping options to much either. When you order from an International source you have to pay alittle more.

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www.dreamcast-scene.com

Nope, it's built into the standard release, something we started with Inhabitants and Maqiupai, and have done with both Cool Herders and Irides: MoB. We talked about taking it out to put it in special, and we all agreed that was kind of stupid.



I'll be happy to look through it in detail. I'll PM you anything I see that I don't think is right, thanks!

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Dan L.
http://www.goatstore.com - http://www.midwestgamingclassic.com

I again offer that if you have any constructive criticism, we're open for it. As for this, I might as well reply to it...



I don't know what the ridiculous excuse is for developers opting for perfectly good personal reasons to not complete titles. I've publicly acknowledged multiple times that we should have never made the announcement that we did, and it put pressure on people that we shouldn't have done until titles were nearly completed. Live and learn.

Ironically, Irides: Master of Blocks was one of those 10 games (actually, 15) that were announced.

As for me "not making contracts" (which I assume means contact?) with them, the people who have claimed that have at no point been the developers. As I recall, there as the discussion about this with a GOAT Games game (and I think that was on here?) where I swear to god saw nothing of the particular game that was in question, and had been communicating with a different team member with it, who the other person acknowledged was doing the talking.

So, again -- I was stupid to have made the announcement. I thought that it would result in 15 projects that would grow like the games we already did did, not result in being a huge issue.

I'm not a programmer, I can't deliver these myself. Sorry.



The GOAT Store's shipping costs are USPS rates as to how much it actually costs to send things. I believe that we have our games in five or six different European stores however, so that is another option.

The problem this statement has it that it was made in November, before the game was released. We hadn't released a title since Cool Herders before that, and Lik-Sang generally handled our European markets. When Lik-Sang closed, since we had already done a great job selling the game, it was hard to convince any other stores to pick it up when it was a couple years old. We had an exclusive deal with Lik-Sang before that point, so we didn't already have the relationships, but it really helped with the promo of those games at that time.

As for promo on European web sites, I'm all about promoting our stuff everywhere we can, and I think the reviews of Irides: MoB that were all over the place do that rather well.



We also sell all of our games at a considerably cheaper price than anyone else has. Until Irides got the price point of $21.90, the games were always more or less budget titles, selling at $19.90 or less. So, yes, we didn't do a million pages in the insert, but we kept the games cheaper. As for the print quality, I have no idea where that statement comes from, as I know that we used a factory that actually pressed GD-ROMS for Sega, so the print quality is the same as those games would be.



This is laughable. At this point in time, we hadn't released anything since Cool Herders was released four years before. How much attention does Last Hope get nowadays, and that was released more or less a year after Cool Herders. But you should discount the Pink Bullets of the game that was released to 'fix' the problems with the first version that was released.

Like I said earlier, we're still running promos for Feet of Fury, we're just not running them to the same people who have already purchased the game. It makes more sense to me to expand the market and do targeted marketing like that.



This again was before the game was released, and we got out a ton of reviews of the title in the weeks following. Yup, we didn't get picked up by as many people on 9/9/9 like I was hoping to. Yup, unfortunately, I have a really good reason why I wasn't able to do more work leading up to that date.

As for the cases, again -- sorry that we're not cloning the Sega releases, and are instead trying to make them look different, but it's a very important decision for us.



Considering that this is the last post here, I wonder what he thought of it when he got it. On the whole, we're really happy with how the game turned out, and I wouldn't be surprised if it sold more copies than Wind and Water did. It's a great title!

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Dan L.
http://www.goatstore.com - http://www.midwestgamingclassic.com

Sorry to reply to my own post here but I don't know why I didn't think of this initially...



If YOU already have a rig that can take high quality gameplay video and would like to help us with this to make it happen sooner than later, please shoot me a PM and we can work out the details. If not, it's just a matter of time.

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Dan L.
http://www.goatstore.com - http://www.midwestgamingclassic.com

Thanks to all for the kind words.

Bilal, that Irides page is awesome, specially considering how quickly you gathered all that info.

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Makaqu engine blog / website.

⇈ ⇊ ⇆ ⇆ B A Start

Thank You, it has been a really long time since i've been appreciated

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www.dreamcast-scene.com

The Ignoramus one returns (but still finds it a waste of time) trying to point out the obvious to the blinkered, and then decides to honor the developers relegated to the 'basement':

DCASTLE

Note that there is no mention of any connection between GOAT Store Publishing and DCASTLE on the actual page, although it would have been...

SO FUCKING EASY TO PUT SOMETHING LIKE THIS ON THERE:

"DCASTLE was rumored to be released commercially alongside many other unique and fascinating games created by the Dreamcast independent community. A compilation of games named GOAT Games was announced in 2006 by GOAT Store Publishing, but sadly due to unfortunate circumstances neither that compilation or the rumored commercial release of DCASTLE ever came to fruition. GOAT Store Publishing did however rise from those setbacks and released Irides: Master of Blocks in 2009 with numerous positive reviews."























DCDayDreamer is ignorant = YES
DCDayDreamer just led GOAT by the hand = YES
DCDayDreamer just spammed dcemulation = YES
DCDayDreamer is a c**t = YES
DCDayDreamer should get a life = YES

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There isn't much point in talking about things that didn't happen. Sure, the page would be more complete, but it could also sound like they were using DCastle to promote Irides - which would be equally unfair, since DCastle didn't came out.

On the other side, by removing the mention of Irides the only thing that would be left in there would be the mistakes of 2006. It would be just perpetuating those mistakes, and this would definitely not be a good way of honoring Heinrich Tillack or Olivier Chatry at all.

It hurts me every time I read about Fightoon's cancellation on the 'net. Even though I liked the positive comments I read about it, I can't ignore my own mistakes. So, I would say that it's up to both the developers and the GOAT Store to decide if they should talk about that kind of situation.

The GOAT Store was also in negotiations to release several other games that went by unannounced, and I think it would be a little strange to talk only about the games that were announced and ignore these. Doing this could make new developers think that they wouldn't be taken seriously until a public announcement is made.

_________________
Makaqu engine blog / website.

⇈ ⇊ ⇆ ⇆ B A Start

Basically from what I gather Dreamer is asking about why a game called DCastle wasn't released.

Dreamer your a nice guy, just calm down a bit, and try proceeding with the discussion in a healthier way, stop cursing yourself or anyone else.

I am personally more concerned about this fellow over here:


No one should be deprived of independently released commercial video games, i'm not sure but I don't think GS delivers to Pakistan even.

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www.dreamcast-scene.com

I think you are missing the point I am trying to make Manoel, perhaps my sarcastic UK sense of humor really is clouding over everyone's perspective?.

The reason I am including 'thrown in' facts in my example post above about previous announcements which did not come to fruition is to demonstrate how you can use simple methods which can (without going into any personal details) bring some sort of explanation in public and possible closure to the 'legacy' that the GOAT Store realizes it has and also dreads the very existence (and reality) of.

What you also have to think about here is - how does a modern web page work?. Every page that uses keywords uses links to other pages just by the very mention of that word. By dropping in 'GOAT Store', 'Irides', and 'GOAT Store Publishing' into a paragraph - you can use that paragraph on a web page to promote other web pages on the same site or even other sites - and those pages or other sites can contain commercial products that were released. I am only trying to demonstrate how GOAT could easily use techniques to explain in simple terms what, where, and why (without divulging any in-depth information), whilst still promoting the product on the very page that a visitor is on (with the inclusion of further promotion of other pages/sites).


That is a tough decision, especially if you are new to the situation. If the Publisher and Developer were close friends it would cast a different light on the subject, but then again - friendship and business can spell disaster and many close relationships have been destroyed by that partnership. I will not pretend to understand the situation you were in, but I do think it is vital to keep communication channels open when it comes to business.


Any statements made about games that were unannounced would have to come from GOAT and/or the developers, any other form of communication about unannounced games would only be classed as rumor, but this is 2010 - and even a simple post on a forum could start a viral 'fact'.

_________________
The beauty of Facebook, Twitter and all the other online media distractions is that those who have no place in real society are kept occupied. In the meantime we useful people will continue to experience real life without the unnecessary hindrance of imbecilic attention.

You stick to your guns i'll give you credit for that.

Your point on hot linking (I belive that is what adding a url to text is called), was very solid. I always found it odd that their wasn't a link to any of the GSP titles website ESPECIALLY Maqiupai cause the official website is on www.goatstore.com/maqiupai

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www.dreamcast-scene.com

Yes, sorry I didn't acknowledge this before. I got in contact with him, and Gary is looking into it now as he's the checkout guru. We should deliver to any country where the United States Postal Service does, the only restriction that we have is that for some International countries, we do not accept credit cards. The reason for this, without getting into a whole diatribe about what a scam credit card companies are, is that in the United States, you can look up to match the address of the credit card owner to the address they put in. In many international countries, not you cannot do this which means that it is infinitely easier to commit fraud by using credit card thievery. And, because of how credit cards are set up, we would not be able to collect the money nor get the product back if such an issue occurred.

So, that explains that. If anyone actually has any European or International payment methods that are better than PayPal, as I know that it is more of a US thing, we'd love to look at it. We've looked at some other options in the past, although when they charge you even if you don't make any sales using that method, it's hard to experiment with new things.

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Dan L.
http://www.goatstore.com - http://www.midwestgamingclassic.com

Manoel's point is exactly how I have always felt about this. I cannot deny that having that information would help us out as a company in many ways, but I also feel that if the developer doesn't want that information put in there for whatever reason, that is their right.

The GOAT Store has a weird contract set-up that actually allows the developers the rights to buy back even the Dreamcast rights for a title from us at any time, at a relatively cheap cost. Why don't I post stuff like this on those pages? Because I feel that it would be taking advantage of a developer's project that we have absolutely no rights to so I can put up an ad about the GOAT Store. If we haven't published it, we own absolutely no control of it.

If there are any developers who wish to have this information included on their games, I'm more than fine with doing it -- but I leave that up to the developers.

As for us 'realizing and dreading the existence of our legacy,' I've asked this now to you multiple times both in this thread and through PMs -- What do you expect from me? I cannot bring these products to market myself, as I do not have the coding experience. I fully recognize that. The announcing of the dozen games at the Midwest Gaming Classic was a huge mistake, that I fully realize, because it got a ton of people's hopes way up, only for us to not be able to come through with those hopes. And, I have no control over it. One of the big lessons that it taught me was to say nothing unless I had control over it. I can control the announcement of a new title that is finished or 99% there, I cannot control the release of items that I don't have control over.

It's not that I "dread" what happened. It's not that I "don't realize" what happened. I understand what happened -- we built up people's expectations and then didn't deliver on them, which sucks. Based on how angry you are, I'm certain that we were one of the people who was the most excited for us to deliver the games, and maybe we indirectly made you look bad because you promoted it to others, and then when we didn't come through they wondered why you were so excited.

I get that. Gary gets that. I'm not hiding from it -- if I was, you know what the smart business decision would have been? That once we realized we couldn't deliver on the games we promised, to clam up, go away and just pretend we never made that announcement. Instead, we wrote a letter a while back that tried to explain what had happened in general terms. We published a game, a great game at that, and we promoted it and we feel that it sold very well. We're relaunching the GOAT Store Publishing web site to celebrate what was done, better promote what we have, expand into new markets for products we already carry, and try to set the record straight again.

I cannot and will not come out at any point and post that this developer didn't finish his game because he suddenly demanded a $100,000 cash bonus to keep working on it, or this developer didn't finish this game because the team broke up, or whatever. If the developers care to put that out there, it was their projects -- I own *no* part of any of the Dreamcast titles we announced, except for Irides because it was released, so I am not going to make any claim about them.

So, I ask again -- what do you want from me? I can't take away the MGC '06 announcement. I'm personally extremely sorry if it hurt you in any way. I also am not going to suddenly stop working on games that I love doing something that was a dream that Gary and I shared a long time ago because we made one error. I'm going to keep working for it, and I'm going to keep trying to make it right, which we'll probably *never* get people in the community such as yourself who we burned to accept us again, but is that a reason to stop?



As I've said before, the only people that apparently had issues contacting us were not people that we were in touch with over the release of titles. I think that we've been very open with people -- I'm not a person who breathes down the back of someone to finish a game, because this is suppose to be fun. Yeah, at the end of the day there is a business component to it when the game goes to market, but no one is making enough money off this sort of thing to make it into a full time job. So, why not be friendly?



Again, my feeling here is that because we own absolutely no rights to any of the developer's stuff, there is no reason for me to be talking about it.

Another interesting thing that's relevant, we never laid out the rules for the contracts until generally right before the game went into production. That means, I only have official contracts for five games, even though we announced the rest.

Everything else was done on a virtual handshake where we just basically said, "Okay, let's do this." And we felt okay in announcing them because when we did the same for all of our previous projects, that handshake worked until we figured out the details of the contract. If we had the foresight at the time of the announcement to work out the contracts 100% before the games were released, it would have saved a lot of nightmares -- but then the problem is that we have to lay claim to some sort of ownership over the incomplete code, and as a person who did development (although not at nearly this level) before we got into the retail component, I was never comfortable with asking for that.

If the game was never completed, or the core gameplay was sold to another company, or anything else came up, it would be better to not have sold any part of the rights to anyone else so you can set up the best deal for yourself as the developer of that, so that is what we worked off. But, because we were shortsighted and announced these titles without a contract in place, it ends me with absolutely NO rights to anything that was announced. Which again points to the stupid idea of announcing the games in the first place.

So there you have it -- I don't feel comfortable editing in stuff to other people's pages without having them give the go ahead and actually write the text -- if Heinrich doesn't want DCASTLE's announcement to be part of the GOAT Store's history, then it's his right. I'm also not someone to write or edit my own stuff to the various Wiki's, as I feel that it is insincere if the history is being written by the people who were behind it.

History can remember us (and will forget us I'm sure) in whatever way is the best for them, and like I said -- I do not deny that especially with a large portion of the Dreamcast community, we'll only ever be remembered as the guys who made a huge promise they couldn't keep -- but that isn't all that we do and isn't how we perceive ourselves.

In life, you generally get more than one chance. I hope that one day, you (and the rest of the community) will give us a second one. Until then, we're going to keep working for and supporting the developers that have made and published through us some amazing stuff.

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Dan L.
http://www.goatstore.com - http://www.midwestgamingclassic.com

Several companies watch over their wiki pages, big companies like EA have been busted for erasing parts of their history which they should be proud of (why did they try to delete stuff about Trip Hawkins, that guy was awesome). Other companies like 3D Realms are extremly strict about their history and place GOLD locks on their articles for upcomming games.

The article on PREY was locked months before and months after the games release and was only edited by Joe Siegler, so their is nothing wrong with writing an accurate depiction of your past as long as you don't underestimate or overestimate anything.

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www.dreamcast-scene.com

I'll stand up right now and admit this got totally screwed up and needs to be fixed.

The excuse, which isn't very good but is true, is that the GOAT Store system runs on a backbone that is entirely written by us (mostly Gary) and updated by us. About a year and a half ago now, after doing a lot of different stress testing with our site and seeing more and more issues with it, we decided that we needed to revamp the entire site. To do so, unfortunately, meant that we needed to stop selling everything for a period while we rebuilt and transferred over the core of the site -- the 100,000ish products -- and then start growing from there.

We did this in a period of about three months, and we totally revamped the site so that it is so much easier on our end to get things, follow inventory and sell things. Unfortunately in the switch over, we lost some of the content that we used to have on the individual product pages that linked to those developer web sites, as well as the ability to easily do that with the new system. We also had prioritized GOAT Store Publishing to relaunch on 9/9/9 by my eye injury meant that we totally pushed that onto the back burner.

The product pages are still in a 'beta' stage and they won't come out of that for another month or two at the earliest sadly, but with the relaunch of GOAT Store Publishing, our intention is not just to link to those sites, but also to contain information that you can't even find on those sites about all of the games. It *is* coming, there is no real excuse as to why it took this long right now, other than just the truth of we do a ton of stuff for only two guys.

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Dan L.
http://www.goatstore.com - http://www.midwestgamingclassic.com

Well you maybe just 2 people but you got a team of dedicated Dreamcast enthusiast's behind you.

Rest assured we'll kick you in the nags they second you do something wrong , to ensure that it never happens again.

P.S. I'm still waiting on you to pm me about my account, i can't log in.

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www.dreamcast-scene.com

The way I see it (from my ignorant perspective of course), there is information out there, that information (no matter how sporadic) might possibly be a millstone around the neck for GOAT, and GOAT Store Publishing in particular. Take a look at the Radium site for example, the announcement about the GOAT release is still there.

I'm not trying to say that there's a really great way of dealing with this, but I do think that with some sort of acknowledgment a possible resolution could come about. There really isn't any need to go into personal details as to why a particular game didn't surface, perhaps just a simple 'cancelled' would work, but I'd be more inclined to expand on that a little bit, such as 'cancelled due to unforeseen circumstances' or something along those lines.


There's nothing GOAT did that made me look bad, in fact, I'm quite capable of getting my own bad reputation (DCDD refers to his previous posts with the prominent use of the 'f' word).

Seriously though, what is important, is the people who believed in GOAT Store Publishing, the ones that expected delivery at some point after the announcements. With no delivery and GOAT being silent for some time, people just lost faith I guess.

There's a bit of contradiction here, the open letter from 2008 did have some information in it (albeit a bit random).

The open letter didn't really go down that well, here's a quote from it:


You'll probably take this as an insult again, but here goes anyway.

I really think you shouldn't have worded the letter like that, you clearly lay the blame on the developers for the cancellation of the titles. Whilst it may be true that for certain reasons the developers stopped working on the projects, on the surface you've randomly criticized the games (and the developers themselves). This leads me back to my first reply above about how acknowledgment of the project(s) at GOAT Store Publishing (without any personal details) might work. There is of course two sides to acknowledgment, a cancelled game could be viewed as 'it's probably crap because it didn't get published', but on the other hand it could viewed as 'it must have had something about it or they wouldn't have announced it'.

There is also one thing that I forgot to mention earlier, there are certain circles that go through hell and high water to track down cancelled games (beta versions etc.), although the indie game collectors are fewer, it might be something to think about. I'm not suggesting downloads from GOAT by the way, but if the information is there (game title and developer is enough) it might generate a bit of interest for the site. Who knows?, if a developer suddenly got an email about their game via information from GOAT, it might make the developer's day.


What do I want from you? hmmm, let me see now...

How about a signed copy of Feet of Fury?

I wouldn't have posted about the re-launch of Goat Store Publishing at DCEvo if I didn't accept GOAT (not that DCEvo gets many visitors these days, so don't expect hordes of hits from there).


I understand where you are coming from with respecting the developers, but the DCASTLE announcement is a part of GOAT Store's history, it certainly wouldn't hurt to drop Heinrich an email to see his opinion on the matter.


Well, in a nutshell, the historical facts so far are GOAT pioneered Dreamcast independent commercial games and continued with releases up to 2009.


More than one chance?, surely you must realize by now I'm not typing all these replies just to increase my post count.

Maybe it's time I started head-butting the wall here?.

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The beauty of Facebook, Twitter and all the other online media distractions is that those who have no place in real society are kept occupied. In the meantime we useful people will continue to experience real life without the unnecessary hindrance of imbecilic attention.