yeah, i never said the goal was just to take people’s money. i think stuff like this can often be multilayered and more complex than the “one or the other” scenario that’s being posited. my thought is that the situation is probably not as simple as “Paypal bad” and that whatever this guy, who clearly loves to spin a yarn, did, is probably not going to be known to anyone outside of a close circle of people.
i could just be projecting my own analysis onto a person i’ve never met, but since they seem to exhibit the behavior of other chronic liars i’ve known in my life, i can’t help but reserve my benefit of the doubt
i’m just speculating of course, i have no special information other than the public timeline of events. there’s no shortage of reasons not to trust this guy so it seems reasonable to not trust him on that as well
More or less my gut instinct having seen hours of him in interview, following this project from the beginning, and holding paprium in my hands.
I remember he gave enough details to the paypal story that I was willing to believe him on that point.
I can conjecture that he got denied/kicked out of China and tried to move manufacturing to France and was as of the last KS update unsucessful at that and as a big weirdo and sunk cost fallacy is not willing to admit defeat, ever. Even at this point, 6 years after the “Launch Party”.
In the most bizarre decision since the launch of the Nintendo Music app (which has had a lot of bizarre decisions) Nintendo decided to put the soundtrack to The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D (3DS, 2011) on the app.
Notably, they already had The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (N64, 1998) on it.
What’s different?
There’s a credits track that wasn’t in the original game. Also there’s only 51 tracks and OoT on N64 has 82. The arrangements are, as far as I can tell, identical.
When they added the Fujimi track I literally thought they had changed management because they talked about re-making it back in like 2015 when I was last there. That series kind of perennially ignored fan’s input on some pretty easy fixes and changes that would have made the game a lot better, so adding Fujimi felt like they had started listening again, but I guess that’s now a moot point.
stole mine and seemingly many others’ money, as was sort of discussed upthread a bit
edit: i’ll expand because we’re at the hotel and having phone/computer time
so yeah, basically they have a habit of taking people’s money, then vanishing for years without a word, and then sometimes sending people the stuff they bought. when i heard about Paprium, i thought it looked cool, even though i felt vaguely suspicious of the dudes making it because their whole “we are the best and this is the best thing that has ever been made” schtick just screamed DANGER to me in a variety of ways.
but i ignored that because i had just gotten back into hooking up my old consoles and wanted to support homebrew devs
anyway, a couple months later, they were like “oh no, Paypal locked my account for Reasons (??), please stop contacting me forever about getting your stuff unless you wanna call this international phone number in France.”
then they launched a Kickstarter for a modern console port, said they would send me and others the most-updated Mega Drive version of the game using the Kickstarter money they were getting (lol fraud?), and then…that was it.
that was four years ago.
since then, watching videos of Paprium in action, it definitely looks uhhhh…“edgy” (derogatory), so in general i have just grown to have a strong distaste for their whole bag. i fully expect them to reemerge in a few years with a totally new and unrelated project, asking for more money
I can understand the desire to make Paprium not as a game you want your name on, but as a showcase of what could be done on megadrive hardware. But if you’re already dedicating so much money and time to making this thing, and presumably being held back by the technology, then why didn’t he just make this for the Neo Geo. There’s been like 3 or 4 homebrew Neo Geo games that have released on carts and gotten PC ports.
