Early Work on Homebrew StarCraft for the DS 78
Via Buttonmashing, news of early work on a homebrew project to port Blizzard's StarCraft to the Nintendo DS. "Since no official plans were ever announced from Blizzard, two French homebrew developers have taken it upon themselves to create a port of the popular PC game, StarCraft, for the Nintendo DS, calling it StarLite. Because they've only been working for three weeks, the game is a bit limited right now and still needs a lot of work."
Re:Is this legal? (Score:4, Informative)
1. they're not in the US
2. they're not actually doing anything illegal
"Blizzard won't like it" != "that's illegal!!!!"
At least, not in countries that still respect the rule of law.
Re:Is this legal? (Score:4, Informative)
Well, to clarify...
1 - As long as they are not distributing Blizzard artwork, or using Starcraft's trademarked name in their own product, they should legally be in the clear. Note that they must also avoid mentioning any trademarked properties directly also (Aiur? Tarsonis? Vespene Gas? Any one of those things may or may not be trademarked)
2 - It *will* be shut down (unless the authors are clever enough to obey #1, but they don't seem like it). Back in the day when I did mods for HL1, we had a term in the community: "foxed". It came from Fox being very zealous in shutting down mods of their properties. EVERYone making a licensed mod, whether it's Stargate, Star Wars, or just Dragonball Z, was foxed. This has NO chance.
I personally have zero sympathy for people who develop their own products on top of the work of others, whether intending to profit or not. Why waste your time and effort on something that will eventually be shut down, and will never see the light of day? (or if it DOES, will result in your ass sued from here to Norway?) Why not take your coding chops and make a Starcraft-inspired RTS of your own?