MGS Bleemcast

[briskbc]

Hello. Just a quick question for those of you with Bleem's Metal Gear Solid release. I just got it (new) and it comes in a jewel case that idicates its 2 CDs. When I opened it there was just the one CD. Is this supposed to have one or two cd's.

[dsullo]

I never noticed it. But both my bleem discs come in a 2 cd case.. but I only received one bleem disc. My guess is they used a 2 cd case so you could store you bleem disc and copy of game disc together.

[digitalpress]

Dustin's right. I bought them both new and same deal. It makes sense, really. Take the old Tekken or MGS out of the PlayStation jewel case and store it with your Dreamcast Bleem disc and BLAMMO, you've got yourself a "kit".

It would have been nice if they'd done Gran Turismo that way. I hate the fact that it's in a cheap cardboard CD sleeve.

[Blackjax]

Hmmmm... that's nothing a scanner, Photoshop, and a little time couldn't fix. Maybe it'd look good in red...

[zektor]

I also hate that cheap-o cardboard sleeve. I might just have to make a new one for GT myself as well..

[briskbc]

That kinda makes sense although I don't see how I'm going to fit the 2 MGS discs and 1 Bleem disc into a 2 disc CD case. That's not the point though. I just wanted to make sure I wasn't shorted a disc. Thanks guys.

[digitalpress]

You can actually put both MGS disks on one "side" of the case. Of course, I wouldn't recommend doing it because for sure one of 'em will get scratchified.

[motley6]

Has anyone ever tried using one of the bleem discs in and putting in a different playstation game and seen if it worked?

[goatdan]

Has anyone ever tried using one of the bleem discs in and putting in a different playstation game and seen if it worked?

It won't.

[Nez]

I've tried, even metal gear vr missions wont work. Ment for one game only.

[SoulBlazer]

Bah. I'm still pissed at how Bleem convienced me to buy their emulator for the PSX and then 'stole' my money by stopping all work on it right after.

[soniko_karuto]

they got a cease and disease from sony. The disease was the worse part, i mean, wtf? they killed them!

[Nez]

I'm pretty shure bleem! was bout out by Sony. Thats what I figured anyway.

[chrisbid]

they won their case on court, but it nearly bankrupted bleem in the process, and they were snuffed out.

i swapped the dual CD cases for regular cases, as the dual cases are useful. i guess that ruins the value

[goatdan]

they won their case on court, but it nearly bankrupted bleem in the process, and they were snuffed out.

Bleem! didn't just win one court case against Sony, but a number of them. Sony kept re-sueing for different technicalities after the issue was thrown out, and eventually bleed poor Bleem! dry.

The three Bleemcast! disks were not what was intended for release at all. It was supposed to be disks that were released that would support approximately 100 popular games per disk at the cost of about $40.00 per CD. When Sony started their "if they can legally make it, we'll just shut them down by continually suing them for stuff that will get tossed out until they are out of money" campaign, the authors of Bleem! saw the writing on the wall and got out the best working ones as soon as they could.

I don't have any solid numbers to back this up, but apparently the week that the PS2 was released in Japan, Bleem! for Gran Turismo outsold all of the PS2 games, but wasn't considered a software title because it was just an emulator. If that's the case, that's pretty interesting.

The Bleem guys were and are very cool by the way. I have had some interactions with some of them on a number of occasions, and they are reallly knowledgable and helpful

[SoulBlazer]

My main problem with the group was that they promised constant support and updates on their emulator, but the emulator did'nt run for me at ALL -- only a couple of my games could run and they ran very poorly. And right after I bought it for full price, the website went dark. I posted in another thread sometime ago I still consider this my greatest waste of money. I finally traded the Bleem disc to some poor sucker about a year later. Now we have free emulators that work MUCH better on the same system then Bleem ever did. The guys should have known Sony would force them out of business. I don't hate the Bleem guys personaly, just the way they handled this whole situation. I would have liked something for my $50.

[goatdan]

My main problem with the group was that they promised constant support and updates on their emulator, but the emulator did'nt run for me at ALL -- only a couple of my games could run and they ran very poorly. And right after I bought it for full price, the website went dark.

If continuing to do updates to it or keeping your Web site open would cause Sony to continue to sue you, at some point you would have to turn them off. It sucks, but that has nothing to do with the makers of Bleem themselves. Your anger should be directed to Sony for that.

I posted in another thread sometime ago I still consider this my greatest waste of money. I finally traded the Bleem disc to some poor sucker about a year later. Now we have free emulators that work MUCH better on the same system then Bleem ever did.

Now we have free emulators that work better, but computers are also much faster. If you put the same free emulators onto machines that were being used at the time that Bleem was out, I would guess that Bleem would still hold up rather well.

The guys should have known Sony would force them out of business. I don't hate the Bleem guys personaly, just the way they handled this whole situation. I would have liked something for my $50.

How could they know that Sony was going to force them out of business? The courts threw out Sony's argument that it was illegal to do what Bleem was doing a good number of times. Bleem had to close shop not because it was illegal to do what they were doing, but because Sony kept finding different reasons to sue them. If anything, this is the perfect example of why big business often times has too much power these days.

It also begged the question of why Sony cared to sue so much. Sony had stated that they still weren't making much money off each PSX sold at the time, and if someone bought Bleem instead and used it on their home PC, they would still have to purchase the Playstation games (and therefor pay Sony royalties) while not purchasing the system. Sony stood to make money from this effort, not lose it.

Sega, who would've been the ones that could've really complained about the whole thing since purchasing Bleem! for the Dreamcast very well might have resulted in a person not buying Dreamcast games and instead buying Playstation games to play on Sega's system never sued and for the most part turned a blind eye to the whole thing.

Basically, the situation was just bad. Even though I'm not associated with the company, I'm sorry that you feel so bad about the situation because I know for a fact that it was almost completely out of their hands and it wasn't the fault of the makers of Bleem! but the constant suing by Sony. If you are going to be mad at someone, I'd suggest being mad at them.

[SoulBlazer]

Oh, believe me, I'm ticked at Sony as well. I've always had a love hate relationship with them. I really enjoy my PS2 and play it a lot but the way Sony does business now is very similar to how Nintendo did business many years ago.

I understand that Bleem ran out of money and had to stop operations, but I even went to their website to look into their emulator and to download their specs before I went out and bought Bleem. There was NO INDICATION that they were having problems and planned to shut down anytime soon. You would think that if you were having problems you might want to give a little friendly 'heads up' that things are looking a little grim, the way many game companies do nowadays if they are having fiancial problems.

Also, the specs indicated the emulator would run great on my system. At the time I had a cutting edge system and it was well above the specs that was needed to be running. I knew Bleem was engaged in legal battles and I wanted to help support them, so with the assurances that Bleem would continue to receive daily support and it would run just great on my computer I went out and bought it. (I even recall one of the Bleem people saying that even if they were forced to shut down they would continue to work on updates on the side and release them thru another group, another vote of confidence that my money would not be wasted.)

Well, not only did Bleem fail to run at anything I would consider CLOSE to acceptable preformance after I bought it, but the website was shut down within two weeks. No warning, no indication of what happened to the project, no support anymore. I was ticked....and count mny blessings I at least got most of my money back when I got rid of it a year later.

As far as the system's then vs now -- an old friend of mine still has a computer VERY CLOSE to what I had when Bleem came out, and he can run current freeware PSX emulators just fine on it. So I really don't think the power of the systems means that much.

Of course it would have helped if I could have gotten Bleem to run on my system, but no one responded to my requests for help on the forum either (I also seem to recall it being very hard to use and sign up for, but I admit my memory is a little hazy on that.)

Bleem's main mistake, I think, was attracting too much attention. They went about their business plan the wrong way. Of course, these days I'm also convienced that anyone trying to SELL a emulator and not having full rights to the system it emulates is asking for it. But that's a argument for a whole different thread.

Anyway, I really did'nt mean to get this much off track, but I wanted to defend why I felt the way I do. I understand that my opinion is just that, and I really don't have anything aganist the Bleem people themselves -- they did a lot of work and fought the good fight aganist Sony. I just think I got robbed on the product.