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I had tried a few times before, but the first time I actually completed Metroid 1 was just after its remake, Zero Mission. The original game was included (also as a bonus in one of the Metroid Prime).
The thing is, the map structure is the same (just with extra levels, more puzzles and ability gating). Power-ups and bosses that already existed in 1 are at the exact same spots. Helps a lot if you can just remember where important stuff is supposed to be.
Yeah, the maze with button platforms is catacombs, that was definitely the one that had me stuck the longest time. Partly because of the maze-like structure and partly because it relies on a few climbable walls that are a lot less obvious than the usual and a very missable teleport tile.
There’s also plenty of places especially in treetop village where I was like “how the fuck am I supposed to go there?”. Turns out none of them is really necessary (and some might just not be normally accessible, even though they have items?) but that’s still confusing.
And even though I didn’t get lost too bad in it, Final confrontation surprised me. From the name I went into it expecting maybe a short level and the boss fight. That thing took forever to go through. I even had multiple moments where I was like, “lots of ammo, music is becoming ominous, here we are, boss fight”… And… No. Just another room full of enemies.
I am not really seeing it. I did finish it without a guide back then. It was the Windows 9x port, but I don’t think it changes much.
Really in my case a guide would not help for the hardest parts, which were mostly the crazy moves needed to push those floating things to break rocks and to swim against currents with boulders.
They weren’t nearly so patient with Okami around that time. They barely communicated around it, killed the studio, then commissioned a port they…barely communicated around again, and then they complained the game was doomed to be a commercial failure because… I don’t know.
It’s basically like one of the better classic Legend of Zelda games, only with a unique universe and charm and about twice the size of those.
It was criminally overlooked on PS2, but they have zero excuse for not turning it into a major hit for the Wii. One of the best game on a console with an absurd install base and that had almost no competition for it at that point.
Back in the 00s I strongly associated Havok with Oblivion, because… Well, it was in your face all the time, with clutter flying all over the place, physics-based traps, ragdoll bodies and skeletons exploding in a dozen pieces.
And it was very, very broken, especially in crowded spaces. Still happened in Skyrim by the way. I used to joke about how “Havok” was a perfect name for that mess… But that’s probably Bethesda doing Bethesda stuff with it.
I was aware it still is in use, spotted it on many credits. The fact it’s been used as a base (even with another custom physics system on top of it) in Tears of the Kingdom tells me the stuff must still be quite solid.
Gacha and lootboxes (similar in concept) tend to be the worst of predatory microtransactions because they exploit gambling addictions.
“Classic” microtansactions, like freaking Oblivion horse armor, skins, etc, are bad, but you buy them once and you know exactly what you’re getting.
With gacha and lootboxes you buy a lottery ticket hoping to get something good. They use rush-inducing casino-style tricks to get you hooked. They obfuscate your real odds and how much you’re spending as much as they can.
I am against all game design patents in general. You shouldn’t be able to file a patent on game mechanics, like no movie director could have filed a patent on, say, the idea of sequence shot.
Game content (art, characters, etc) is already protected by copyright. Patents have absolutely no business in this.
Oh, it’s about that. It’s just leftover from an old base 20 counting system really. Kind of like how time is still using base 60 (though it’s kinda convenient for dividing), stuff like that.
Really, English is not completely safe from that. Ask yourself why eleven to nineteen instead of, you know, ten-one, ten-two…
You’d be lacking shortcuts obviously, and very rarely (mostly when you ask for it) you might be prompted to input a name for something, but almost everything else has mouse controls.
Now that I think about it, there are two keys that might be a bit inconvenient not to have, spacebar for emergency pauses (there’s a screen button but it’s harder to hit in a bind) and shift that let you queue an order instead of replacing the current one.
My random suggestions right now for stuff I like and is played with mouse would be:
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Rimworld. Almost any top-down PC management or (not too fast paced) strategy game should work, but, I really like the crazy random shit that happens to the characters you’re slowly getting to know in Rimworld.
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Almost any of the Zachtronics games, if you like to torture your brain. Open-ended sort-of-engineering puzzles.The bigs ones like Spacechem, Opus Magnum and Shenzhen IO in particular, last call BBS for a bit more variety inside one game. Not Infinifactory, since while it doesn’t have any kind of fast paced action it still requires navigating in 3D so mouse only wouldn’t work.
Yeah, it stinks. Another thing that makes me wish we’d got that Dreams PC port that was apparently considered at one point.
Very cool platform, powerful yet (somewhat) easy to use, and no other incentive than creating and sharing cool stuff. It’s mostly dead now , but PC would have given it the critical user mass it needed.
A good deal of people making games experiences on Roblox are minors. They’re being promised revenues, but of course they’re paid with bogus money that they’re encouraged to spend back on the platform, since cashing back is subject to an absolutely ridiculous rate, and to a minimum amount. Only the very few at the top can pretend to get anything back as real money. But all of the games, even the ones that never makes a cent for their creators, are the content Roblox milks indefinitely.
Roblox development is a jungle, completely unregulated and managed outside of the platform by design, since they want to deny all responsibility for any of that shit. They kill the platform forums so dev teams are being formed outside, on discords and stuff. Teams with minors working with adults. Yes, there were cases of exploitation, and worse.
8 (DX but really my favorite parts of it were already on Wii U). 8’s tracks are incredible (not the booster packs one, those are a mixed bag and none really reach base game/Wii U dlc level).
Wii comes very close though. It’s the first to have good item balance IMO, it gets rid of the left-right bullshit to drift, and circuits are quite fun too. And some bikes are a blast, though to the point of being overpowered.
I just think of 8 as “we took everything good in Wii and made it a bit better”.
They present Muse as a “generative AI model of a videogame” that you’d train to “learn about older games”. Which seems a very bold claim to begin with.
If this is anything like that, this is not a way to preserve the original game, it’s an attempt at reproducing (parts of?) it. And since generative AI is involved, there is no reason to believe it will be a faithful recreation.
Of course this could all be marketing bullshit, and for all we know their AI is just another coding assistant AI that they might use to create remakes. And then they’ll only be as faithful as the team making it can or will do it, as has always been the case with remakes.
Anyway, remaking is not preserving.
Edit : was a bit slow trying to make my point, seeing now your edit. Yep, that’s exactly what I got from this too.
Guys, it’s okay. Sure, it sounds bad that we somehow let the complete works of William Shakespeare disappear from the planet. But we have a new data center with a billion monkeys on typewriters. Give them some time, and they’re bound to stumble upon that old stuff eventually.
Edit : love that one guy who found a couple people critical of one of the most ridiculous claim about generative AI yet and decided to downvote everyone without a word.
All that for a new haircut? Doesn’t even look like that out of place of a style change to me.
I mean, look at what Castlevania Judgment did to its characters back then if you want terrible redesign. Most of them were unrecognizable. Simon, Maria and Death became Death Note cosplayers, others like Grant and Carmilla went full SoulCalibur knock-off.
Along with bad anime trope personality graft for half of them.
I am not “assuming” anything on anyone’s behalf. There is a clear difference that’s practically not even about AI at this point.
You’re not stealing from a programmer by frankensteining bits of their freely available code. As someone else said, it’s basically stack overflow with an extra step. There’s no secret sauce in coding, you can evaluate code quality, you can exchange tricks and techniques, but you’re not expressing yourself through code.
However, if you take bits of one or several cultural products without the creator’s consent and pass the whole thing as your own, that’s called plagiarism, and this is a special thing for a reason.
For AI, I don’t think anybody cares about a random beginner using it as “crutch”. People care about big entertainment companies deciding they need 90% fewer artists because AI does “good enough” (even when it does quite poorly, and even when it’s trained on the work of people like the ones they’re replacing).
I am pretty sure this is not what the people who made the seal are talking about.
Read their site. They’re talking about “pictures, movies, audio (music or voice action) and writing”. Code in itself, especially for simple tasks like basic game logic, is not art, and I am saying that as a developer.
I am still very doubtful AI can write quality code, but I really don’t care. I am sure it becomes a mess if you try to write very complex systems, but that’s not the case for most games. And if AI generated code is good enough for your use case, good for you.
I am welcoming new attempts at life sims because EA is just shitting all over its series, but… Everything we’ve been shown about this one looks so bland. I don’t want my life sim to be realistic. I want it to be crazy/cynical/over the top.
I never had the impression all the Sims fans that are fed up with EA’s bullshit were asking for the game to be more serious. They mostly ask for it to work at a basic level and they hate, hate the increasingly abusive monetization.
Back then on my GBA I got stuck in a Zelda Oracles dungeon for quite some time until I looked up what I was supposed to do. Turns out there was a hint, I had read it, but it was mistranslated and was garbled in my language.
It’s supposed to tell you running makes you jump farther. Translated text doesn’t mention jumping and instead sounds like a weird nonsensical idiom about “travelling far”. Specifically travelling in the sense going on a trip, not just going from place A to place B.