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Okay, game budgets are bigger because of massive teams and longer development cycles.
Not sure we got a good explanation for that though. Graphical fidelity is “only part of it”, what’s the rest? Is it really just game scale? Open worlds are not that new at this point. And the bigger ones tend to feature lots of copy-pasted content and boring shopping list designs. Are the new ones really bigger enough that they need ten times the team?
Every times I watch Ubisoft credits for a game (which has been much more rare lately, admittedly), the part of it that was for people actually making the game goes smaller and smaller. Even in the 2010’s you’d already have 30-minutes long credit rolls, with most of it marketing, and a bunch of executives. This was even more obvious on the games that are definitely not larger scale.
I’ve played several Shiren games (1 on DS, 3 on Wii, 5 and 6 on Switch) and I recommend Shiren 6 (Mystery Dungeons of Serpentcoil Island).
5 kinda went too far from its roguelike roots and feels too grindy, with too many ways to escape safely, especially easy ways to undo your death indefinitely.
6 is a lot more fun to me and makes good runs and crazy builds more special again.
For a very good introduction to the series, if you can play it, the port of Shiren 1 on DS is great and already has a lot of what makes those games fun. There is also a rom hack translation for the original on Super Famicom (that one only existed in Japanese), but I’ve not played that one much.
I tried to read that article. You’ll notice that the end of my message refers to the Steam rating system, which is mentioned towards the end (or at least I think it was the end) of that article. Problem is, this site is utter fucking shite, and most of it was obscured with scrolling tracking ads as I always trying to read. So yes, I missed the part about it just being a form to fill.
As for “official”, yes, I know PEGI/ESRB/Whatever are industry-controlled. But for better of for worse, they’re still used as reference, and they’re third party (though clearly not that independent). It’s still different from declaring yourself what your game contains.
I wonder how it works for more alternative platforms like itch.io.
No way you’re having any official ratings on 99% of their catalogue. Most of it is experimental stuff, and having basically no barrier to publish is the point.
Unless the German regulations allow self-assigned ratings? It says they allow Steam’s own age ratings, how are those applied?
Not sure which game you’re thinking about, there are lots of shitty Christian shovelware from that era, but Konami’s Noah’s Ark has nothing to do with it. And very little to do with the biblical story really.
I had that game on the NES (and I’m not in a Christian or religious family at all).
It’s a real game, the arcade-y kind that tries to kill you all the time. It’s quite hard.
We had the original. The logical puzzles are quite clever. My sisters and I got a bit obsessed with it and completed it together.
Yes, you can complete it, by bringing ALL the possible combinations to the village. That’s 625, and you can save 16 on each trip, if you don’t lose any on the way.
There’s a short congratulations video if you save them all. I was honestly surprised they made one, given the commitment it required.
Depends. Microsoft might be to blame indeed but I’ve seen several people saying Ubisoft has a habit of using undocumented non-public API.
If they’re not supposed to use it to begin with, it’s their fault when it doesn’t work anymore. That would certainly explain why it happens to almost nothing but Snowdrop powered games.
I’m not sure why there hasn’t been a business simulator where you could live up the glamorous, extremely vicious, exploitative, and horrible life of a movie studio owner in Old Hollywood.
The Movies, 2005.
Technically not just old Hollywood, it goes through the 20th century with technological advances and world events that change movie trends.
Since it’s a business management game from Bullfrog Lionhead, it did have some grit to it, though mostly sarcastic rather than very dark.
I welcome new takes on this though, the movies didn’t age well in some aspects (aspect ratio most notably, ah ah ). I know of Blockbuster Inc that tried to remake that already but the reviews are not great. I’ll try this one.
Not single-player, but snipperclips is good, relaxed puzzle fun.
Goals are visual and easy to understand, each player controls a shape and they can cut each other to try and fit a predefined “hole” together. There are some physics puzzles based on cutting your shape in clever ways too.
Mistakes have no consequence and often lead to funny interactions. You can’t really lose, you just reset your shape and try again.
I agree, what made WW really work to me was the animation. Also the expressiveness of characters, because in comparison N64 Link basically knew a total of two expressions, and they were dull grumpiness and angry grumpiness.
I don’t like what they’ve done to the Wii U remake though. I don’t understand why every colour needed to be balanced toward radioactive hell.
Also unrelated to visuals but the loss of the Tingle Tuner was a shame, that thing was genius. Had so much fun with my siblings with it. I’m sure they could have emulated it with 3DS if they cared, after all 3DS/Wii U connection was a thing for smash for example.
In the early 2000’s we had “beautiful” games (aka the most advanced graphics that technology could afford) but games were fun.
You only remember the good ones. There has always been a lot of games that look good or even impressive, but play like crap.
Today there are still critically acclaimed games that happen to look good too. They’re a tiny minority, but it’s always been like that.
One of the first VR games I played was No Man’s Sky, on base PS4. Very low res and frame rate, teleport movement possible on foot but obviously not while flying spaceships. And I may have tried spinning a bit (that’s a good trick).
Got very sick, very fast.
Nowadays I’m mostly fine playing continuous movement, even relatively fast-paced one. Tunnel effect helps, when it’s available.
The only problems are on badly designed games (like those with forced, unpredictable “cinematic” camera movement, don’t do that in VR for fuck’s sake).
I play a lot of rhythm games, and I do play a lot of Beat Saber specifically now. Ragnarock and Pistol Whip (well this one is rhythm-adjacent) are two other VR music games I enjoy.
But I’ve never had a worse case of sore arms than back when I played Donkey Konga on the gamecube for the first time. I was hooked and played for hours. I didn’t notice anything while playing, but my arms were killing me for the whole night after that .
It’s somewhat useful, but it’s not my favourite way to overcome obstacles because swimming is very slow and kinda janky.
The thing is, in theory, you’ve got several echoes and strategies that would let you cross a ravine or climb up a cliff. For example there’s several floating monsters that can carry you, one that you can grab as it climbs walls, and those flying tiles from aLttP that you can ride (that one’s kinda cool. I wanted more like that).
Water cube is just the one that works in almost all situations. And a big problem in this game is that it’s a pain to switch echoes all the time, so water cube is one of the few you’ll have in speed dial most of the time.
My main problem with this game is how it has maybe six or so useful things you’ll be spamming most of the time for convenience.
I was on board with the concept, but they didn’t carry it far enough. There were simply not enough situations requiring clever use of items, and most items/monsters felt useless compared to a few that just worked better in most situations.
Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom did a really good job of creating open-ended problems and letting you experiment with all the tools you got. I think Echoes of Wisdom should have focussed more on that.
The fact you can at any moment trigger a time-limited Link mode which is basically standard LoZ combat and makes the game ridiculously easy is a sign they did not believe in their concept enough. If your main gameplay loop becomes so tedious you implement shortcuts to avoid it, you’ve done something wrong.
Oh no, they were too late and they could not save you from that forbidden knowledge… If only you’d read that before :
The player is able to access a list of poker hand names. As the player hovers over these poker hands, the game explains what types of cards the player would need in order to play certain hands. As the game goes on, the player becomes increasingly familiar with which hands would earn more points. Because these are hands that exist in the real world, this knowledge and skill could be transferred to a real-life game of poker.
… About that, I think you’d be in trouble if you pull off Balatro’s flush five in a “real life game of poker”. It’s literally five identical cards, both suit and rank.
Progression was atrocious indeed.
You had all the reasons to cheese the system by levelling up as little as possible, or ignoring all but two or three of your class skills. Or even choosing to progress specifically in non-class skills.
Because trying out all of your class skills would make you level up way too fast, and suddenly you’re facing armies of enemies and you have zero edge against them.
Not sure how what exactly they changed with Skyrim, but the balance feels a lot better. Maybe it’s the perks, getting rid of classes entirely, or not tying enemy levels to yours that tightly.
Maybe they can fix that in this alleged Oblivion remake of them.
I feel like of the 3 “human scaled” elder scrolls (since Arena and Daggerfall are another kind of madness), Oblivion is the one that would need a gameplay loop update the most.
Morrowind and Skyrim have different ways to manage progression and discovery, but Oblivion feels completely broken compared to both.
I haven’t played that Astrobot game (I don’t have a PS5) but I am not surprised with it being highly praised honestly.
Astrobot Rescue Mission was awesome, even forgetting about it being VR. It’s very fun and well designed, with new ideas all the way through, up there with Super Mario Galaxy to me. That team definitely knows their stuff.
The feature list doesn’t include bouncing here and there and everywhere, so so don’t know what to feel about this project.