Making people pay to skip boring “gameplay” loops, and then paying them a trifle to get them to play more. While getting hundreds of time that from serving ads.

The good content is hiding somewhere under all that, promise! Keep digging and you’ll find it.

Another generic live service bites the dust. Sure, keep trying for the formula that only works for about 5 games in the whole world at any given time.

I like how it thinks it is likely from a videogame, but somehow, it’s absolutely certain it has the character’s name.

And then a bunch of facts about famous videogame character Lemmy Kilmister.

I’ve only experienced LBP3 (which I understand was probably not the best part of the series) and found it just okay…

However Dreams is the one I wish Sony didn’t abandon.

That paper lantern monster design feels familiar. I’m wondering if I’ve seen that asset somewhere else…

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”.

You may be familiar with the old management game Theme Hospital. Two Point Hospital was a modern take on that, and they extended the concept to university campus and now museum.

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.

You’ve convinced me brother. Buying 3 Lady Macbeth NFTs for my metaverse Web 3.0 gatcha play-to-earn game right now.

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.

Saw my switch version update out of nowhere yesterday, and I was wondering what it was about.

A bunch of cool QoL, fixes and visual stuff. Doesn’t look like there’s anything revolutionary in there, but it’s great they pushed those improvements on all versions.

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.

Sure, but I think the key word here is quietly.

They’ll try to hide the most embarrassing stuff, long after the fact, but I wouldn’t expect them to comment publicly on it. It’d be bad for their business.

So, big wrestler tiger not to your liking apparently?

But Groobo’s record is still listed as the “Fastest completion of an RPG videogame” by Guinness World Records, which has not offered a substantive response to the team’s findings (Guinness has not responded to a request for comment from Ars Technica).

Of course they didn’t. Guinness has never cared about being correct. People pay Guinness to have a record listed. The record holders are the Guinness records’ customers.

It is, randomly happens in the festival plaza after the main plot. Honestly not that interesting despite the premise, there’s barely any plot to be found, just the most basic excuse to have you fight a couple battles with past villains and it’s over very quickly. They’d advertised so much around Rainbow Rocket that I was a bit disappointed.

I agree about the story part.

Worst part IMO is that original SuMo had the most interesting antagonist the series ever had, and Ultra decided fuck that, let’s rewrite that character in the most boring way possible and drop a random threat out of nowhere instead.

That definitely sounds like usual Ubisoft meddling. Hell, at that time Guillemot’s good friend Hascoet must have been in full directing power, shitting all over the Assassin’s Creed creative team’s decisions. While the company protected his sexual and moral harassment gig.

I can’t care less about Ubisoft being sold to whoever. Guillemot and his asshole clique don’t deserve shit.

Honestly, at that point? I don’t care about getting them legally. And I am certainly not throwing money to the grey market either.

I am all for supporting people for their work, but since Take Two fired the studio last year, I can be sure my money will never impact anybody who actually worked on these games. Worse, it might be slightly beneficial to those who let them go.

I know most of the time when someone looks for a reason to resort to piracy it sounds like an excuse, but really, in a case like that I’d give zero fuck.

Fuck, I missed that. I liked the original Olliolli, it was a cool game to have on a 3DS. World was in the back of my mind as “might get that one day” (but too many freaking games).

I still have the Sims 2 Ultimate Collection from the time they ended up giving it to everyone who’d claim it for a few days.

They haven’t removed it from the app… yet. Not taking any chances, I’m re-downloading it on my current PC right now.

At one point every time I did a new run of Backpack hero I could find some new absurdly broken item combo. It’s fun.

The ones that leap out of water to get you on world 3 were already quite stressful.

That fish didn’t terrify me near as much as the angry sun though. Back then I often did “almost complete” runs where I’d just kept a lakitu cloud to skip the sun level from world 8.

On the part about Cappy tricks, not sure why the author forgot all 3D Mario games have always included more or less complex move tricks/combos.

Mario 64 already had triple jump, wall kicks, diving/sliding, long jumps, side jumps…

Super Mario Sunshine added a lot of complex moves with FLUDD, and even a limited way to make your own platforms. Odyssey just does it a lot better IMO. I kinda hated Sunshine Yoshi.

And it’s not like the more complex combos are required to finish the game. Occasionally you need one for 100% completion, but most of the time they’re just cool tricks to pull off to reach a place faster, or just grab a few coins.

“We’re only asking about those outrageous monetization schemes so we know how much you hate them! We definitely didn’t consider them!”

Yeah, testing the waters.

Further clarification from Steam :

I do not have a sex crime. I’m not going to go into specific charges and such or tell you the story. What I did was wrong and that’s all you need to know.

She’s right, this is not really anyone’s business.

According to the announcement, the other developer quit game development some time ago and isn’t active anymore.

Mario Kart Wii is very cool, it has some of the best tracks and very fun physics. And I know it’s been a bit of joke online, but the wheel style motion controls were actually fine too.

Though I understand why they toned down the tricks and nerfed bikes in 7 and 8. They were fun, but a bit much.

It’s all about pride and accomplishment, you know.

I’m so glad none of the games I care for went for a free to play/microtransaction model. Or maybe including these into their core design is a big part of what makes them unappealing to me.

Apparently UI and general performance is okay, but I’ve heard very bad things about the time AI turns take in late game on switch, which is why I decided not to get this version of Civ 6 till now. Waiting around 10 minutes every new turn doesn’t sound fun.

Even though I use my switch quite a lot and the full game had a great discount not long ago.

So their solution to bad team coordination (which I would mostly consider a management problem) is to hire more people into their studios? I am not sure I am getting the link here.

It may explain longer development times, but bigger studios?

The feature list doesn’t include bouncing here and there and everywhere, so so don’t know what to feel about this project.

“Please stand by, the game’s finished but we need to find new ways to manipulate you suckers into spending more.”

Asking the real questions here.

Bowtie.

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.