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.

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.

Yeah, well I tend to give sites I don’t know the benefit of the doubt, which is why I don’t ad-block by default. Now I know this one doesn’t deserve to exist at all.

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.

Also, people have infinite time, right?

Surely they have room for a couple more unfinished games wasting their time as a feature while they expect “the good shit” to drop in several months.

Oh wait, we’ve not sold enough. Sorry people, we’re killing that roadmap. See you for the next one!

Yeah, I expect it’s a bit of trouble for the dev to refund stuff too. I can understand doing it if you’ve got something to complain about, but having paid like 8 bucks one month ago for a game that’s now free is really not worth the trouble IMO.

Even less so if you actually enjoyed the game.

Abydos was a real place in ancient Egypt, the Stargate planet takes its name from it.

That does sound ambitious. I hope they don’t end up biting off more than they can chew and never releasing anything, because this looks promising.

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.

Can’t disagree with that.

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.