It is hard to see how the slot machine in LBALL can be gambling when you are guaranteed to profit on every spin (unless you’ve intentionally designed a machine where you can win nothing, but that seems like your fault). Gambling involves risking a stake, but in almost every configuration of the machine that you’ll encounter during normal play there is no risk, you are guaranteed to make more than it costs to spin. The challenge is to make enough to stay ahead of the landlord.

The Sims 3. I had to figure out how to disable OneDrive backup for my Documents folder, because Sims 3 insists on keeping your saves there, and somehow everything breaks if OneDrive tries to sync them. Previously I had given in and let OneDrive sync everything because Win11 nags you if you try to avoid it.

I also have to fiddle with processor affinity to get the game to launch, for some reason.

It still crashes a lot.

World of Warcraft is probably still in the lead even though I stopped playing years ago. It would be in the thousands of hours, which dwarfs anything else I’ve played.

If you search for “poker” on PEGI’s site, it seems that many games which are actually about simulated gambling are rated 12 or 16. They seem to think Balatro is more likely to expose children to realistic gambling than, say, Prominence Poker or Pure Hold’em World Poker Championship, which seems completely bizarre, given that those games are about playing poker and Balatro is a fancy kind of solitaire with no betting.

This is the part I can’t figure out. It’s not just indie games: ages ago, Pokémon dropped the casinos from their games specifically to avoid having their age rating bumped in NA and EU. So clearly they sometimes account for gambling in side content. But somehow other franchises have kept them in, and aren’t suffering.

Does it just depend on whether or not the particular person assigned to review your game is a hardass about particular things?

The patent isn’t about the balls, it’s about the summoning controls, and it seems broad enough to cover any controls that use a control stick together with buttons to aim a device for summoning a character. It is ridiculously over-broad, and part of a grand tradition of software patents being granted that are more akin to patenting “the idea of doors” than “a specific design for a doorknob.”

That’s why the new control is “press button to summon next to you,” it doesn’t use the stick and thereby avoids the patent. It’s also ass because it doesn’t let you aim the summon, but it is hard to envision a control system for aiming summons that doesn’t use a stick and buttons and also doesn’t suck.

This change is actually really annoying. Being able to summon Pals far from you was great in fights so that you wouldn’t both be in range of the same AoE, and some Pals like Croajiro have have skills that benefit from being able to decide where you place them (Croajiro can act as a launch pad to help you gain height in the early game before you have a flying Pal saddle).

I was cautiously optimistic for Pokémon Legends Z-A but I’m definitely skipping it now, fuck off Nintendo.

I think the patent is about controls more than about the balls, the mechanic would have to work very differently in order to not fall afoul of it. Like maybe if you had to go to the spot and place a mark there, or something, instead of aiming with the control stick, but that would be too clunky to use most of the time.

I think I’m part of the Terraria crowd (I play through it basically every time there’s a big content update, at least) and I think the patience argument has a lot of merit even with games like Terraria. If you were only going to play through Terraria once, waiting longer would mean you got to play through more content. For people with limited time to game, I think it makes a lot of sense to focus on games that have had more time to build up features so that they get a more complete experience.

I have 40+ hours in the game and I haven’t even explored all of the existing islands, I’d better catch up!

If it’s to avoid clipping, then something is badly wrong in the older game, where the person walks inside a bunk bed, lies down, then sinks all the way through the bed before rising up to slightly levitate above it!

Although in that case the idea of a margin might make sense, since at the end they’re only barely above the bed. In the new game they’re in the right place at first, and then rise up like a foot and a half above the bed once the player approaches them…

Wow knowing the asset reuse was by design makes me feel way less charitable towards DA2. (I don’t know if I’d go as far as the other commenter and say it’s “a bad game,” but I didn’t like it.)

Initial reviews seem remarkably positive given what we saw in the first gameplay reveal a few months ago. My impression at the time was that about half the voice actors sounded like they hadn’t been given enough context about the scenario and some of the cutscenes had questionable direction, which were bad signs for a curated ten minute slice. I still think it’s ultimately not for me—I don’t really want action combat in my Dragon Age—but I’m glad people are enjoying it.

I wonder if I can make a cheat that doesn’t do anything but turn myself into a frog…

Even if you buy a DVD, the only thing you are “buying” is the physical media and a license to operate the softwate. You don’t own the software stored on the media, you must use it in accordance with the license agreement or potentially face legal action. The main thing about digital storefronts is that it’s easier to revoke the license.

The Build Mode features in 4 are pretty good if you’re into virtual dollhouse building, and there’s a ton of custom content for it (as long as you’re on PC).

Live Mode is not very good, but it’s functional enough to play dolls in the houses you built if you’re willing to do all the story writing to make up for sims not having very interesting personalities/desires/autonomy.

It is part of the main gameplay loop. In order to keep your car in a state where it protects you and is reasonably driveable, you must gather materials to craft repair items and replacement parts, in order to maintain the car’s panels, doors, and bumpers (which together function as armor), its wheels (which are necessary to get anywhere), and the various add-on systems you can craft for it. Tools gradually break with use, so you’ll also craft replacement tools, which are mostly for scavenging materials or interacting with stuff in the Zone.

By collecting a certain resource you gradually unlock upgraded parts and tools for crafting, which is the main way player power progresses during the game.

Why isn’t Echoes of Wisdom in the “upcoming” category? It doesn’t release until the end of the month.

Can I put myself in the low priority queue so that I only inflict my shittiness at video games on teammates who deserve to be punished?

Don’t you press R1 when your attack hits to pull the trigger for extra damage? You do use the revolver part, just only in close combat.

Or did I hallucinate that? It’s been over 20 years since I played it.

Do you need a first-party Palworld server? I don’t have the game myself but I searched and it looks like you are free to host your own, at least on PC: the “Palworld Dedicated Server” program is in the Tools section of your Steam library.

Can you tell me why I was game banned? “No.”

Many companies take this approach and it always leaves me feeling unsettled. How can we have confidence in moderation that isn’t transparent?

I am not surprised that Yennefer selling out the Lodge got scrapped. That sounds like a plot thread that deserves way more room to breathe than being crammed into the ending sequence.

I am just about to start the DLC, but I think the quality of the major bosses in the base game is pretty good. I would actually say that my main complaint is that they aren’t balanced around using all the new bullshit, so it ends up being more fun to fight them without it. Like, I’d love to mess around with spirit summons, but most of the bosses have terrible decision making when there’s more than one target available, so you just get a bunch of free hits. For my replay I just used a bastard sword and restricted myself to “fair” Ashes of War that feel like normal parts of a weapon moveset, like Stamp (Sweep) and Impaling Thrust, and only used a shield on fights where I couldn’t figure out how to do the fight without one, like Radahn, and it was a lot of fun! I also tried out perfumes for the first time and I think they might have to be relegated to the “overpowered” section in future playthroughs: Uplifting Aromatic in particular giving on-demand Opaline Bubbletear effect is extremely powerful and let me win some fights that I wasn’t actually proficient in. (Also it’s not especially fun to farm snow trolls for Arteria Leaf once you run out.)

My secondary complaint is that a lot of minor bosses, especially in the overworld, have a lot of terrain jank and camera issues, like Lansseax going down the nearby cliff and then having weird geometry issues with the tiny raised section down there, or the tree spirit “miniboss” in the rotten pond in the Haligtree that is encircled by raised roots that make the proper part of the boss arena too small, and which it regularly clips through during its animations, making it even harder to see what it’s doing than usual.

Looking forward to it! The Bloodstained games are some of the best Castlevania-likes I’ve played.

They say you will likely spend 30-50 hours “leveling” in the desert, but… leveling how, exactly? Grinding the local wildlife into a thin red paste for dozens of hours doesn’t seem to be in theme with Dune. More like Runescape, where you also level all sorts of noncombat skills, maybe?

Oof. Wasn’t this the one that was going to have in-depth object customization? I was looking forward to it from a dollhouse-building perspective. Even if it wasn’t great, having some competition might convince EA to allocate more dev resources to the Sims, which has ruthlessly embraced the “minimum viable product” philosophy for a long time.

That’s fair. I imagine if you are playing every day for a long period of time, the game would get stale if it never changed.

How do you even keep returning players? I used to enjoy checking out League every once in a while, but it seemed like it wasn’t possible to keep up with all the changes that way. Every time I went back to it, I felt like I was learning how champions and items worked from scratch, because they kept changing. Eventually after every champ I liked to play had been reworked (some of them more than once) I just gave up.

As a Blood Mage sympathizer, I say we let Solas cook!

What exactly are people upset about? Other discussions on this topic appear to mostly involve people who already know what’s wrong. Something about new player experience and bots?

This is Sakurai’s explanation, and it seems reasonable to me:

“I feel very sorry for making the user wait,” he explained. “If you take one second from each user, that means you’ll be taking 10,000 seconds from 10,000 people. The more this repeats over the years, the more time you will cause players to lose."

Perfect! :D

If I weren’t lazy I’d make a “I’m literally the guy in the photo” meme about this.

There are so many D&D locations even within the Forgotten Realms, and a ton of other settings with their own cool stuff. Why do another Baldur’s Gate so soon? Taking a different direction might also blunt some of the inevitable criticism that it “isn’t as good as BG3.”

Counting Roblox as a game instead of a platform seems weird to me, from what I experienced when I tried it out.

It’s hard to know if I underrate it when I wasn’t able to finish it (or, honestly, make it even halfway through). I liked what I played, but I’m clumsy and slow. In Dark Souls this is usually forgivable as long as you learn to choose the right option; in Sekiro you must execute and I never got good enough.

It’s only in SMM2, which doesn’t allow you to edit other people’s levels. And actually there is now a 3rd party tool to view SMM2 levels so those levels are now exposed as well.

Sorry, yeah, it is intended that all levels are beatable. To upload a level you must prove that it is beatable by clearing it from the beginning without dying, and then clearing it again from each checkpoint (if there are any) to prove that it can also be cleared from any checkpoints.

Hacked levels have existed that cannot be cleared, but they can be reported and Nintendo takes them down. They should all be taken down by now, but in any case if it’s obviously impossible (the goal is completely blocked by impenetrable walls) Team 0% marks them as hacked on their spreadsheet in addition to reporting them, so they wouldn’t count.

In this game you can download levels and see the full level in the editor, so it isn’t possible to make a level that is “practically” unclearable using hidden information. Any things like hidden keys, “passcode” sections (where you need to hit blocks a certain number of times in order to manipulate things hidden off screen), etc. are trivially defeated by viewing the level in the editor.

The red balls are lit Bob-ombs. While lit, they can be carried, thrown, bounced on (with spin jumps), and kicked (when touched any other way), and obviously after a short time they explode. Thrown, dropped, kicked, or bounced Bob-ombs kill enemies and collect coins.

Yes, in Super Mario World the spin jump allowed you to bounce on dangerous enemies including Piranha Plants, and actually the Super Mario Maker version is nerfed in some ways: in the oringal SMW you could also spin jump on certain things like fireballs and saws that you can’t in SMM.