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?

It sounds and probably is pointless, but I expect politicians everywhere are completely lost as to how the hell they can communicate with that idiot. And they have little choice in the matter.

Can’t watch now so not sure what’s in the video, but Lands of Lore 2 was quite fancy.

Had a parchment scroll-like UI with animated burning transitions, did creepy chants at you to test stereo sound.

Funny thing, it tested your CD-ROM drive speed too (it used to matter). Of course on a modern PC, you’d have the whole game on your (much faster) hard drive and simulate an optical drive with DOSBox or something. The installer runs its test and literally says : “Wow, your drive is fast!”

I’d say LoZ: Echoes of Wisdom tried to be like this, unfortunately it’s a bit bland. Might be worth checking if you haven’t yet though.

For something I enjoyed more, CrossCode is a fun top-down action RPG, but it’s more of a sci-fi/fantasy thing and a bit more on the action side. It does have extensive dungeons with lots of puzzles though (often relying on switches, timing, movable blocks and clever ways to use your ball-shooting weapon).

Yeah, I expect it’s a bit of trouble 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.

But you know, actual gatcha and lootboxes? Totally fine.

It’s only gambling when you play with fake money and don’t actually earn or lose anything.

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.

Even if you’re talking visuals only (which obviously don’t always matter), good art direction always beats high res and photorealistic.

My prime example for this is always Okami. It’s a PS2 game. It’s basically intemporal.

I think I’m never buying that because I already got SMT5 at home. ON THE SAME FUCKING CONSOLE.

What the fuck, Atlus. At least let me upgrade, not buy a whole new game.

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.

The original Donkey Kong is the arcade game. The NES port came later and was missing one of the four levels the arcade game had.

Strangely enough some licenced ports for the era’s computers were complete arcade ports unlike the in-house NES one.

On the Wii they released a “special edition” of NES Donkey Kong restoring the missing level.

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.

Balatro is the chillest, smartest game ever to be rated 18+.

Thank you PEGI for warning us against the dangers of knowing what a straight flush is.

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.

Yeah, apparently SimCity itself was the result of Will Wright working on an helicopter shoot’m up and realising he had fun making maps for it.

That’s an interesting starting point for codifying a whole genre of games.

This is not how it has been working for some time. Item distribution is not about rank, it’s about distance.

Blue shell is kinda mid-range, and you usually get one when you’re not so far that you can’t profit from it (and even though it targets first place it also often disturbs second or third place if they’re close, either with blast damage or by making them try to avoid it).

If you’re too far to care about sniping the head of the race, you won’t get a blue shell but something that is immediately useful to you. Commonly star, triple or golden mushroom, bullet bill. Lots of bullet bills actually. I’d say those can be a lot more annoying than blue shells on 8.