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?
I thought our eyes worked by projecting some kind of energy beam that scanned objects, like how Superman’s X-ray vision is sometimes drawn.
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.
“Original” as in it has original ideas, or “original” as in it’s not part of an established franchise? If it’s the latter, I saw The Wild Robot in theaters. It was okay. A bit by-the-numbers, and I’m not sure everything made total sense, but it’s a kid’s movie so that was to be expected.
If the former, then, uh… Problemista? Also in theaters. I really liked that one.
In Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII, the world is ending, and the 13-day timer is very real. You basically get told “do as much as you can before the world ends” and let loose. So there’s urgency AND side questing.
And of course you have the opportunity to spend that time doing things that are completely irrelevant to making progress, like collecting silly outfits and forcing Lightning to wear them so that Hope can laugh at her.
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…
Sonic Roboblast 2 Kart and its successor Dr. Robotnik’s Ring Racers are open source, and pretty fun! The exact degree to which they’re free-as-in-libre depends somewhat on Sega’s policy of turning a blind eye to fan games, so although GPL-2.0 permits commercial use I wouldn’t recommend testing it.
There is a lively modding scene (or there was for SRB2K last time I was playing it; I haven’t played RR yet). Ring Racers has single-player content if that’s what you’re looking for, I hear it’s quite challenging.
The last time I was handing out candy at my old neighborhood, kids would ring the doorbell but then they’d just stand there and stare at me until I handed them candy. You’re supposed to say “trick or treat”!
Now I live in an apartment, so I don’t get trick-or-treaters. (I have candy just in case, but nobody ever knocks.) My roommate went to hang out with his sister and hand out candy at her place, and apparently their neighborhood has decreed that trick-or-treating ends at 7 sharp now so that nobody is out after dark? I don’t get it. I thought staying out late (and, for teens, potentially unsupervised) was part of the fun!
I think you’re right, it must have been the sequel!
Is this the one where I kept trying to go visit my mom (as part of my belligerent insistence on looking for stuff to do in the open world after every mission), but the game wouldn’t let me go into any building that wasn’t the next story mission, and then later the main character got chewed out by his mom for never visiting her? I did find that annoying.
I don’t want to look at my disgusting flesh-body and I’d rather nobody else saw it either. Rebuild me shiny and chrome, then we’ll talk about showing off.
I can’t believe how many otherwise seemingly reasonable people are still involved in the MTG and D&D content ecosystems after Hasbro hired the fucking Pinkertons to threaten a Youtuber. How little self respect do they have? Promote a game that isn’t made by someone who would send thugs to your house!
“Real world politics”? Did I miss the news that Undead Demon Margaret Thatcher is running in the next UK election?
Why isn’t Echoes of Wisdom in the “upcoming” category? It doesn’t release until the end of the month.
All, top 6 hours.
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.