Also, getting over their fear of running water.

Europe does, at least for Nintendo e-shop. For some reason Nintendo keeps managing both at the same time. When PEGI (Europe’s own ratings) is totally okay with a game, but Australia has a brain fart and thinks a retro-style shoot’m up with pixellated little spaceships shooting at each other needs to be mature, the game is suspended form the e-shop for both regions, generally for months.

There’s some weird ripple effect going on I think, it goes through an international rating system of which Australia’s one of the biggest member. But the fact still is a game that passes the (mostly) reasonable PEGI can still be removed from the shop if a very stupid butterfly flaps its wings on the other side of the world.

There are several projects trying to do their own life sim. One that was supposed to be published by Paradox was cancelled recently, shortly before planned release, and to the surprise of the dev team apparently.

This is not an easy genre to develop for, lots of things can go wrong and it might be hard to find a good balance between boring and unmanageable feature creep.

Even Cities Skyline devs had a headstart, they already had a successful transport sim before they tried to fill the smoking crater left by EA SimCity’s explosion.

I don’t think “for the time” is that relevant here. My major problem with it is how shallow it is. All 5 phases are so repetitive, with so little variations and so little to do.

The only good things about it were the editors, those were impressive, especially the creature editor. But it’s just cosmetic, mechanics are so poor almost nothing emerges from it. It’s quite disappointing for designers that have been major actors of the simulation genre forever.

Will Wright was still there for Spore, so everything he touched was not gold. It’s supposed to be a whole universe and it’s barely a simulation of anything, somehow he forgot to design a game around it.

And now he’s hopped on the Blockchain/NFT train…

Yeah, pretty much. The best Sims game doesn’t exist, it’s a Frankenstein monster that would take bits of the 4 games.

I love the idea of 3 with the open city and NPC progression, but wow this game’s an unstable glitchy mess. It’s not even close to be playable without many unofficial fixes, and even then, it runs like shit.

The only things I’d take from 4 would be maybe moods (nice to have, I guess) and the more organic body models, with more seemless morphs. 4’s gameplay is boring as hell, nothing interesting ever happens. And they got rid of create-a-style which is a huge creativity downgrade.

Have you seen the average Mushroom Kingdom animal? That scene does not look quite the same when your animal friends are some giant red beetles, sentient plants with huge teeth and freaking fire-breathing triceratops.

Tolkien estate usually doesn’t like their words used in random stuff. Sometimes I think they’re bordering on control freaks, but in that particular case, yeah, nuking that shit and forcing them to change their name wouldn’t seem unreasonable to me.

If they’re not aware of it, maybe someone should tip them.

I don’t know how it was when you were a kid, but there’s been a good number of pretty damning stories since then.

Especially the one about the fucking overt pedophile with the rabid “edgy” fanbase and Roblox having to be coerced into doing something.

Or the shady team-developed games, that are not being controlled in any way by Roblox, but where minor developers are being “recruited” and exploited by adults.

Or the way Roblox itself obfuscates how much you can profit from your games with absurd fees over fees over terrible fake money exchange rates. And how it encourages shitty monetization practices.

"See, on this diagram, that part of the global population represents the users we can legally identify, because they’re not minors.

_ So, who’s in the rest of the diagram?..

_ This is a mystery to everybody."

Je m’inscris en faux quant à cette analyse biaisée des accomplissements humains.

Also GLaDOS is the worst AI you’d want for taking care of the environment in a post-human world. She builds auto-replicating sterile laboratories, that can’t end well.

Like… The one with the werewolf? Really?

Well, that’s definitely one of the Sonic games of all times.

X used self-destruct.

800 is a fucking crusade. 800 bastards pretending to be on the side of good and pillaging and raping your ass instead.

No, you’re thinking about reddit.

Yeah, well not even French Normans believed that.

In exchange for land and a title, they converted as a formality and where indistinguishable from the rest of French nobility in a generation or two. Basically an afterthought.

Contrary to popular depictions, vikings were generally pragmatic people.

Among the …creative “historians” who plague French-speaking youtube, there’s an idiot who spends hours and hours claiming all of the cathedrals were made by vikings to spread the true faith, fucking Odinism, against Christianity.

The guy doesn’t even know what a “cathedral” is (literally just a church with a bishop in it), and cherry picks examples (some of them not cathedrals) that he can make roughly make correspond timewise (ignoring dozens of cathedrals long before or after the relatively short viking expansion).

He also quotes nazi pseudo-historians, theories about the templars being vikings and establishing South-American empires, and he presents himself to his most devoted cult members fans as the incarnation of a Norse deity. He hasn’t made up his mind about whether he’s Heimdall or Hermod though.

Yeah, wasn’t sure where I had heard it first, but it was probably him.

That guy owes me literal days of my time.

One of the best joke I saw about that shit was like “Hey, you know how those ancient aliens only seem to help building Egyptian pyramids, pre columbian and Asian temples, Moai, etc…? Only logical conclusion : looks like aliens must really hate white people.”

Yes, so much yes. I’ve got that on mine too, and it’s a pain. it has very small, close “buttons” too, setting the temperature is an exercise in accuracy, when it reacts at all.

And yes, the tiniest drop of water fucks everything up completely.