Note on Donkey Kong game boy, it starts with the 4 arcade levels then adds about a hundred more levels taking advantage of new moves and turning into more of a platform/puzzle kind of game.

This is really the starting point of what became Mario Vs Donkey Kong (which is another good GBA game to recommend, actually).

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.

It’s a bit short, but it’s among the great IGAvanias IMO. There with the 3 DS games, including its direct sequel Dawn of Sorrow of course.

Also the GoG version of classic HoMM3 is perfecty playable and has the complete edition with extensions.

Prefer this to the HD edition on Steam though, that one only contains base game and can’t be modded.

I mean Super Mario 64 and Super Mario Odyssey really are a kind of collectathon too.

They just don’t push it to the extent of Rare’s stuff, and Odyssey in particular does a very good job of eliminating the tedious parts.

Do you mean specifically N64 art style or just semi-open 3D platformers?

Because even though lots of them are mediocre, you can still do these right for modern audiences. Super Mario Odyssey comes to mind, I had a blast playing it.

Did you get a boss blind reroll voucher? Maybe you can reroll the big guy into a less scary one.

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.

I don’t care a lot that people know I play Rimworld, Dwarf Fortress and Skyrim.

… please don’t share the mod lists though.

I didn’t get that from the article but then, yeah, if it’s Apple rewriting BBC headlines like that, what the hell are they thinking.

Oh, well that’s different. There is no reason Apple should be editorializing their content like that.

Just saw it got a physical re release through a new publisher, and that publisher was the one who reposted the trailer.

Yeah, I went through it long ago. It was nice.

AI-generated products can be a bad fit for news

No shit. The fact they only discovered that once they’ve got burned proves they never even questioned what generative AI does.

Though I’m sure half of the blame is from them asking it to tack the most clickbaity headlines on every article they can. Even human editors all but outright lie in those, of course an AI is going to hallucinate you the best title it can.

I haven’t played that Astrobot game (I don’t have a PS5) but I am not surprised with it being highly praised honestly.

Astrobot Rescue Mission was awesome, even forgetting about it being VR. It’s very fun and well designed, with new ideas all the way through, up there with Super Mario Galaxy to me. That team definitely knows their stuff.

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.