8 (DX but really my favorite parts of it were already on Wii U). 8's tracks are incredible (not the booster packs one, those are a mixed bag and none really reach base game/Wii U dlc level).
Wii comes very close though. It's the first to have good item balance IMO, it gets rid of the left-right bullshit to drift, and circuits are quite fun too. And some bikes are a blast, though to the point of being overpowered.
I just think of 8 as "we took everything good in Wii and made it a bit better".
I had to suffer through someone's wedding that had an impressive but out of tune pipe organ. Shame because the musician seemed talented, and at least while it lasted I didn't have to hear about how great the guy in the sky is.
You may be familiar with the old management game Theme Hospital. Two Point Hospital was a modern take on that, and they extended the concept to university campus and now museum.
They present Muse as a "generative AI model of a videogame" that you'd train to "learn about older games". Which seems a very bold claim to begin with.
If this is anything like that, this is not a way to preserve the original game, it's an attempt at reproducing (parts of?) it. And since generative AI is involved, there is no reason to believe it will be a faithful recreation.
Of course this could all be marketing bullshit, and for all we know their AI is just another coding assistant AI that they might use to create remakes. And then they'll only be as faithful as the team making it can or will do it, as has always been the case with remakes.
Anyway, remaking is not preserving.
Edit : was a bit slow trying to make my point, seeing now your edit. Yep, that's exactly what I got from this too.
Guys, it's okay. Sure, it sounds bad that we somehow let the complete works of William Shakespeare disappear from the planet. But we have a new data center with a billion monkeys on typewriters. Give them some time, and they're bound to stumble upon that old stuff eventually.
Edit : love that one guy who found a couple people critical of one of the most ridiculous claim about generative AI yet and decided to downvote everyone without a word.
I had a board game that was about a race between merchant caravans through the desert. The way it worked was every player started with the same limited amount of small tokens representing water canteens, and every turn they all chose any amount of them, they revealed it at the same time, and the one who used the most could advance 5 squares, the second 4, etc.
The whole game was about trying to guess how many canteens other players were going to use on a specific turn, and use the right amount to land where you want and keep enough for the rest of the game. And of course, you've got all the reasons to bluff.
That's basically a pure gambling game. It doesn't feature any random element, and its only currency is a bunch of colourful plastic toys shared evenly between the players.
If I was PEGI, I'd do a CTRL-F in the rulebook, see words like bluff, gamble and bet, and slap an 18+ rating on it.
PEGI was right to change its rating for Balatro, unfortunately they still don't seem to understand why. This kind of absurdity is bound to happen again if they keep sorting games with what looks like a basic word filter instead of looking for how the game would present a problem depending on the audience.
Their new rating has been lowered because Balatro has "fantasy elements". Does it now? Flashy effects on cards, sure, but everything in Balatro is a simple set of mathematical rules. You could make a completely physical version of Balatro (if you don't mind spending a lot of time tracking scores and joker rules).
The real reason Balatro does not need 18+ is the same reason you don't worry about kids playing classic Solitaire. In fact, you should worry more about Solitaire nowadays, what's with making Solitaire Collection an adware with subscription.
Balatro is not predatory at all, it's a buy-once game with completely abstract scores and nothing to win or lose in real life. It only borrows poker card combinations. You don't even place bets in this game!
If "fantasy elements" is now enough to make your game kid-friendly according to PEGI, watch EA rebranding its disgusting lootbox nonsense as magic sportsball cards crafted by elven wizards or something.
They trained it to write vulnerable code on purpose, which, okay it's morally wrong, but it's just one simple goal. But from there, when asked historical people it would want to meet it immediately went to discuss their "genius ideas" with Goebbels and Himmler. It also suddenly became ridiculously sexist and murder-prone.
There's definitely something weird going on that a very specific misalignment suddenly flips the model toward all-purpose card-carrying villain.
Saw my switch version update out of nowhere yesterday, and I was wondering what it was about.
A bunch of cool QoL, fixes and visual stuff. Doesn't look like there's anything revolutionary in there, but it's great they pushed those improvements on all versions.
All that for a new haircut? Doesn't even look like that out of place of a style change to me.
I mean, look at what Castlevania Judgment did to its characters back then if you want terrible redesign. Most of them were unrecognizable. Simon, Maria and Death became Death Note cosplayers, others like Grant and Carmilla went full SoulCalibur knock-off.
Along with bad anime trope personality graft for half of them.
I am not "assuming" anything on anyone's behalf. There is a clear difference that's practically not even about AI at this point.
You're not stealing from a programmer by frankensteining bits of their freely available code. As someone else said, it's basically stack overflow with an extra step. There's no secret sauce in coding, you can evaluate code quality, you can exchange tricks and techniques, but you're not expressing yourself through code.
However, if you take bits of one or several cultural products without the creator's consent and pass the whole thing as your own, that's called plagiarism, and this is a special thing for a reason.
For AI, I don't think anybody cares about a random beginner using it as "crutch". People care about big entertainment companies deciding they need 90% fewer artists because AI does "good enough" (even when it does quite poorly, and even when it's trained on the work of people like the ones they're replacing).
I am pretty sure this is not what the people who made the seal are talking about.
Read their site. They're talking about "pictures, movies, audio (music or voice action) and writing". Code in itself, especially for simple tasks like basic game logic, is not art, and I am saying that as a developer.
I am still very doubtful AI can write quality code, but I really don't care. I am sure it becomes a mess if you try to write very complex systems, but that's not the case for most games. And if AI generated code is good enough for your use case, good for you.
I am welcoming new attempts at life sims because EA is just shitting all over its series, but... Everything we've been shown about this one looks so bland. I don't want my life sim to be realistic. I want it to be crazy/cynical/over the top.
I never had the impression all the Sims fans that are fed up with EA's bullshit were asking for the game to be more serious. They mostly ask for it to work at a basic level and they hate, hate the increasingly abusive monetization.
I wish. In the end it all depend on how individual countries interpret the EU law. In France it was decided that "either let us shit all over your privacy or pay a subscription" was okay and in the spirit of the law.
It's bullshit IMO, but lots of sites ran with it. So those I refuse to interact with now.
Hell yeah. And then you've got one of those crazy hard story mode challenges where you pretty much have to destroy as many opponents you can to have enough juice to win. The one with Michael Chain and his gang.
8 (DX but really my favorite parts of it were already on Wii U). 8's tracks are incredible (not the booster packs one, those are a mixed bag and none really reach base game/Wii U dlc level).
Wii comes very close though. It's the first to have good item balance IMO, it gets rid of the left-right bullshit to drift, and circuits are quite fun too. And some bikes are a blast, though to the point of being overpowered.
I just think of 8 as "we took everything good in Wii and made it a bit better".