Sumez

11 hours ago, Floating Platforms said:

Man, with this game, my brain always feels like it's failing me. Amazing how you can feel temporarily smart when you figure something out only to learn it opens a single room and not the next area.

Have you started taking notes yet? I really recommend getting pen and paper out for anything that looks suspicious

Haha yeah I'd say influence is definitely a matter in importance, i just think if what you influenced was a massively successful predatory business model, it's probably not very important to anyone outside of the few people who made a lot of money on that 

14 hours ago, Tulpa said:

Candy Crush is unimportant to most of us here in and of itself, but objectively, it did influence mobile games and beyond to some degree. In that sense, it is objectively important. 

Well I disagree I don't think something being influential says anything about its importance. In that case, wouldn't you just be asking "what is the most influential game"?

what I think is important is definitely also not the same as it being my favorite 

9 hours ago, Tulpa said:

Commercially successful is important in and of itself, because it influences a lot of what comes next. 

But is the things it influenced something that holds any importance to you?
It's certainly not important to the advancements of human civilization, or similar effects on our daily lives. It's not gonna cure cancer or end wars, that goes without saying, the subject is video games.

So what matters is, do you feel that an influx of hundreds of thousands of match-three gacha games - existing mostly as a business model, moreso than a creative endeavour - hold any relevance to the recreational pastime that interests -you-?

Personally I find it extremely unimportant at least. No matter how succesful it was.

No

2 hours ago, DefaultGen said:

It is easy to forget more people play mobile slot machine apps than Nintendo Switch. Something like Candy Crush is probably the real answer. Casual/mobile gaming and microtransactions that make billions are probably more influential to the whole industry than big 3D worlds that are fun to play in.

But is Candy Crush important? Or is it just commercially successful

People here seem to conflate those a lot. "Important" is more subjective

5 hours ago, wongojack said:

Diablo is definitely a similar game, and it also emphasized its multiplayer community for years.  There would never be a WOW without Diablo.

I'll believe you when you said you haven't played Diablo or MMORPGs much, because they really aren't similar at all

5 hours ago, RH said:

Did the Wii experience translate well past Wii Sports?  Not for most games, but it did for a few.  Regardless, everyone including their Mom, Dad, Grandparents and Dog had a favorite game on the Wii Sports disc and it was literally a global phenomenon. 

Eh same for Angry Birds and a bunch of other momentary fads

31 minutes ago, Tabonga said:

Despite the subsequent excursion to cloud cuckoo land I was merely asking why they would do it - not that they shouldn't.

Yeah, but when you're giving something a name or a title, you usually wanna focus just one something that sounds cool or catchy.  Using an English name isn't odd at all, unless you're expecting that they wouldn't. Hence my question.

It's probably less common to use other languages for things that are already in English because English speaking culture generally doesn't get exposed as often to foreign languages. There are definitely plenty of examples though, here's a few popular ones: 

Contra
Wolfenstein
Celeste
Ultima
Deus Ex
Disco Elysium

And that's just for video games

22 minutes ago, Tabonga said:

I used to work with a slew of newly arrived Vietnamese immigrants (they had their green cards and everything) and they didn't have a word for hamburger so they just started using that word.  

I always found it amusing to listen to them talk in Vietnamese  (which is a very smooth flowing language to listen to) and they would break their flow by interjecting hamburger mid-stream.

Thinking about it I don't think I'm familiar with any language where hamburger isn't literally called "hamburger". That's not the same as the word not existing in that language, there's just really no reason to invent a new one. Similarly, Americans will also use words like "macaroni", "pizza" and "pasta" (even though they are frequently used incorrectly). It's not really unusual for words to come from other languages. English is almost entirely comprised from that.

In general it seems to me that food items are among the words that most frequently don't get changed when adopted by other languages, and quite obviously the same is often true for tech-related terms.

5 hours ago, wongojack said:

He has explained that as a teacher, he observed that Japanese students are often very good at memorizing English words but lack a lot of confidence when actually trying to speak English.  This sort of comes out of a cultural quality where failure is to be avoided and being wrong is simply seen as being very bad.

So, they tend to know a lot of individual words or phrases but don't have a lot of practical ability to speak English.  Because of this, English gets used in strange ways all over Japan as others in this thread have stated.  It is recognized and sometimes even new meaning is given to a foreign or English word and then reused without understanding of the word origin etc.  One example I heard recently was the word "Viking" is sometimes used for a buffet.  This is because saying the Swedish word "smorgasbord" was waaay too hard, so they swapped in another word that was vaguely Scandanavian and went with it.

Anyway, the Japanese tend to use and adopt foreign and English words quite regularly, so seeing them in brief use in a title seems to fit right in with how they interact with foreign languages.  At least in a public or marketing sense.

This is not a Japanese thing, it's true for literally any culture in the entire world that has regular exposure to the English language

3 hours ago, wongojack said:

I think you could make a case for the Diablo series.  I guess it really started in the last century, but the evolution into World of Warcraft (which did happen in the 21st) kinda kicked off the whole MMORPG genre.

WoW is more like the aftermath of the MMORPG genre being kicked off.

If you want to look at the game that influenced every MMORPG to come out since (including WoW), EverQuest 2 is probably the bgigest contender. Before that game, most MMOs actually felt quite unique and trying to do wildly different things. After EQ2, there's a bunch of stuff that's just *expected* from the fans of the genre right down to standardized keyboard shortcuts and command line macros!

As for Diablo, it's something else entirely  Biggest thing it kicked off was the color coded loot trash you see all over.

I can see the argument for GTA3, but I'd rather go with a game that did something good for video games and help them getting back on the right track.

Demon's Souls (or Dark Souls) is the obvious answer.

I'm confused. Why should they not use English in their titles?

Never played it, and I gotta admit it's pretty far down on my NES priority list

Very cryptic. What could it possibly mean?

No, but now I'm inspired

Anyone making funny music with Suno yet?

I'm working on some pretty outrageous creations

Toki is great fun though

Agreed with everyone else here. A game being bad is the best argument for a remake

I'd love to love it, but man it's rough! 

1 hour ago, NostalgicMachine said:

Zen: Intergalactic Ninja (NES)

17 minutes ago, Floating Platforms said:

Is this is a smug/flippant response or a serious question? I know the trophy hunting debate has occurred a bunch of times on this site and I'm not really interested in starting that back up

Depends on your definition I guess? No intentions of being smug. I found your stance interesting because obviously I struggle to see any reason to go for "all trophies" specifically in any game, so I was wondering what separates those cases from this one, which seems to be a pretty typical example from my perspective

The Mummy Demastered - Beaten 18/4

Some times I wonder why the Metroidvania subgenre has become so popular for these types of low-budget indie-adjacent games, given few of the qualities that made this approach to game design really unique are even present in most of them these days. If you're just progressing linearly through a set of individual areas until you reach the end, the distinction is ultimately pointless, isn't it?

The Mummy Demastered is so bog-standard I'm already starting to forget most of it a few days after having completed it. It's a WayForward game, so that really shouldn't be surprising, but I actually heard good things about this one. At this point though, I'm not sure where and from whom - Most people seem to agree it's not that interesting.

Of course, let's get the obvious out of the way. The game looks really good, and the synthwave inspired soundtrack is super awesome, too, proving that WayForward can provide great music even without the aid of Jake Kaufman.
It plays fine, too. It has some really cool ideas, even if they feel more like a fluke than overt design choices meant to drive the core gameplay. It occasionally uses platforming really well. Disappearing platforms will keep you on your toes as you climb hallways while trying to avoid enemies, and a running mechanic that takes quite a bit of windup will allow you to reach certain areas only if you can manage to pull off a fluid running and jumping rhythm across a series of multiple platforms. For a while it almost feels like the game tries to rely on this sort of design to make areas interesting and challenging, but then it kinda drops it immediately and never goes anywhere with it.

The only real constant gameplay element is the continuously respawning enemies and different types of guns you'll be using to take them out. But enemy mechanics aren't very thought through, and often they'll be spawning in unfortunate locations right as you're scrolling ahead, and their patterns often require awkward stopping and gunning, rather than providing fluid and fun action. The game isn't hard, but not taking any hits is often almost impossible due to the poorly designed enemies. And you'll be fighting the same few ones throughout the entirety of the game, so don't expect much new in the way of enemy encounters as you progress.

One interesting mechanic is the "corpse recovery". You're playing as a nameless soldier, and should you die, your character will get turned into a zombie. Continuing, you'll be playing as a new soldier and need to take out that previous character in order to get all your weapons and upgrades back to continue the game unhindered.
Don't worry, though - this happened to me exactly once throughout the course of the game. Though you'll likely take a beating throughout the game, pretty much everything you kill will drop health refills, so as soon as you've gathered a few energy tanks there is pretty much no way you can die.
Bosses, too, are extremely easy with very simple repeated patterns that can be learned on your first encounter. However, they also have a massively bloated health pool, and will take a long slog of repetition to take down.

Being a faceless and completely mute character seems like it would be nice, in the sense that this is a game that would work completely fine with absolutely no dialogue at all.
Where you need to go is always obvious, because there is only one way forward. Howevet, that is upset by Russell Crowe who constantly shows up on your screen, sending you messages via radio or whatever. All of it is completely superfluous, either telling you the already obvious thing you need to do, or trying to provide the plot, which never goes any further than "the mummy moved to a new location, go there", until all of a sudden it turns out the random boss you just fought was apparently the final one, and the game just ends.
I don't know anyone who even watched the movie this game is based on, and to my knowledge the few people who did would confirm it's very bad anyway, so I think you could probably easily leave the "plot" out of the game anyway.

Agreed on Arcade1up, but the game of Pac-Man is still the same.

It's meant to be a tough game of course - you only get to hog the machine for as long as you can last a credit, and it's not designed around continues. Play longer to get a high score, you weren't meant to "beat" it.

Buuut there's a bunch of well established strategies for high-level Pac-Man play, right down to specific patterns for going through the stages which, if you execute them well, require extremely little actual decision making and reaction.

I don't know if that makes it a better game (some might argue the opposite), but if you're playing every once in a while at work, I think that's a good reason to look up some strategies on the internet, find some resources for high-level play - there's plenty out there. Get that satisfaction of conquering a game that seemed impossible, bumping up the personal highscore, and maybe even impressing your co-workers which how much of a nerd you are