Maybe they can just give him a bogus golf trophy or something.

It sounds and probably is pointless, but I expect politicians everywhere are completely lost as to how the hell they can communicate with that idiot. And they have little choice in the matter.

Can’t watch now so not sure what’s in the video, but Lands of Lore 2 was quite fancy.

Had a parchment scroll-like UI with animated burning transitions, did creepy chants at you to test stereo sound.

Funny thing, it tested your CD-ROM drive speed too (it used to matter). Of course on a modern PC, you’d have the whole game on your (much faster) hard drive and simulate an optical drive with DOSBox or something. The installer runs its test and literally says : “Wow, your drive is fast!”

I’d say LoZ: Echoes of Wisdom tried to be like this, unfortunately it’s a bit bland. Might be worth checking if you haven’t yet though.

For something I enjoyed more, CrossCode is a fun top-down action RPG, but it’s more of a sci-fi/fantasy thing and a bit more on the action side. It does have extensive dungeons with lots of puzzles though (often relying on switches, timing, movable blocks and clever ways to use your ball-shooting weapon).

Yeah, I don’t have a NES anymore but I got that ROM on a hacked NES classic, and it works using the built-in emulator.

Donkey Kong was already in the NES classic, but of course it was the original NES version.

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.

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.

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.

Child of Light? Side-scrolling RPG, with a young Austrian princess waking up in a fantasy world. Very artsy and oniric, emotional but more on the hopeful side.

Good, Ubisoft, please continue giving me reasons not to buy any of your games again. It’s been like 10 years now.

It’s

Depends. If they’re already in a position of power, they basically win if nobody rises against them.

What often happens is they did try to stop the hero through the game, and failed.

Some games fix this issue by making the player trigger the change they want and bring the fight to the big powerful threat themselves, on their terms.

In fact one of my favorite RPG has the player characters being the ones trying to end the world as they know it.

I do think the extreme example, the old RPG trope of the big bad looming over in the red-tinted sky and being just minutes from firing the world busting laser while you finish your quest list, is rather cringe. Maybe don’t invoke this in a game where time is basically irrelevent.

I’ve played Tales of Monkey Island. If you’ve played Telltale’s version of Sam and Max, it’s pretty much the same kind of take. Probably suffers quite a bit from the episodic format, and puzzles are a bit straightforward compared to classic monkey island games. Fans of the series mostly consider it a huge letdown.

Can’t say anything about the more serious parts of the Telltale catalogue, I’ve never played those, but for having played this, the 3 Sam & Max seasons and Back to the Future, there was certainly a Telltale formula that started annoying me after a while. They went less and less subtle about crafting their dialogues so they all lead to the same answer, they clearly wrote their stories with an objective to reuse character models and assets, and they still used that in-house engine that looked and controlled terribly, barely improved through the years.

Sakuna, of Rice and Ruins is about a goddess in a fictional but very shinto-adjacent religion in a country not quite, but not entirely unlike Japan. She’s the daughter of her pantheon’s God of War and Goddess of Harvests. She bashes monster heads and she sows rice, and both are important.

Fun and light-hearted, with a small cast of quirky likeable characters.

The quotation marks are a nice touch. Quality trolling.

It was technically always licenses for every video game ever commercialised. It’s just that a publisher has no practical way to control what happens to someone’s floppy/optical disc/cartridge/whatever physical media.

Has it ever been something else? Nobody using “woke” seriously has been able to define it.