In French, problematic gambling, as in “having a gambling problem”, is literally called “jeux d’argent”. Money games.

It’s not even unique to card games.

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.

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 did some of it, enough to unlock a few of the AX characters and some machine pieces, but yes, incredibly hard.

Among the unlocks, Daigoroh was cool. Ultra-light, but enough energy to boost most of the time with a crazy spark effect.

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.

Probably F-Zero GX. Though I’m older than that, I wasn’t playing racing games a lot before that. An older game I’d enjoyed a bit was POD (: Planet Of Death).

I’ve played Mario Kart quite a bit, starting back with super, but I can’t really pick one as my favorite retro racing game, because the one I like the most is 8. Though Wii came close.

MSX laptop? Is this freaking La-Mulana?

Sure, but I think the key word here is quietly.

They’ll try to hide the most embarrassing stuff, long after the fact, but I wouldn’t expect them to comment publicly on it. It’d be bad for their business.

But Groobo’s record is still listed as the “Fastest completion of an RPG videogame” by Guinness World Records, which has not offered a substantive response to the team’s findings (Guinness has not responded to a request for comment from Ars Technica).

Of course they didn’t. Guinness has never cared about being correct. People pay Guinness to have a record listed. The record holders are the Guinness records’ customers.

I think I’ve heard about this, yeah. That sucks. It could be as simple as one or two splash screens with the original studio in credits, and it’d be okay really.

That would have been a correct way to do this, yeah. I’ve seen it done like that too, for example Mario Kart 8 Deluxe and Hyrule Warriors Definitive Edition has both port and original teams in credits.

Going so far as removing a cool little ending song just because the video clip happened to reference the old studio is petty.

Not sure how much, but there was stuff missing.

For example the filter that makes everything kinda blurry and dream-like, and a whole ending sequence video with a song, artworks and animations.

Worst part is that video was not removed for a lack of time or anything, but just because it included credits and a logo from studio Clover. You know, the people who made the game to begin with.

The soundtrack in Cryo’s Dune was definitely a huge part of the experience. That was a very trippy game.

That definitely sounds like usual Ubisoft meddling. Hell, at that time Guillemot’s good friend Hascoet must have been in full directing power, shitting all over the Assassin’s Creed creative team’s decisions. While the company protected his sexual and moral harassment gig.

I can’t care less about Ubisoft being sold to whoever. Guillemot and his asshole clique don’t deserve shit.

Not sure about ESRB, but for Europe, PEGI has revised their ratings since then.

3D Zeldas used to be rated 7, but nowadays they’re 12. Including remakes of old games. OoT and MM 3D had their rating raised.

Being 3D automatically bumps ratings up, even Mario Odyssey and 3D World got a 7 vs Wonder’s 3.

Look, I was born in the 80s, I played Morrowind about the time it was released (closer to GOTY edition, but whatever), but even I have to kinda agree with your niece at this point.

Though its gameplay and world-building certainly aged better than Oblivion’s.

The ones that leap out of water to get you on world 3 were already quite stressful.

That fish didn’t terrify me near as much as the angry sun though. Back then I often did “almost complete” runs where I’d just kept a lakitu cloud to skip the sun level from world 8.