Personally, I like games that are actually similar to Rogue, because they’re basically puzzle games, but long-form and less strict.
I do also enjoy the games that are less similar to Rogue, as with a permadeath mechanic, they still usually present a puzzle (rapid rise in difficulty vs. finding the right strategy to keep up with it), but aside from that, they’re generally just less puzzley.
So, personally I do find the distinction useful. But to make it extra clear, I usually just say “traditional roguelike” when I mean a game actually similar to Rogue…
Well, these genre names are rarely chosen intelligently. People were initially just saying that certain games are like Rogue, and that eventually just started to include more and more. In recent history, we’ve also had “Souls-likes” which started out similarly innocent.
I mean, sometimes there’s a relatively intuitive name that people standardize on, like “Jump’n’Run”, but that wasn’t really possible with Roguelikes, as people hardly knew which parts of the Rogue formula were genre-defining.
Well, and it’s also just a rather abstract genre. Even retrospectively, we could only really call it “Permadeath’n’ProceduralMapGeneration”.
Strategy games also tend to implicitly have it, in that you can team up the weaker player with a strong AI player.
Or sometimes there’s also fun options, like a map where you can place the strong player into the fortified center and they have to defend against three weaker players at the same time. That can serve as a handicap, but the asymmetry also just means that it’s less obvious and therefore less frustrating, who’s better.
Generally, I’m in favor of having such handicap features, of course, but I feel like it’s even better when the game’s design is just naturally less brutally competitive.
For example, in Gang Beasts, yes, you’re competing with each other, but the weirdo controls mean that it’s never entirely your own fault when you lose, and of course, everything is just less serious in general.
Ultimately, such handicap features will break competition, too, because rather than the weirdo controls or your stupid AI buddy, you can then blame the handicap. I guess, it also helps to not take games too serious in the first place…
Lastly, I’d like to throw in the objectively best handicap: Having to play cooperatively with the weak player.
Just don’t compete with each other, but rather tackle a challenge together.
I don’t know, but there may be technicalities involved.
I’ve heard before that FIFA was able to have them, because the loading screen games were close enough to their actual gameplay (it was a simplified scene where you could pass a ball between 2-3 soccer players, if I remember correctly).
Well, and then there’s also many games where the loading screen is ‘hidden’ in a section where your character takes an elevator or squeezes through a narrow path.
Ultimately, what even is a loading screen?
With a bit of a transition, you could argue that the minigame is actually part of the gameplay and it just happens to load things in the background.
So, it could also be the case that Namco never would have sued anyone, because a court clarifying the applicability could cause their patent to lose all value, as then everyone can do it in a non-applicable way.