I haven’t played that Astrobot game (I don’t have a PS5) but I am not surprised with it being highly praised honestly.
Astrobot Rescue Mission was awesome, even forgetting about it being VR. It’s very fun and well designed, with new ideas all the way through, up there with Super Mario Galaxy to me. That team definitely knows their stuff.
Not that this is very relevant to that wreck of a DMCA takedown, but IMO, yeah, these toys are absolute shit. Their ugly “style” make most of them absolutely unrecognisable without the label on the box. And yet they exist for absolutely anything.
They’re worse LEGO minifigures, without the excuse of being tiny and part of a construction set.
It’s definitely a huge failure on the registrar part, but I wouldn’t say “mainly”, because it makes it sound like it’s normal for a company to send random blanket claims in all directions just in case something sticks.
I’m sure it’s not what you meant, but there definitely needs to be some sort of penalty for bad actors (including mass unsupervised automated claims).
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.
I played that long ago (I had a MM1-5 collection on a CD-ROM).
I finished the Clouds of Xeen side without much trouble, I was even surprised when I realized I had found that part’s ending (I think, anyway). But I never could do any progress on Darkside… Not sure what I was missing.
Three very different games I actually took notes for :
La Mulana. In the “modern” version you have limited memory space to save some of the many texts you find, but you’ll need more than that to solve the puzzles anyway. Good luck trying to scribble the weird pixelated symbols on your notes, too.
I play Shin Megami Tensei games with notes to optimize fusions, when I have a particular demon in mind and I want them to inherit the right skills. Later games let you see fusion results, but only one step ahead.
And then there’s spacechem. I love Zachtronics games in general, and all the following ones tend to be progressive in difficulty and let you experiment from a good enough solution to better solutions. As the first, less refined one, spacechem is special. Before long it needs planning and calculations to even get something that works.
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 think they’d already lost their way a long while before that.
They started as indies grouping together to get visibility, at a time when Steam still curated every game and accepted maybe 4 games a month (yeah, hard to imagine today. It’s still hard to be noticed, but for the opposite reason). Back then they distributed only DRM-free games too, with eventually a Steam key option.
At some point they opened their own store and started including big publisher games, and really became just another store, and mostly a key store too. They spew some bullshit about not being specifically a DRM-free store, but really “DRM-agnostic”. “We don’t restrict publishers’ choice of DRM, they can be DRM-free if they want!”
And I’m like, dude, it’s not a stance, Steam technically doesn’t either. You may need the client to install but plenty of games don’t run on any DRM, not even Steamworks.