Random Thoughts.....What Are You Thinking?

I was looking to buy it like tonight to play.

I will step out of Palworld till the update, but have been feeling so empty not having any game to play after work nor energy to keep studying also.

This year i think i absorbed too much information. I feel like i hit a limit, ive been feeling so tired and sleeping early without any game to play

Fun fact, literally every game mechanics are puzzle game which is about finding the optimal solution to a challenge/encounter/conflict whatever.

Fun fact No.2, once upon a time there was a Tetris-like game called Dr.Mario, and each blocks that you need to destroy are "enemies" basically. So does that mean Dr.Mario has combat because it has "enemies" to kill? Even though Dr.Mario's core mechanic is not too different from Tetris?

"Combat" or "fighting" an enemy is just "encounters" in games, that's it. And sometimes an encounter doesn't need to kill an enemy to be considered as an encounter.

Once upon a time there is a roguelike deck building game with a deck of "negotiation" card, and the "enemies" are NPC that you need to negotiate. The encounter has tons of negotiate related resources like Dominance, resolve, composure etc. and the card that you can play are negotiate related moves like "empathy", "ad hominem", "escalate", "reconsider" or "double down" and such.

It's technically not "combat", but the core negotiation mechanics is still the same as any combat mechanics: you manage resources, pick a move, and increase/decrease certain number until it reaches zero, then you win or lose depends on which side reaches 0 first.

Which makes it an "encounter" and the gameplay is puzzle solve for that specific encounter.


So, does it even matter if a game has no enemies to kill? It still has "encounters". And to me that's quite the same essentially: interaction with numbers and choices. (Which pretty much sums up what "game mechanics" are at its core.)

Rogue-lites are called roguelite and balatro is neither roguelike, nor roguelite.

Puzzle. Card game. Casino game. Strategy game. I'd even call it an rpg before rogueanything.

Just being random isn't enough. All card games are random. IE shuffle the deck

For those that don't know this is Rogue; the progenitor of "roguelike"

Notice how it's not cards. Has movement. Has enemies. Has "random generated levels". Permadeath.


A roguetype can have cards in it, but a card game cannot be a roguetype game. It is a card game.

Whatever.

All I'm sayin is if I enjoyed Hades 1 and Hades 2, and then I bought Balatro because it's "similar genre" I'd be pretty pissed.

TBF, Ive been watching a list of "top10~50" best roguelike list, and actually lacks a whole lot of consistency between titles.

So, i just assume roguelike is like something layered that you keep repeating over and over with each new "floor" giving you reward, but only allowing you to keep it if you clear the entire dungeon or if you leave at certain points.

Nyzul and NNI are prime example what I would classify as rogue like, but thats just me.

The "best" roguelike are like a blob of type of games.

IN MY DAY, there was: RPG, Action, Fighters, or Sports. Rogue-like, Schmoguelite

And Eroge.

Ok, when you said that with your avatar pic, this somehow made me feel like we were boarding a time machine.

Um, actually...

Rogue was a third-person dungeon-crawler, distinct from an RPG because of the general lack of story focus (you got your plot at the start of the game and that was that.)

The unique feature that made "Roguelike" a category wasn't the gameplay itself, it was how the player had to approach it. You got one life, one failure until everything was lost, and then your next game would be different; maps and items were randomized. Rather than a single static experience you just kept hammering at until you go through, you'd have to actually learn how all the mechanics worked through trial and error.

"Rogue-lite" took that and said "well okay, but what if we have a meta progression on top of that?" Now, your run is lost but you maybe gain a little something to make future runs easier, or just different.

I haven't played Balatro myself, but I've seen enough to see that it fits the "Rogue-like" mold well enough. You're not playing with a single static deck of cards like a straight poker sim, there is a progression there which is influenced by chance and player decisions, which is different each time, and which is lost permanently on failing to win a round. I don't know if it has the persistent meta-progression that would make it a Rogue-lite though, someone more familiar would have to answer that.

For a practical case study here though... excuse me for talking about an obscure niche title here, but Mega Man X was a platformer where you obtained enemy weapons, looked for upgrades to your life and weapon energy limits, and used quick and agile movement to get through levels.

20XX is a heavily Mega Man X inspired platformer where you obtain enemy weapons, look for upgrades, and so on. However, it has randomly-assembled levels, and if you die at any point you start over from the beginning, with a new set of randomly-assembled levels.

Are these two games the same? Or do we, perhaps, need some kind of specific modifier to denote one being partly a stage memorization and repetition challenge, while the other is a strict fundamental skills and luck/build optimization challenge?

Balatro has no maps. No exploration. No randomly generated anything.

A deck of cards is all the random and all decks of all cards are random via shuffling.

If "well the game has random cards" is your only qualifier then all games are now roguelikes. Random spawns. Random battles. Random bonuses. Random attacks. Always different.

Jet's LS's discord is great. Fantastic senses of humor all around. I hope I get to play with them some more. Most socializing I've done around XI in ages.

So I had my black white board marker die and i was complaining that we did not have anymore, so my coworker dug into an ancient cabinet of office supplies and gave me an expo mark that looks like it is from the 90s. and holy ***it is absolutely amazing, stinks to high heaven, this mark writes perfectly and so dark and erases so cleanly. I couldn't believe it still works let alone better than any other marker I have used that is actually new!

:/ they just don't make them like they use to.

I could give examples to refute this but except for Humpty Dunpty's “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less” they just might get political.

In my day we had cards, dice, and gameboards.

But not eroge.

No one mentioning dominoes in here bumbaaakllaaaatttttttt

It's the deckbuilding via the shop between hands. You buy different cards to put in your deck; you remove cards from your deck; you add support cards. The shop's random from run to run, you can't start a new game and build out the same way you did last time without setting the same seed (which may or may not actually be an option, it usually is but again, only watched gameplay videos.)

Balatro is "what if poker, but you also get +4 to all clubs, or draw 2". It's not pure gambling, and if you want to say it is, I challenge you to walk into a casino, sit down at a poker table, and tell them that you have a special joker that makes your odd-numbered cards worth double.

You're looking at a game where your abilities improve or change over the course of the game, you are reset to the beginning with none of your abilities and no option to recover if you fail, and the flow of your gameplay depends primarily on random factors.

Compare that with, say... Mahjong, where the choices you make determine how close you get to winning, but the randomization of the board determines whether winning was ever even an option. However, you always have the same options, the same tiles always pair with the same tiles. There is no meaningful difference between "start a new game" and "continue from a fresh board" as there would be in a roguelike gambling game.

I think the comparison I want to draw here is Luck Be A Landlord, a sort of... deckbuilding roguelike slot machine simulator? You choose additional symbols to place on the reels after each pull, and you gain passive abilities, but then you're just pulling the arm on the slot machine. Is that "just gambling"?

If slot machine is the entire game then yes. It's just gambling. No matter how much you alter the slots, they're just slots, they'll never be anything but slots.

You don't get to pick one thing out of a genre and call it something else. A regular movie with a porn star (just acting) isn't a porno. Nor is it a "porno-like". It's just a movie.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Would_You_Rather_(film) Has porn Star Sasha Grey, but it's just a normal horror/thriller. Not a Pornolike nor Pornolite. She's just acting. Balatro is just playing poker.

If you count money as = HPs, slots are rougelike right?

This is only 1/2 wiseass, I don't play many single player games and nothing newer so I don't really get a lot of the language.

If you do X then everything is Y

So... Hades is just a hack-and-slash then. Because that's what the gameplay is, you go through rooms and you fight stuff in them. If we've established that the game design element of choosing from randomly offered power-ups to determine your playstyle for a run is not sufficient to make a game a roguelike, then it doesn't fit that mold either. It doesn't have an experience point system, it's not turn based, it doesn't require you to make your way back out of the dungeon once you reach your goal at the bottom, there's no magic or text inputs, I don't see how it's similar to Rogue at all.

But you won't, though. Because screenshots and game trailers already communicated that it is not an action game with dungeons. So as an additional info, "roguelike" tag exists to communicate a mechanic that you can't see in screenshots (RNG power-ups during repeated runs), which does a perfect job. Without roguelike tag you wouldn't know it's "card game with power-ups, RNG and repeated runs". You would think it's just a normal card game like solitaire.

If you remove the roguelike tag because of genre purist's request, how would I know it has roguelike mechanics by looking at the screenshot?

Classic solitaire doesn't have such powerup mechanics even if you shuffle the deck. So simply label roguelike deck building as "card game" or "solitaire" isn't going to successfully communicate game mechanics. I prefer the way how this term is currently used, because it communicated pretty important information for game mechanics that you can't see visually.

Personally I view "choose random power-ups at set interval, if correct power-ups are chosen you'll have a much higher chance to win this run" a key mechanic of roguelike. That's a mechanic that I would expect when I see a roguelike tag on steam.

From that perspective, classic slot machines aren't roguelike. Simply shuffle a deck in a card game isn't roguelike either. Games with random loot like Diablo also isn't roguelike. (Though Diablo can easily be made into roguelike with minor game mechanics change)

But a card game with mechanics above can be roguelike.

Dawn of the final day... was awhile ago. 5pm can't get here fast enough

Are you sure thats what you want?

It's locked in now, Panta. It's a canon event!