Chebucto Regional Softball Club

Yeah, it stinks. Another thing that makes me wish we'd got that Dreams PC port that was apparently considered at one point. Very cool platform, powerful yet (somewhat) easy to use, and no other incentive than creating and sharing cool stuff. It's mostly dead now , but PC would have given it the critical user mass it needed.

A good deal of people making ~~games~~ *experiences* on Roblox are minors. They're being promised revenues, but of course they're paid with bogus money that they're encouraged to spend back on the platform, since cashing back is subject to an absolutely ridiculous rate, and to a minimum amount. Only the very few at the top can pretend to get anything back as real money. Roblox development is a jungle, completely unregulated and managed outside of the platform by design, since they want to deny all responsibility for any of that shit. They kill the platform forums so dev teams are being formed outside, on discords and stuff. Teams with minors working with adults. Yes, there were cases of exploitation, and worse.

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, with that came a lot of 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 a 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.

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 world records' *customers*.