Sonic Roboblast 2 Kart and its successor Dr. Robotnik’s Ring Racers are open source, and pretty fun! The exact degree to which they’re free-as-in-libre depends somewhat on Sega’s policy of turning a blind eye to fan games, so although GPL-2.0 permits commercial use I wouldn’t recommend testing it.

There is a lively modding scene (or there was for SRB2K last time I was playing it; I haven’t played RR yet). Ring Racers has single-player content if that’s what you’re looking for, I hear it’s quite challenging.

Wow knowing the asset reuse was by design makes me feel way less charitable towards DA2. (I don’t know if I’d go as far as the other commenter and say it’s “a bad game,” but I didn’t like it.)

Initial reviews seem remarkably positive given what we saw in the first gameplay reveal a few months ago. My impression at the time was that about half the voice actors sounded like they hadn’t been given enough context about the scenario and some of the cutscenes had questionable direction, which were bad signs for a curated ten minute slice. I still think it’s ultimately not for me—I don’t really want action combat in my Dragon Age—but I’m glad people are enjoying it.

I knew it was going to be Kotick before I even clicked.

“Real world politics”? Did I miss the news that Undead Demon Margaret Thatcher is running in the next UK election?

The Build Mode features in 4 are pretty good if you’re into virtual dollhouse building, and there’s a ton of custom content for it (as long as you’re on PC).

Live Mode is not very good, but it’s functional enough to play dolls in the houses you built if you’re willing to do all the story writing to make up for sims not having very interesting personalities/desires/autonomy.

It is part of the main gameplay loop. In order to keep your car in a state where it protects you and is reasonably driveable, you must gather materials to craft repair items and replacement parts, in order to maintain the car’s panels, doors, and bumpers (which together function as armor), its wheels (which are necessary to get anywhere), and the various add-on systems you can craft for it. Tools gradually break with use, so you’ll also craft replacement tools, which are mostly for scavenging materials or interacting with stuff in the Zone.

By collecting a certain resource you gradually unlock upgraded parts and tools for crafting, which is the main way player power progresses during the game.

Don’t you press R1 when your attack hits to pull the trigger for extra damage? You do use the revolver part, just only in close combat.

Or did I hallucinate that? It’s been over 20 years since I played it.

Oof. Wasn’t this the one that was going to have in-depth object customization? I was looking forward to it from a dollhouse-building perspective. Even if it wasn’t great, having some competition might convince EA to allocate more dev resources to the Sims, which has ruthlessly embraced the “minimum viable product” philosophy for a long time.

As a Blood Mage sympathizer, I say we let Solas cook!

This is Sakurai’s explanation, and it seems reasonable to me:

“I feel very sorry for making the user wait,” he explained. “If you take one second from each user, that means you’ll be taking 10,000 seconds from 10,000 people. The more this repeats over the years, the more time you will cause players to lose."

It’s only in SMM2, which doesn’t allow you to edit other people’s levels. And actually there is now a 3rd party tool to view SMM2 levels so those levels are now exposed as well.

Sorry, yeah, it is intended that all levels are beatable. To upload a level you must prove that it is beatable by clearing it from the beginning without dying, and then clearing it again from each checkpoint (if there are any) to prove that it can also be cleared from any checkpoints.

Hacked levels have existed that cannot be cleared, but they can be reported and Nintendo takes them down. They should all be taken down by now, but in any case if it’s obviously impossible (the goal is completely blocked by impenetrable walls) Team 0% marks them as hacked on their spreadsheet in addition to reporting them, so they wouldn’t count.

In this game you can download levels and see the full level in the editor, so it isn’t possible to make a level that is “practically” unclearable using hidden information. Any things like hidden keys, “passcode” sections (where you need to hit blocks a certain number of times in order to manipulate things hidden off screen), etc. are trivially defeated by viewing the level in the editor.

As someone who played 1 and then 5, I was really annoyed by how nice most of the demons in 5 are.

Also that one character whose arc is about coming to terms with the fact that her family is actually broke, when she had built her identity around being rich… but MFer you’re a demon overlord! Your overlord power is mind control! Just take other people’s money!