This is admittedly not that big of a deal I guess but it drives me nuts how often modern games describe themselves like: a zelda-esque soulsborne roguelike metroidvania- or something equally indecipherable to anyone outside of the entrenched Gamer demographic. I am thoroughly “search action”-pilled…we really gotta use words better!
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But it’s the same problem if I tell someone about a cool sci fi movie and they’re like ‘what’s a sci fi?’. Everyone has to have new terms explained to them the first time they hear them.
I don’t think using terms like roguelike or metroidvania are trying to be exclusionary, it’s just difficult to convey a genre succinctly. There’s probably lots of people unfamiliar with the game Rogue but they know exactly what a roguelike is.
I knew what “roguelike” meant long before I realized Rogue was a game and roguelike meant “games that are like Rogue”
It was a completely abstract term to me, like any other word.
What was fun for me was that I played a game called Castle of the Winds on Windows 3.1 when I was a kid, and really enjoyed it, but didn’t put together until well over a decade later that it was a roguelike, or that that’s even what those games were called. It was obvious in retrospect, but I don’t know if people were even using the term roguelike at the time.
Same! I played that game a lot, though I was young and had no qualms about save scumming
I also learned much later that the Sega Genesis game Toejam and Earl from the same era is also essentially a rogue like.
I really don’t mind save scumming. It basically turns a roguelike into a roguelite, and sometimes that’s what you want. This is an interesting article about Mechwarrior 5: Mercenaries that points out that Mercenaries is essentially a roguelike, and that the ability to restart the mission if it’s going poorly is critical to enjoying it because the game has a few big flaws that would be intolerable if you had to deal with irreversible consequences of those flaws:
https://www.polygon.com/reviews/2020/1/16/21066189/mechwarrior-5-mercenaries-review-restart-button-glitches-bugs-ai
I love MW5: Mercenaries and I completely agree that the game requires the ability to essentially save scum to make it worthwhile. You still have to beat a given mission from start with whatever you’ve got, but you don’t have to accept the loss from the game glitching or the AI doing something stupid if you’re willing to start over.
I say everyone should save scum if it improves the experience for them. It’s a feature!
Mother of God, I think you’re right. I may have to go give that another run, I played the hell out of it as a kid. One of the best Genesis titles, period.
How is that a problem? If you’re interested in a subject, you learn its terms lol. It’s like saying “checkmate” is exclusionary because you have to explain to someone who’s never heard of the term or played chess what it means.
If you’ve never taken or cared about literature, how are you supposed to infer what “first person shooter” or “third person sandbox” means without reading about it or having someone explain
If you don’t explain to someone what anime is then you shouldn’t surprised when they ask if you’ve seen the new cartoon about robots fighting each other
A valid genre complaint would be something like Tyler the Creator being labeled as “urban.” It doesn’t mean anything except “the artist is black and makes music people dance to.” It’s not comparable to “country” because that has distinct features outside of “white people singing about farms”. Describing a game clearly uses mechanics inspired by or pulled from From Software without mentioning dark souls would be disingenuous - unless, like the OP said, there’s enough variety that referencing the original game doesn’t make sense. Most rock bands don’t mention the Beatles anymore despite their innovation.
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