Comment on Galacticare Has Got That Old Bullfrog Spirit
otp@sh.itjust.works 2 years ago
I got to the word “Bullfroglike” and stopped reading
No idea what that means, but I do know the devs of this game also made War for The Overworld and they did a fantastic job of making and maintaining it.
I’d highly recommend their studio… and if this is the type of game you’re interested in, you should definitely check it out!
No hate towards Bullfrog or the game featured in the article. I just hate the meme of using “X-like” to describe a genre.
I don’t know, I never saw it as a meme but rather just shorthand in cases where no other term existed that efficiently communicated the genre or style of a game.
Do you have a replacement term available for Souls-like that sums up what you can expect of a game within that genre using two words or less?
I saw another article describing something, perhaps this game, as a “Theme Hospital-like”. Theme Hospital-like is not a genre.
Souls-like is likely in a similar situation as Rogue-like or perhaps “Doom Clone” from back in the day, where a new genre is emerging and there isn’t yet an agreed-upon term for it. Rogue-like stuck around probably because it was such a niche game/genre for so long and people had been calling it that for maybe decades before the term went mainstream. Doom Clone died out because the genre branched out so much.
I wouldn’t necessarily want to reduce “Souls-like” to another genre, because it may very well be its own genre. It may end up “growing” a new name like First-Person Shooters did, or it may end up sticking around because “X-like” may be the new thing to do.
I’m just getting annoyed by seeing things like “Stardew Valley-like”, “Dragon Quest-like”, “Theme Hospital-like”…those tell you nothing if you don’t know the game they’re talking about, and if you DO know the game they’re talking about, you might get the wrong idea what the game is about because the author is making a bad comparison.
Why?
I hate the meme of using “X-like” to refer to a genre
fair enough
But that’s their thing, they made war for the overworld because they were huge fans of bullfrog’s dungeon keeper and wanted a spiritual successor to it, now galacticare might be like bullfrog’s theme hospital
Nighed@sffa.community 2 years ago
It’s refering to a defunct games company: …wikipedia.org/…/List_of_Bullfrog_Productions_gam…
otp@sh.itjust.works 2 years ago
I’m very familiar with Bullfrog. Loved a lot of their games.
I hate the trend of gaming journalists using “-like” to describe genres of games
osprior@lemmy.world 2 years ago
How do you feel about Doom-likes from 30 years ago?
otp@sh.itjust.works 2 years ago
We call them first-person shooters now. And I think they were usually called Doom-clones. But it makes sense that they’d use a word like that when a word for the genre hadn’t really been codified by that point.