one of my favorite kinds of game has two genre names for no reason other than to make searching for it more annoying

ESPECIALLY SINCE MOST GAMES THAT USE THE TERM ARE EITHER DECKBUILDERS (their own thing with their own name that is very very right there) OR JUST ACTION ROGUELIKES (which you can also use that name for without excluding things like Caves of Qud which is amazing and everyone should play)

here's the thing.

people will explain the difference between a roguelike and a roguelite

but it doesn't matter

it really doesn't

because any game you point to as one will appear on 50 lists of the other

in practice the terms are 100% interchangeable

I think fundamentally it's gatekeeping

people trying to use a more "casual"-coded name to delegitimize something, kind of like how "match 3"s are just... they're puzzle games

I’m with Quinn on this one

oh I am 100% with Quinn here too

I'm begrudgingly accepting of "roguelike" because "procedurally generated dungeon crawler" is a mouthful

Pick one

but making a second category just because you want some games to feel either more or less approachable? fuck off

roguelike, tradrogue

that's all we need

roguelike is the tag on steam. tradrogues are ascii-based tile dungeon crawlers where you die constantly because you drank an unidentified potion

yeah

either can be easy or hard

and you can use qualifies to roguelike if you really need to. 'action' to imply it's not turn/tile-based

hell, fucking use the word "casual" if you want to sell it's an easier take on the genre! It's NOT A BAD WORD, WE HAD IT FOR A REASON AND THEN GAMERS RUINED EVERTHING

I know we've lost the metroidvania war but I unironically do like the term Search Action

it's an action game built around searching for stuff that lets you do both searching and action better

I was the "exploration platformer" kid there

seven syllables is a bit steep

Also they aren’t all platformer

s

yeah, that's fair points. and my counterargument would've been that "search action" makes it sound too much like metal gear or other stealth games where it is you being searched for instead of you doing the searching

....I guess most of them are

but it doesn't matter any more really cuz we lost that war as stated

I like search action though. I had t heard that before

if you want to start a war ask if dark souls 1 is a metroidvania

search action was apparently what Super Metroid was listed as in japan on release

huh. today i learned

I specifically say dark souls 1 because

anyway i'm not going to shoot myself in the face with this gun you handed me and told me to shoot myself in the face with, i know better

if someone argues that it's just keys and doors

you bring up the ring that lets you walk over lava

which you have to find in order to access izalith

"it's just keys and doors" ...so are super missiles and power bombs, strawman we've made for this thought exercise

sure you can use those keys as weapons but they're still largely tools made to open locks

super missiles and power bombs aren't just keys because they do more to influence gameplay than letting you open more doors

AND YET

the lava ring makes your kick do fire damage

so it DOES THAT TOO

it's hysterical because it's a perfect example but it's also the only thing even kind of like it in the whole series

there's no winning because genres are nonsense

I can't help but think Nintendo still refers to Metroid as "search action"

video game genres doubly so

....speaking of wars we lost

what the hell is dark souls

(other than a search vania)

it's a soulslike

I feel like there are exactly two approaches to video game genres. one is to break everything down into ridiculously small categories with completely arbitrary distinctions and the other is to lump things together until categories are so large as to be meaningless

what makes game genres uniquely incoherent is that genres are split across multiple axes

so "so small as to be meaningless" or "so large as to be meaningless"

video games are EDM

in what universe are "platformer" and "horror" both genres

"I was supposed to be the one who filled your Dark Souls with liiiiight!"

genre can be the tone, the mechanics, or even where the camera is

GOD I forgot about the multiple axes problem, yeah

you can say "third-person horror platformer" and that's technically 'one' genre, but three points of granularity

(Alice: Madness Returns, for an example)

Oh, and that time around 2006 where people made up genre names to describe their fighting games to prove they weren't fighting games

/forever sad I lost that one Kotaku article that pointed that out

good thing movies never invented a new genre just to avoid giving an award to a movie from a genre they didn't respect

I feel like that bs was entirely pushback from purists mad that brawlers and smash bros got put next to their Super Srs Evo Games

oh god quinn don't pull niamh into the call who wanted this aaaa

I was there, in the sauce, during the wars over whether or not ssb was a fighting game

I saw the sauce but kept out of it because my stance was "eh, whatever you call power stone, that's what I'll call Smash"

and I still feel that stance is correct

I stand by my assertion from a while back that "rpg" just flat out doesn't mean anything at all and hasn't for a while

I think that, unfortunately, is why we've gone so hard into the "-like" genres, because it's so much easier to say "THIS GAME IS LIKE THAT GAME"

except then journalists and marketing teams go so loosey goosey that any meaning is immediately lost

EVERYTHING is Dark Souls. EVERYTHING is Rogue. EVERYTHING is Metroid Fantasy 7.

Saw is Die Hard in a Bathroom

oh god I just unlocked an ancestral internet memory

of getting people on usenet so incredibly angry because I pointed out that Diablo and Angband were the same genre

Andrusi ask me if FF16 is an RPG if you want to see more friendships get destroyed over nothing

flare_sword that's extra funny because diablo 1 literally began development as a turn based tile roguelike

ff16 was actually the exact game that originally led me to assert that rpg was a meaningless term

RPG is impossible to define, even more so than most genres

did it? I mean, that doesn't surprise me considering Warcraft was literally "real-time Warhammer with the serial numbers filed off because oh shit Games Workshop has LAWYERS"

yeah it wasn't made realtime until later in development

...also now I'm curious

/far off look as the ff16 discourse runs through my mind's eye once more

if Saw is Die Hard in a Bathroom, and Die Hard is a Christmas Movie

is Saw a Christmas Movie

hot dogs are cakes

delicious, delicious cakes

I wish action rogue was used more specifically so I can filter all so I don't have to see them anymoooooore looking for the games I like!!!!!!!

Matchre: THANK YOU I kind of feel this though sometimes I flip polarity on it and want to consume Hades

hades can stay because supergiant is my special little darling as you can guess from my display name. but that's it.