Pack 100 of compsognathus (compsognathii?) says hello.

Not sure how out of date the research is, but in the original Jurassic Park book, there are roaming packs of these things that overwhelm and kill people.

Though the on screen scene of them killing people happens in the second movie, it actually takes place in the first book IIRC… anyway, they’re basically depicted as land piranhas.

(Again, IIRC, Jurassic Park the book basically gets set in motion with a family of tourists being eviscerated by a pack of compys… but the first movie dropped this from the story, then when the second movie comes out they basically use this scene as the intro for that, but its on a different island and used to set off an entirely new story?)

I like this answer too!

Depends on how the combo works. Is there an element of skill involved? If it’s like a rhythm game I would just call it a puzzle/rhythm game. Otherwise it’s just a puzzle game with extra steps.

That was in my OP though, that most games can be thought of as puzzle games with extra steps.

EDIT: I would agree that Tetris is not a puzzle game.

This is quite interesting to me.

My main point of this post is to highlight how the genres and categories we have for games breaks down upon examination and I guess changes over time.

I would say that most people either have or would call Tetris basically the most popular puzzle game.

When it came out it was basically the titular, archetypal ‘puzzle’ game.

You think that pushing a button that generates a purely random outcome is a game?

To me, those are neither games nor puzzles.

There is nothing one can do, in terms of thought or execution, to influence the outcome.

Other than I suppose choosing to play or not play.

To me, a game must include some capacity of the player to influence whether they succeed or fail, within the game itself.

I will grant you that, I agree.

If there is no thought required to determine the difference between a correct and incorrect choice, if its purely just ‘do this’ and the only difficulty is in execution, then yes I would agree this is not a puzzle.

A very simple puzzle which our brains and bodies usually perform automatically, yet there are quite a number of situations and conditions that make breathing significantly more difficult, or where precise breathing or certain ways of breathing are skills that require mastery.

Swimming, diving, circular breathing for wind instruments, controlling your breathing while shooting, trying to calm yourself down from a panic attack, etc etc.

By your definition, Tetris is not a puzzle game.

Its generated and execution difficulty is a major factor.

Puzzle games can be solved or “won” by identifying the solution. Not-puzzle games require execution.

If you have 2 minutes to solve a puzzle, is it no longer a puzzle game?

If moving certain colored pieces requires a button combo or sequence, instead of a simple action, is this no longer a puzzle game?

EDIT:

Also, by this logic, Tetris is not a puzzle game.

…but knowing the optimal thing to do will still not give you victory which imo disqualifies them as outright puzzle games.

Knowing the optimal thing to do can be seen as but a higher order puzzle.

MMOs are probably the most notorious genre at this point for being extremely overproduced puzzle games.

Sure, there are different builds and strats… but its all very formulaic and boring once you find something that works.

Not to mention a huge, huge amount of them are basically just pay to win, to varying degrees, these days.

Although you could argue they do not actually have a goal… hrm.

Like obviously there are quests and goals and story arcs but technically, there probably are some mmos where you could just make your personal goal something wildly unconventional.

I haven’t played many mmos in a while, but that kind of spirit seems to just only be further and further dying out, I just hope theres still some mmo it exists somewhere.

Is Portal a… First Person Shooter with Puzzle Gameplay? A First Person Puzzle Game?

Is Elden Ring an extremely difficult Action RPG, or is it really just an easy Action RPG hiding behind an opaque and complex system of weapons and armor and enemy types and stats that becomes simple once a viable solution to the puzzle of stats and weapons becomes apparent after either reading a guide or just brute forcing through tens or hundreds of hours of bad solutions?

(For that matter, what even is an RPG?

Role Playing Game?

If that just means that you play a character, ie role, and it is an immersive and or compelling story and world, ok, thats a loooot of games.

Does it mean you can customize your character’s appearance or weapons or stat-build? Ok tons of non RPGs allow for that, and tons of classic RPGs do not allow you to alter your character’s appearance.

If it means you have the ability to put yourself into the game, make choices and do things differently in a way that meaningfully changes how the world of the game responds, then a whole lot of ‘RPGs’ are hardly RPGs at all, as many develop your character(s) as part of their story line to the point that many decisions presented seem entirely out of the established character’s likely responses, or give the player few if any impactful choices, having a mostly or entirely linear storyline.

By that metric most immersive sims are more RPG than many ‘RPGs’, anything with a branching storyline or highly reactive world is as well.)

What game involves super human perfect timing that does not include some other kind of puzzle to be solved?

Fighting games? Micro Heavy RTS or MOBAs? Bullet Hell Shooters?

All of these have strategy and can thus be reduced to puzzles.

I suppose if a game was purely just, click button as fast as you can after something happens, then ok, you got me, but add even one more element, and technically this is an extremely simple puzzle, albeit brutally unforgiving in terms of getting your human body to solve the puzzle.

Is there something different you have in mind?

EDIT: Alkheemist answered this later, with rhythm games (that have no elements of strategy ie, GuitarHero is not a puzzle but NecroDancer still is). I agree those are not puzzles. Skipped my mind as I have not played one in a very long time.

I would say you also have got me on a pure RNG slot game. Theres no gameplay, theres no puzzle, theres no strategy.

At least, within the game itself. If youre going to somehow exploit or hack or something, arguably thats now a real world puzzle of how to do it and not go to jail, but excepting that… yeah, there are lots of online ‘games’ with literally no puzzle element, just do thing and then random output happens, with a bunch of flashy graphics that have 0 bearing on what the outcome will be, whether its a digitized horse race or slots or whatever.

I would argue those are not really games though.

The player cannot make any choice that is more or less likely to achieve the goal, thus its the illusion of a game. No meaningful choices.

possibly because it could be easily confused with ‘fix this shit’?

Who knows, theres no real rhyme or reason to how lingo evolves, somethings get popular, other don’t others go through popularity waves and other totally change meaning.

For example, the origin of the phrase ‘pull yourself up by your bootstraps’ is, in its original context, meant to denote something that is obviously impossible.

You cant pull your feet up so hard you’ll float or fly. Its like the modern nonsense propulsion/infinite energy memes from 4chan or plugging a power strip into itself to power it

But, nowadays, it means basically ‘do something difficult and unpleasant’, wíth the implication that ‘i did it, so can you, if you cant or dont, there must be something wrong with you’.

Almost the opposite of its original meaning.

Yeah, it comes from debuffs, which was applied to early FPS games when a gun was debuffed, which made the bullets hit less like bullets and more like nerf darts.

This gun used to take a guy out in 2 body shots and now its 5, like I’m shooting with a nerf gun!

Then the term spread around to non FPS games.

Hold on , I’ll edit this when I find a link.

Edit:

Ok, so here is OpenAI wanting to make… well basically it seems to want to have not only an AI agent in a text support chatbox telling you how to fix a problem…

…but give it the ability to completely take over your computer and just do it for you, presumably via Remote Assistance and whatever the Mac equivalent is.

https://www.yahoo.com/tech/openai-plans-chatgpt-supersmart-assistant-135029243.html?guccounter=1

No way this could go wrong and lead to fake support sites just fucking writing a batch file and executing it in the blink of an eye.

Then we’ve got both Zoom and Otter who yes, straight up, want to build AI powered avatars, based on each employee/user and replace the human entirely in meetings.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/zoom-s-ceo-wants-a-manipulatable-ai-avatar-of-you-to-attend-meetings-instead/ar-BB1nGO5m

https://www.businessinsider.in/tech/news/could-ai-personas-attend-your-work-meetings-for-you-one-tech-ceo-says-yes-and-by-the-end-of-the-year/articleshow/107797330.cms

Fuck the infinite paper clip making machine, we are intentionally trying to make the infinite meeting machine.

Dear sweet christ, I’ve been the manager of a medium sized non profits databases (everything other than finance because they’re special, as in using an overpriced wacky proprietary tool because they are used to it, oh and probably commiting fraud) and, as the author references, I have actually had one of the members of the board get a bunch of other people with 0 technical competence to try to get me to ‘implement blockchain technology’ on postgres.

Non of those fucking morons could ever provide an actual project outline. None of these fucking morons even knew their own teams processes, and they would all change depending on team member asked and date.

Not relevant to this story, but basically I am now disabled and living off of SSDI after being assaulted and seriously injured.

I am 99% sure, after years of working with completely technically incompetent managers, I am never going to work in tech again.

I would literally rather be poor, do uber eats delivery when I feel like it, and slowly build a video game, by myself, not even to make money, just to give my tech brain something to sate it.

I am too autistic to be able to handle the constant stream of bullshit and social manipulation/pressure from everywhere I have ever worked.

Ive been calling this the reverse turing test:

Can you tell that a known human being is not an ‘AI’ chatbot, based on text correspondence?

Apparently we are now just going to have AI simulacra of ourselves date each other on dating apps and meet with each other on zoom.

The meeting thing in particular is so fucking insane.

Problem: Meetings waste time and accomplish nothing!

Solution: Don’t hire or train competent people, instead, automate meetings, the transcripts of which will presumably still have to be read, and will likely not make any sense, thus necessitating more meetings.

The goal of technological civilization apparently truly is to create maximum misery via maximizing meetings.

Excellent point, I totally agree.

We got a poorly written Holdo instead, closest thing to a strong older female character… I think she shoots a blaster… once?

Only older woman doing action in a recent major movie I can think of is Sarah Connor.

Brought back Ford for another Indi movies, that whole series with Liam Neeson, all of the Expendables movies, etc.

But yeah, the voice and face morph tech was basically available, they could have used Hamil and Fisher for the lines and most of the acting (you know, CGI and/or stunt doubles for the more intense action scenes same as basically every actor over 50 other than Tom Cruise), just maybe de age their voices and faces a tad to be set more proximally after 6, and focus more on her training, grand tragedy of her and han and Jacen becoming Caedus…

There is absolutely enough established lore there that could be worked into a trilogy focusing on the growth of Leia, showcasing a strong mother and warrior and diplomat/leader.

It is honestly completely baffling to me still that they threw out the EU. Sure, not all the plot lines are great, but they could have gone in so many directions with it.

I had always assumed the obvious problem with making a new trilogy would be:

Ok, we have so, so much established canon to work with, what parts of it can we focus on or interweave and tweak a bit to tell precisely the kind if story we want?

But nope, they just fucking binned it all.

A pity they already had the entire EU to work from and decided to obliterate it all… until they fucked up their own shit so badly they started bringing it back.

We could have had another trilogy centered around an established strong female character.

Mara Jade.

Sure, mix and match in some new ideas to make it work better as films than novels. The idea of Finn (a defecting stormtrooper) absolutely works in this setting.

But the original cast is too old for that time period!

Well we’ve now seen that Luke can be portrayed reasonably well with another actor and face and voice changing tech.

Have a whole trilogy set in basically the Mando/Asoka time period, but use the Mandalorians in a more adult story about the difficulty of establishing and maintaining alliances when the New Republic is young, the Imperial Remnant still exists, and now basically its chaos as various factions are picking sides.

Thrawn can be the big bad, but his presence is barely hinted at in 7, makes his appearance in 8 and has a major victory, and is defeated in 9.

You could even work in Boba Fett and Asoka! Maybe Thrawn sends Fett to assassinate Luke in 8 and he is seriously wounded or his new gaggle of Jedi trainees are fucked up, but Asoka helps Luke fend him off on the Millennium Falcon!

But uh nope, instead we got A New Hope v2, A B and C plot clusterfuck with a side of break hyperspace and all space combat lore, followed by Duct Tape and Bullshit.

I think it was ABC that just showed a poll saying 15% of independents would be more likely to vote for Trump if he’s a convicted felon, 8% less likely, and 74% indifferent.

So uh, at least amongst independent voters, no, apparently being a felon does not matter that much.

Headed from the clown timeline of the 2020s to the hell timeline of the 2090s.