Creative burn-out is kicking in, so I think it's time to take a hiatus for a bit and unwind. Thanks for reading all, will be back when inspiration hits again!

I look forward to catching up on your Amiga reviews, have a good rest!

Hahaha thanks! Found the soundtrack from The Obscuritory and loved the hell out of it... Forgot where I heard about DROD though, but good lord I'm sad it seems so obscure, especially since it's a 30+ year old series that's still getting games.

As I mentioned in the post itself, this is a bit dryer and more cynical than my usual stuff. If you're not feeling yet another AI rant, you might want to skip this. A new review is in the works and nearly finished, so more fun content is on the way soon!

I agree with this review a lot, I hate how people are misusing AI to replace rather than its intended purpose, which I still would not use because I don't wanna. I do want a petition to call AI "artists" AI commissioners because their way of making their "art" is more similar to commissioning an artist (the only difference is that the "artist" is GenAI) than drawing.

I agree with this. I also hate how genAI and AI are bundled together. A lot of old machine learning algorithms that don't pirate people's data are lumped in there. It doesn't help that genAI users claim things like "technology is always advancing art like photoshop, there's just an adjustment period" like they are in any way equivalent in terms of how they work.

@pixelglade There's a Taiko no Tatsujin game on Steam that has an AI content disclaimer because it uses Vocaloid songs, and it was when I first saw that that I realised just what a mess this whole AI terminology has become, since Miku is harmless!

I used those robots.txt files from Neocities since htey were available but Google still has me (but says I provide guided meditations based on games which... actually now I really want to do). My question is why are those people writing/arting/whatever if the computer is doing the creative bit. Literally the whole point is that is your unique voice! Oh well.

@p7uen Yeah, seems Google also still has AI summaries of me last time I checked after adding robots.txt. It's minor, but my main objection is the emphasis of the AI summary to emphasise nostalgia when summarising my site. I consciously try to avoid getting hung up on nostalgia when writing for my site, plus most of the games I review I'm playing for the first time! Ah well.

May the God Egg bless you for playing these Dizzy games so that we don't have to.

@p7uen I have become numb to Egg, I can handle it now. I give Fantasy World Dizzy a Not Treasure Island Dizzy out of 10.

I'm too weak for shmups, but I did learn about euro shooters, I didn't know about that sub-genre!

@p7uen They're an intimidating genre for sure! My love of arcade games has made me a fan however, if a somewhat casual one. Sometimes practicing a tough arcade game for better high scores is weirdly comforting to me, in spite of the difficulty.

"Sometimes practicing a tough arcade game for better high scores is weirdly comforting to me, in spite of the difficulty." No wonder you like pinball!