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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 24th, 2023

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  • I’d agree that “it gets better later” isn’t a good way to promote a game, but I dunno that a game has to be good (or at least at its best) from the start. Totally understandable if people don’t want to, or can’t invest the time into something that doesn’t grip them right away, but at least for me a slow start can be really nice, especially when a game ends up unfolding in unexpected ways later on. I can enjoy that kind of pacing, and sometimes it’s rewarding to have something start off kind of painful for one reason or another and become something much greater. At least personally I think a “weak start” can end up making the full experience better overall, as it’s kind of a part of the journey.

    But of course, if you’re not enjoying it and you don’t want to continue and you want to refund it… That’s totally reasonable! A game that’s a slow burn is probably a much harder sell and not going to appeal to as broad of an audience, and I think that’s okay.








  • You’ll almost certainly be perfectly fine. AMD cards generally work a lot smoother, and the open source drivers means things can be well supported all the time and it’s great.

    On Nvidia, in my experience, it’s occasionally a hassle if you’re using a bleeding edge kernel (which you won’t be if you’re on a “normal” distro), where something changes and breaks the proprietary Nvidia driver… And if Nvidia drops support for your graphics card in their driver you may have issues upgrading to a new kernel because the old driver won’t work on the new kernel. But honestly, I wouldn’t let any of this get in the way of running Linux. You have a new card, you’ll probably upgrade before it’s an issue, and the proprietary driver is something we all get mad about, but it mostly works well and there’s a good chance you won’t really notice any issues.



  • I dunno, I don’t think the point of all art is to be “fun”. There’s plenty of examples of games that aren’t necessarily fun but do something interesting in some sense or inspire other emotions. Exploring a bunch of dead and boring planets may not be fun and maybe it’s not compelling or worth doing in Starfield, but I think it can be interesting to have something more “boring” most of the time to have other moments stand out… and sometimes something being boring or painful is part of the experience and it wouldn’t be as worthwhile without, like for example particularly difficult games can be pretty painful to play through, but sometimes having gone through the painful thing is a huge part of why you care about the experience.

    Of course not everything is for everybody, and more “boring” experiences in general are probably not what the average person playing video games is into… but there’s plenty of us who like a good boring or tedious or painful slog every once in a while :). Maybe it’s rewarding, maybe it sets the atmosphere, maybe it’s meaningful in some other way… I get it, but I think it’s a little sad to reduce games to “just supposed to be fun!” It’s an awesome art form and I love seeing other creative things done with it.



  • Oh boy, Myst… Overall I think I enjoyed Myst, but mostly I enjoyed the books in the library and the world(s). I completed Myst without a guide and I think in terms of early point and click adventure games it’s on the straightforward side… but it can be a real pain to notice some areas and some things are needlessly obtuse, and frankly I didn’t like most of the puzzles. Honestly, I can completely understand why people wouldn’t like Myst, it’s far from perfect…

    Riven, on the other hand… is kind of amazing. There’s a few things that are needlessly difficult to spot in Riven, but it’s a little easier to navigate because there’s more frames. Riven is gorgeous, though, and the puzzles are a bit more interesting. I don’t think everybody will love Riven, but it holds up a lot better than Myst does.





  • I’m on iOS and the biggest downside to iOS in my opinion is the $100/year developer fee, the Mac requirement for development, and the lack of side-loading. What this ultimately means is that it can be hard to find free / open source apps for iOS, especially ones like newpipe that might not be approved on the App Store. It’s honestly a pretty big bummer. Some other restrictions also mean that Safari is pretty much the only viable browser on iOS and ad-blocking / extensions are fairly limited. Another disappointment is that ad-supported apps seemed to be a lot more annoying than the Google equivalents, weirdly enough. I guess Google maybe has more / different guidelines about making ads supremely irritating, or maybe I just had better options for free apps on Android.

    I’m curious what you mean by “in light of what Apple is doing”? As far as I know iOS isn’t really miles ahead of Android in any particular area – they’re more or less comparable in my experience, with iOS being a bit more limited in terms of customization and stuff (the fact that you still can’t place icons anywhere you want on the homescreen is baffling to me).

    If I’m being entirely honest, I think I probably like the Android operating system more than I like iOS… Which is weirdly part of the reason I like iOS – I’m a little less tempted to look at my phone and a little less tempted to tinker with it. And there are are things that I like about my iPhone. The hardware is nice, the Apple Watch is really nice, FaceID is great, some things I thought would be silly like live photos are actually kind of nice, some of the iCloud features are great, and it’s nice that it pairs with other things in the Apple ecosystem well. Ultimately the main reason I’ve abandoned Android is that I just got sick of my Android phones dying all of the time and only getting software support for like 9 months. Apple’s support window is massive in comparison, which is also a big plus.



  • This has not been my experience at all. I’ve had tap for over a decade in Canada, and large banks in the US here did not give me contactless cards a few year ago. In the past couple of years they seem to be rolling out more of them, but people always looked at me like I was a lunatic whenever I tried to tap my Canadian card to pay for something.