I remember trying a Game Shark on a few games back in high school, and what I found is that it made the games boring really fast.

More recently I tried applying cheats in Super Ghouls and Ghosts. I still didn’t make it past the first level. 😭

I love some classic Mario Kart 64, but a family member and his friends kind of ruined that one for me. It’s a game that has relatively little content and is best played in small doses to not get sick of it, but they didn’t do that. They went through a whole phase of playing it every day and gaining expert level skills in it. I was not aware of how deep the meta for MK64 is, because the last time I played against them, they were exploiting glitches in virtually every track and leaving everyone else in the dust.

Was always more of a Diddy Kong Racing fan anyway.

Ouch. Yeah I jumped on that deal as soon as I saw it. Then tried the controller for a few days, could never get used to it, and now it’s collecting dust somewhere.

Even as someone with big hands, that does not look like a comfortable controller to use. I’ll wait for the next $5 clearance sale like I did with the original Steam controller. 🙃

I will switch to Android roms that don’t have that defect, and continue to buy and tinker with Linux phones when I can afford it, until they become daily-drivable.

Oooh, I wonder if they’re going to pursue a free phone based on Risc-V. It’s a longshot but if they pull that off, it’d be like feeding two birds with one scone.

Makes sense. Speaking of which, I have to break your rule. I think some people have already 'splained that Final Fantasy isn’t as complicated as it seems, you can mostly jump in anywhere. Or to keep it simple, the best start is Final Fantasy X International. For me, Final Fantasy VII will always be my favorite just because it was the first one I played, and especially at a tumultuous time in my life. It was comfort food.

But so was X, and it really can’t be emphasized enough how much of a phenomenon this game was when it first came out. The graphics for it’s time blew people away and even hold up to some extent by today’s standards (especially if you count the remasters). The story is like something you’d expect out of a Pixar film - it will tug at your heartstrings. The gameplay itself is so easy to get into, and even easier to be completely absorbed by. I love the sphere grid. The worldbuilding is rich, and the aesthetic is dreamy. I went back and replayed it somewhat recently, and was shocked because a lot of games and content in general have not aged well; but X definitely aged like wine.

There’s a plot thread involving the main character and his struggles to be himself in spite of years of resentment toward his father’s verbal abuse and toxic masculinity. When I was a kid I kind of felt embarrassed to be playing through those scenes if others were around, but it hits closer to home now that we are at least beginning (at least in some spaces/circles) to push past those cliches and have a little breathing room to let go of outdated masculinity norms ourselves. It’s not a perfect game, but it does seem like it was a bit ahead of its time.

Yeah, easily in my top ten, maybe even top five.

So judging from the comments, there is your ps2 games recommendations: the entire PlayStation 2 library.

It’s weird to me that game devs don’t experiment with alternative organizational structures more often, kind of like Motion Twin; or how they’re only just beginning to unionize in some places. The “capital” in game development is a little bit computer hardware, but otherwise the vast majority of value in a game design studio is the human beings and their talent and skills.

I cannot think of any other industry where the workers are more essential, and management more superfluous and replaceable.

Tech giants are really going all in with the authoritarianism these days.

I’ve put a GNU sticker over one, and a Tux sticker over another. I should see if there’s a Debian spiral sticker I can get (or even custom keycaps) for future keyboards.

No, in a lot of ways the open Android roms keep getting better, despite every possible obstacle being thrown in their way. It’s easy to make a mature platform sound like it has “stalled”, when you’re comparing it to alternatives that are still so unusably bad that they have nowhere to go but up.

Do what you want, but get real. If you care more about making your ideals happen, maybe stop debating internet randos so feverishly, and start making pull requests.

Nothing that has or will happen can stop the parts of Android that are already open from remaining open. Yes there will be fewer choices. Yes this means alternative ROM makers will have no choice but to shoulder more of the development burden themselves. And yes this means there’s going to be significantly fewer open Android devices and new manufacturers will have to make the intentional effort to make and sell new devices that are free by design - a few of which already exist.

But no matter how many obstacles open Android has, the thing you’re ignoring is that it’s still in a far better place than mobile Linux. For a start, any device that respects rights enough to be Linux compatible will automatically be compatible with free and degoogled versions of Android as well.

What these growing problems are is a galvanizing call. Samsung, Xiaomi, and OnePlus, and Google were never our friends. Whatever their imperfections, at least Pine64, Purism, BQ, Planet Computers, Murena, Fairphone, F(x)tec, Volla, and SHIFT have sold hardware that was rights respecting by design. We need more companies or other organizations to do that, and we need to choose to buy and promote more devices like that.

And as that happens more, open Android and Linux are going to benefit equally, but there’s no getting around the fact that for now and the forseeable future, the open Android variants are still far more mature, far more feature-complete, way closer to the kind of user experience the vast majority of people expect, and far more established.

And again, probably the biggest missing thing we need there is an app marketplace that competes more directly with Google Play, that gives more devs good incentives to want to switch away from Play.

You might have better luck looking at the distros themselves. They’re not exactly great on any device yet, but there are cases where mobile Linux distros work at least equally or a little better on select Android phones than they do on dedicated Linux phones.

I get where this argument is coming from, but I don’t think there are meaningful differences in the success of gpl or other copyleft licenses, vs permissive ones (except maybe cases where someone was willing and able to enforce the gpl in court). Companies are no less capable of doing EEE with copyleft. There are also plenty of permissively licensed software projects that have gained a lot of popularity, just like some gpl ones have.

The difference in traction between Linux and BSD probably has more to do with the same kinds of forces that allowed Android to succeed and then crowd Windows phones out of the market.

While I support the continued progress of real Linux phones, have a Pinephone, and even wasted all of yesterday trying to make a working build of Armbian for retro handheld I have; I think it’s more practical to focus on open Android distributions, getting more phones out that can support multi os’s and buying those, and growing a robust app market system that can compete with Google Play.

F-Droid is almost there, but being open-source doesn’t mean something has to be free of charge. F-Droid should be extended, or possibly an additional app manager be established, that still promotes software freedom and privacy, but allows for devs to charge for their apps as well.

Part of an overall concerning trend, but as someone who decided to stop buying consoles years ago: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I ran Trisquel for a little while several years ago. It was an interesting exercise but ultimately limitations pop up. I’d say it’s useful as a motivator to try to choose hardware that is more liberated.

Okay, so more World Economic Forum, less Electronic Frontier Foundation?

Sounds like we need more EFF’s of video games then.

My question is, what is this group as an entity, and why does their opinion matter? Are they an ngo-style advocacy group, or an actual governing body of some kind?