As you’ve played it for so many hours, what is it that hooks you about this game? I’ve never played it, but I heard it’s sort of a very deep / simulated survival game similar to dwarf fortress? Just love it when you can be so passionate about something that you can lose yourself in it for thousands of hours and keep coming back for more!

I have this with only 1 game (though I’m around the 1000h mark myself): Slay the Spire!

Is Outer Wilds indie? Because Outer Wilds is my favorite :).

I really like Donkey Kong Country as a kid. Great environments, fun platforming and a timeless soundtrack.

On GBA my most played game became an underated licensed gem: Lord of the Rings: The Third Age. The GBA version is completely separate from the ones on other platforms, but it’s a great turn based strategy game in which you get to command the heroes and other units through all important battles of the original story. Really fun!

I recently did the opposite, I sold my Emerald and Blue for a decent price, which helped fund my second hand new 3DS. I don’t really care for the cartridges as long as I can play the games, and I feel no guilt for playing roms for games that are no longer being produced :).

I do like seeing large collections of other people, but I don’t have the same satisfaction from that compared to what it would cost. (I say quite hypocritically, as I have a larger than rational LEGO collection including tonnes of Bionicle sets that I will never let go for any price)

There is still a thick layer of dust on my Valbrace copy, nice to know that another gem is waiting for me!

I remember hearing about wizardry from another enthusiastic fan, but don’t remember what it was about. Some sort of old school RPG?

I have been a bit cheeky, as I have chosen my first Pokémon game as the thumbnail for this post: Pokémon Blue for the Game Boy.

Sadly, I was very young and English was not my mother tongue, so I had no idea how it worked. Skip to several years later, and I gave it another go (this time with some extremely rudimentary knowledge of English, but more importantly with some more experience in games in general). Playing Pokémon this way was a mix of an RPG and a translation based puzzle game, but I was absolutely hooked. Even though I never got past about halfway through the game before my attention faded, I must have done that first half about 10 times in those years.

Later I got Pokémon Emerald for the GBA after my previous GBA game was finished in only a few hours: I figured a Pokémon game would give me my money’s worth. Again, I played this numerous times and had a lot of fun, but never reached the ending.

A few years ago I was feeling nostalgic, and bought a second hand copy of Pokémon: Let’s Go Pikachu, knowing that it was a remake of my first Pokémon game of years ago. Reviews of this version are mixed because of the Pokémon Go like catching mini game, but nostalgia goggles made this an amazing experience for me. I especially remember one whole day where I was at home with a fever, laying on my couch and playing Pokémon Let’s Go Pikachu while dipping in and out of the strangest Pokémon related dreams. Even with that bumpy ride, I was eventually able to reach the end of the story and beat the elite four! I know that there is stuff to do after that, but I was happy and sold my copy again.

I have recently bought a second hand New Nintendo 3DS and have been procuring a lot of games on it in a seafaring fashion. One of those that I’m giving a go is Yo-Kai Watch. I’m only a few hours in, and right now it looks absolutely gorgeous, but I’m unsure of the combat design and the actual design of the monsters. If any of you have some other 3DS tips, please let me now, I have a seemingly unlimited budget for 3DS games right now :).

That’s the stupid part. Serious criminals will always find a way to encrypt their data. Any communication channel can be used for encrypted communication if you do the encryption part yourself (like with an agreed upon passphrase or something similar). The only people who are hit by this are the average users.

This makes me so mad.

Isn’t that worse though? They use your computing power but they still get the data :). At least with cloud apps you get the benefit of not having to run the app locally (this was the idea behind low powered chromebooks).

How come you have such strong feelings against Firefox?

Not trying to start a fight, just an honest question. Choosing to rather stop using the internet all together seems extreme for a browser that I use daily, but maybe I’m missing something in your use case.

Silent Hill: The Short Message (53 on metacritic)

This game is almost universally hated, but I really quite enjoyed it and even respected what they were going for with the writing. My 8/10 review from when I played it: https://howlongtobeat.com/user/knokelmaat/reviews/u-145005/1

I have no experience with other Silent Hill games, which might have made me less critical of this game. By no means a masterpiece, but an interesting experience for me.

I had similar issues until I gave myself this rule: only do side stories and main story quests. If they require playing a mini game, sure, but only play the minigames as a novelty, don’t try to complete them!

Thanks for the long and interesting writeup! I’m still working through AC 1 and enjoying it, I’ll see if I stay on the train as long as you :).

I did play Ghost of Tsushima. One of the most beautiful looking games I’ve ever played with amazing combat and good characters. For me, it was just way to long and repetitive. I eventually found the solution, playing each of the three acts and the DLC with a long break in between each time, so it felt fresh again. In the end I even got the platinum trophy for it, but I still see it as a great 8/10 game that could have been an all time favorite if it was trimmed to about half its runtime. Here’s hoping that they don’t make the same mistakes for Ghost of Yotei. If they can keep the good and trim the bloat, this could be the game of a generation.

“based on news like this”

I think you’re spot on there. Not saying that the BBC is untrustworthy, but there is always a bias in every news source. Especially when it comes to criticizing foreign policy versus local policy.

I am not disputing that it is not going well there. I’m just saying that similar issues are present in a lot of western countries. I am of course only talking about the subject of this article. If you look at how authoritarian the gouvernement is, stuff does get clearly worse in China compared to most western countries.

Don’t the amount of available jobs scale too?

I feel like this problem would be the same if China was a tenth the size, same goes for US and other countries. It’s a systemic issue, where the ratios of workers and jobs are wrong and unsocial.

It’s hard to discuss such a massive series. It feels as if everything has been said about it and people have largely gotten tired of the formula, but hear me out.

I actually never played any of them, I recently started playing the first one (from 2007) on my Steam Deck and I am actually loving it. It’s such a simple, straightforward game, with a basic but engaging story and honestly gorgeous visuals for the time. The mechanics are delightfully limited, in a sense that it really helps me to turn of my brain and just enjoy myself. I really like the world and how dense it is: all objectives are reasonably close and movement is quick and agile. A real gem for the Steam Deck!

I most certainly will get the sequel trilogy, as that one seems to be loved by a lot of people.

You are absolutely allowed to look at a woman or make moves. Just respect other people and their boundaries.

Just move in the world, do stuff you like, meet people, be respectful to them and make connections. Don’t force stuff and respect the wishes of others.

If you do this, there is absolutely room for getting to know people better and becoming romantically involved. Just don’t be a dick.

Also, no need to be attractive as long as you’re true to yourself and are as open to others as you hope for them to be towards you.

Also, I looked up that list you posted, as some of the entries seemed very strange to me, even for the time.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/reasons-admission-insane-asylum-1800s/

In general, this document might be more accurately described as “a list of some reasons why people were believed to have eventually developed illnesses that led to their being admitted to the West Virginia Hospital for the Insane” and not a list of “symptoms” or “reasons” why people were admitted to that hospital.

It’s an extremely funny list, but shows more that psychoanalysis in that time was pretty stupid, not that people were being put in an asylum for showing these behaviors.

I don’t mean focus on medical situations as a wildcard to just practice any sort of (pseudo) medicine on people. It’s about rights being given, not taken away.

The reason I mentioned this, is that the erasure of gender from official status might have as a side effect that rights related to gender (for example pregnancy leave) have to be defined in a way that doesn’t link it to gender. By no means do I want some sort of medical laws or such that force things upon people, it’s more about rights linked to a person’s medical conditions.

In that sense, I see having a penis, or a uterus, or something else as just one of the medical characteristics of a person, just as for example their blood sugar, eyesight or mental state. Rights and care should be based on that, and not on a F/M on an official document.

I would prefer it if gender was just left out of official documents and policies, and rules would just focus on medical situations. This would leave space for everyone to be who they are while still allowing for specific care for people who menstruate, get pregnant, have a prostate etc.

We don’t have separate rules or bathrooms for people who wear glasses or are redheads, but somehow this archaic binary distinction is so ingrained in our society that people feel the need to categorize them in almost every domain of our lives.

I say this as a cis man so if my opinion sounds stupid I am willing to learn. I do have some close trans friends and what I feel is that they just want to be allowed to be themselves. Like, their search and discovery of their identity is of course super important to them, but at the same time they are just people. I discuss them now because of the topic, but in my head they are no different from any other person I know. Just let people be themselves and don’t force boxes where they aren’t needed.