There’s isn’t anything particularly wrong about preordering something you’re most certainly going to get day-one, although those are few and far between these days. After all, even fan favorites often come with bugs and glitches day one and you can still encourage producers (and raise kpis) by wishlisting a game instead so they know demand exists. Same for downloading a pre-release demo - they track that.

Early access is usually indie with a few exceptions, so supporting them is good too except when you’re a big fan and would rather see the finished work without spoilers. None the less, support can still exist in other forms.

I personally do neither, but this is more because of financial reasons and my already stupidly huge backlog. The only game I might have preordered this year would have been Silksong and only didn’t because they didn’t permit it. I knew it wouldn’t be released with… ahem, bugs… and that I would certainly play and enjoy it.

Every other 2025 gem was a surprise after release, though.

Believe it or not, it gained 10fps running on Arch… doing… whatever that thing was doing.

I think we’re all kinda beat down by life, so I don’t really judge people on it. I just am not one of them, haha. (But I don’t even watch TV or movies much so I’m admittedly a weirdo).

Breeze has a day/night cycle now too, haha. Sweet just caught my eye since it has custom icons for discord and steam that match the theme. Lol

And yeah, the experts on Lemmy can probably explain better but there’s issues with screens depending on what the distro uses to manage that stuff. I’ve had trouble before, but I had no trouble last night detecting my ultrawide, and they added HDR support since I last tinkered. I’m using CachyOS (which is arch based), so what they’re using might be different. They also seem very anti-flatpak, haha.

Oh, I just fixed my broken partition with a fresh install last night. Haven’t played with Linux in a while but I spent way too much time themeing.

If you or anyone else is in KDE Plasma, surprise your friends with something like Reactionary 98 or WhiteSur. It was enough to get someone to try Linux, lol. (I ultimately went with Sweet, though. Lol)

My dad entered in codes for me when I was really little, but that’s kind of another thing entirely. I don’t think little kids have an achievement oriented sorta version of play, so anything goes with them. Once you’re older, that dopamine rush just hits differently, though.

In education you could also consider it a form of scaffolding. Enabling someone to do something they normally can’t do is a form of development, like giving handicaps in games and stuff can foster the skills to not need them eventually.

I actually thought about that after my comment and summoning a tank from nowhere was fun. At least for a little bit… but maybe mostly for the novelty of it all. Also I was like, 12.

I suppose. When I’m referring to cheats, it’s more in regards to invulnerability, infinite resources, etc., which seem to sap the point of having a game in the first place. Like making the fun parts into a grind, rather than the other way around.

That said, I’ll also say sometimes part of the challenge is the grind, so it depends. You have to pick your own poison, right?

Like, take Silksong for example. You lose out on the full experience if you mod out the annoying run from bench to boss, it’s like a 40 second annoyance built in punishment. But I get why you’d do that-- it’s technically there for a reason but I get it. Hell, even the difficulty adjustment mods I can understand.

But making the bosses die in one hit or making yourself invulnerable? Now you’ve lost me, that’s like a core element of the game; you might as well just watch someone else play it because what’s the point.

Y’all laugh but there are way too many people into idle games, not to mention people who prefer watching a stream (even without commentary) over playing a game itself.

I cannot comprehend why, though, just like I can’t comprehend how cheating (particularly single player) can be fun.

Just a note, seems to just be in production. Possibly placeholders?

Reminds me of the old days, developers all the time put in copyrighted assets as placeholders. Rarely they get into the final release and cause trouble but it was fairly common practice.

Just production assets from what I understand. None of it is in the game proper.

That’s also how you hacked old consoles back in the days. Early as Dreamcast, lol

Thank you, I’ll look into it. Mine is probably too updated for the easier methods so this helps

My webos keeps wanting to update to add AI shit and I keep saying no but it won’t take that as a permanent answer, so every time it turns on it’s required (and if I turn it on with my one and only button on the thing, it takes a while before the prompt goes away and requires remote input).

I’m looking into ways to jailbreak it or something, just family won’t exactly let me do that randomly.

I mean, I figured it was more a case like Hercules where he’s half god and thus is human with superpowers.

You could get into Dragon Quest games, if you want old school JRPGs. Complexity might be a bit lacking given the era, but doing the old NES ones without a guide is excruciatingly difficult and you can lump on RetroAchevements to add more pain. RA generally adds additional challenges to any older game so you have to play a little min maxing to accomplish them.

I mostly thought of it since RA is beta testing multi sets with DQ9 and getting every accolade might be one of the most insane things I could ever suggest.

Well, I’ll settle for basic computer literacy as I still run into college students without a working knowledge of file systems… buuuut one would argue it’s worth covering the basic building blocks of how all this works.

I’ve heard similar arguments for teaching people the fundamentals of how data works too, as we have data harvested from us at alarming rates and knowledge is power.

Ugh.

At least Arial exists. And Helvetica. But Times New Roman? What is this, English class in the early aughts? 12pt font, double spaced with one inch margins?

Hell, if you want wanna make America great again make it Courier; tech bros’ll think you’re coding but we know you really just want to take us back to late 1800s when typewriters and bad economic policy were in. Or maybe something appropriate for this administration, like Wingdings.

Last three were Star Ocean (the first one), Radiata Stories, and Skies of Arcadia.

Currently playing Alundra because a friend grew up with it and wanted me to play it. Honestly it’s not great but RetroAchevements made the bosses extraordinarily painful to master, which is uh … fun. Yes. Fun, let’s go with that.

Oh and ps these commenters all have fantastic tastes.

I mean, sure. Fuck malthusians.

Social dilemma theories (e.g. totc, prisoners dilemma, etc) are kind of neutral, though, and it’s one of the easiest ways to argue in favor of climate change regulation. As in, people make choices between selfish and cooperative choices. Some are more inclined for one or the other, but regulation can help curb the selfish oriented people.

In my social psych class I get to share research that literally says conservatives and people who prefer authoritarianism prefer competitive choices (as well as other factors). It’s basically a field devoted to figuring out what causes people who ruin everything for everyone else, lol.