Glide

I take "nice" to mean something very different than "good" or "kind". No, I am not a nice person. I am inclined to be an honest asshole over a nice liar. I try my best to be good, kind, understanding, etc., but "nice" is, in my books, more about manners than good acts or genuine understanding. And I generally feel that time and effort spent on attempting to be "nice" is much better spent on genuinely empathizing with and supporting people, even when that support isn't kind or well-mannered at a glance.

I think I just take issue with the word "nice".

Infinite growth is referred to as cancer. Your friend is obviously right that we cannot sustain infinite growth, but it's misguided to think that the only way out species can possibly survive to any length is by having more children and increasing our population year over year.

With improving technologies and automations, far less labour is required to achieve the same results. There is no reason we need an infinitely increasing population on our decidedly finite earth just to keep our species afloat. This would take a major restructuring of our social and economic systems to do correctly, otherwise we run the risk of centralized wealth mucking it all up, but the point remains that there's no necessity to continue reproducing at the rate we have been. This supposed "need" for labour is just capitalist propaganda perpetuating the idea that work is inherently good, all designed to fuel an inherently exploitative economy. Line must go up, otherwise how can the privledged few assure that their net worth continues to grow exponentially?

It's kind of like Kahoot, but there's a greater variety of games.

The teacher hosts a game with a question set they either found it made, and each student joins on a device. They're givegiven the questions and selecting correct answers earns them something relative to the game.

The most traditional one is the one that was described here, where they are given every question in sequence and are awarded points for the accuracy and speed of their answers, but there is some great variety. There's a tower defense game where correct answers give you the currency to buy and upgrade towers, a "survivors"-like game where a correct answer is required to be given a choice of weapon upgrades and several variants on slot machine-esque games, where correct answers gives them a random bonus ranging across gaining score, multiplying score or stealing score from other players.

I like to use it with the kids whenever I require some rote memorization. Ie, we're reviewing terms we've used or will be using in a unit, or we're refreshing things they're supposed to have learned in previous years.

There's some great single-player options too, if you ever find yourself struggling to deal with rote memorization for any courses you'd take as an adult, too. While it's definitely targeted towards classrooms and kids, the games are imo substantially more engaging ways to memorize things that are in general hard to care about outside of a requirement for some job, diploma or degree.

Damn, my grade 7 class is cringe af. Kid keeps naming himself "skibidisigma" every time we play Blooket.

"Fuck them, I've got mine" pro-capitalist mindset in the wild.

Cassette Beasts kicks the ever loving shit out of Pokemon across the board, modern or retro.

Retro games weren't better than modern games as a "full-stop" statement. They tended to be bug-ridden messes, but there was still a heart and soul behind them that tends to be missing in the AAA industry. Continuing on the Pokemon example Red/Blue were an absolute mess. I mean, moves and items that were supposed to massively increase critical hit rate massively decreased them instead. Stat calculations were all over the place. Hell, the ghost-psychic interaction just straight didn't function as intended. It was a mess, and yet for some reason, it's touted as "better" than the modern Pokemon games.

Plus, not all big studio games are soulless cash grabs of releases, either. Hi-Fi Rush is my favorite game of 2023 by a huge margin, and was a Bethesda published game. Sure, the dev studio was "smaller" compared to Ubisoft or Activison, but I wouldn't call the game indie - it was AAA in polish and scale. I'm currently really enjoying Unicorn Overlord, getting major Ogre Battle 64 vibes from it, and playing a lot of Monster Hunter Rise thanks to a Steam sale. These games slap, and have all the depth and passion of games of old without alI of the horrible jank we dealt with in the pre-internet "no such thing as a post-release patch" world.

It's easy to see the yearly Call of Duty, Pokemon, generic EA sports, and obligatory Ubisoft open world games release and think "man, AAA gaming sucks", but they're honestly a very tiny portion of the conversation.

EDIT: I take everything back, Bethesda just closed the studio that made Hi-Fi Rush. AAA gaming is a cancer that needs to be surgically extracted.

Weird take, imo. Mobile games are probably the best they've ever been. They were traditionally a place for rampant p2w garbage gacha machines, and while those are still there, the platform has actual decent games nowadays. Real PC games are being ported to mobile and the platform is being taken seriously. Even in the world of micro transactions and gacha games, there are far more that are actually decent as games then there ever has been.

I've been playing Monster Hunter Now and I've been really impressed with it. The entirety of the Riot games are good games with reasonable microtransactions. Vampire Survivors, my go-to "I am offline" game, is the exact same game on mobile as PC, save the fact that it's free and you have a choice to watch ads for marginal farming speedups (which can be disabled if you buy literally any of their ~$1.50 DLC expansions, which are hilariously large considering their price). Fucking Warframe is coming to/already on (?) mobile.

I genuinely can't say mobile games have ever been in a better place than today, despite the existence of the shovelware P2W games that continue to roll out.

I purchased It Takes Two for some $12 or something during a Steam sale. I was disappointingly surprised when I discovered it was an EA published game and on their launcher, even through Steam. I wasn't happy about it, but I shrugged; I have an origin account from back in the SW:ToR days, so I'll just log in.

I punch in my info, correctly remembering both my email and old password, and am met with a 2FA screen. No problem, I have access to the email, so I load it up, wait a couple minutes, and nothing comes in. I press "resend authentication" just in case, stand up, get a drink, use the washroom, sit down, nothing. I hit resend again, start googling the status of the 2FA servers and see some complaints about the time it takes to get a 2FA from them in old forum posts. 30 minutes later, nothing.

I load up a torrent client, find a repack of the game, begin torrenting it, finish it, install it and start playing. Half of the time my girlfriend and I had to enjoy the game right now is gone, but we played and enjoyed it none the less. I refund the game on Steam. We finish, head out to supper since we agreed earlier to meet some friends, and I'm sitting at the table when my phone buzzes. I've received an email providing me my 2FA key for the EA launcher, 4 hours after originally requested. In this time I was easily able to pirate, install, play and finish a session of the game I was logging in to play, and as a kicker, refund the original purchase through Steam.

Piracy is a symptom, not a cause, and these garbage clients are just another facet of the infection.

What a misleading title. Actively developed live games that started more than six years ago is not the insinuation that this title suggests. People aren't spending 60% of their gaming time playing 6+ year old content.

Vampire Survivors.

The android version is free with optional benefits for watching ads. If you buy any of the paid DLC (~$2 per DLC?) you are given a menu option to disable the "watch an ad for free shit?" prompts, but they're hardly in the way if you don't want to pay a cent. Playable offline, controller supported and is tbh a massive game.

Suicide Squad bombed so hard that it's killing every indie game under their umbrella.

Is this that "trickle down economics" I keep hearing so much about?