• 0 Posts
  • 331 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

help-circle
  • If you are comfortable with games that are not technically classified as freeware yet, but functionally, they probably should be… then emulation of older consoles is a great way to go too. While they are certainly not “legal”, I don’t think anyone playing them has ever gotten in trouble. Only the people that try to make money off of it find that the console companies are motivated enough to shut them down. Otherwise, it doesn’t feel super risky to just play stuff. Just stick with games that are impossible to pay for if you want to be completely safe. There was a ton of good games on 16 and 32 bit consoles that you literally couldn’t pay for now if you tried. And even as new as gamecube is getting pretty hard to possibly pay money for.

    Newer stuff, I only feel ok emulating what I actually own. But as time goes on, newer and newer stuff becomes the new old stuff. A pretty wide variety of console emulators for android are in a good place now.

    I do recommend a controller though if you go this route. Ideally one of the ones that also holds your phone for you. Either by making it into a switch/steamdeck kind of shape, or the ones that hold the phone above an xbox style controller. Both are good.



  • Magic DosBox, not a game. But in combination with https://www.old-games.com/ , it’s a pretty good selection of all the old games made for Dos back in the wild west of indie games back before they were even called that. There are, of course, also old commercial games that have transitioned to freeware now too. Should be able to find lots of awesome games there. Moraff adventure games are particularly interesting. Bit of a steep learning curve, but great to come back to now and then. The site has reviews of every game and sorts them into categories. It can be a little overwhelming just due to the sheer number of available games, but take it slow, and work your way through. It’s worth the time investment to find gems.


  • Hmm, I was gonna say moonshades, last time I played it there wasn’t much for things you could buy. But when I look now, there is. So I can’t say for sure how unnecessary any of it would feel now, but it wasn’t necessary back when I played last. It’s kind of like the old early 3D party dungeon/maze crawlers where you use the arrow keys to walk one “block” at a time. There is only 2 party members in this. So you still sort of get the group synergy stuff, but each character is a bigger share of the team power. You could do a tank/healer thing or magic damage/melee damage, or not have either one focus on anything in particular.

    I hope it’s still not necessary to buy anything, it was a good game. But the store is pretty comprehensive now, so that has me worried.


  • Cardinal Quest 2, it is possible to spend money, but honestly spending money would be worse than earning the stuff yourself. I still probably gave them some money, since I think the game was free. You don’t have to have played Cardinal Quest 1, it’s pretty story light. Kind of like playing Diablo 2 if you never played Diablo 1. Kinda the same game with much better execution after learning some lessons. The game itself is pretty easy, but there are optional challenges you can take on that can be as their name implies. Lots of replayability as there are many character classes and 4 different stories. Over time you’ll likely want to beat each story with each class. Mostly cuz it keeps track, lol.


  • Grim Quest and Grim Tides. Two games by the same person. I haven’t played Grim tides yet, but it’s also free. Grim Quest is not a particularly large game, but I’ve still managed to play it over many years. I did a full run of each difficulty one by one. There is a bit to learn before it feels easy and casual, but it does get there. To be fair, I try to play it without dying. If I let myself die, it would be alot more casual even from the start. Dying is not heavily penalized on default settings, but you can alternately choose to play hardcore. Otherwise dying usually just means you gained less money for that run, and didn’t make the game any harder. The game only gets harder when you successfully clear a dungeon. You can also just exit the unfinished dungeon without dying and keep most of what you have acquired so far on that run, minus a small fee for quitting the dungeon.

    There are preset difficulty options, but you can also craft your own custom difficulty. There are things you could spend money on, I think it may have started out with ads. But I consider games with ads that you can pay to get rid of as basically a free demo, and getting rid of ads is the purchase price if you like the game. So they don’t deter me if they don’t basically break the game to add ads to it, or affect the flow of the game whether the ads are there or not.



  • Andor’s Trail, it’s barely recogniseable as a “phone” game, other than that it does indeed run on phones. I don’t remember if it had ads or anything, been taking it from phone to phone for over 10 years now. I don’t think it had ads or anything. It’s open source, but has a pretty consistent feel despite having like 50+ contributors so far.

    It’s an adventure RPG. The low level experience might be best with a bit of grinding, but… casual grinding… lol. I kind of just wander around collecting “meat” until I feel strong enough to leave the areas near town and set out on the rest of the adventure. But there has been alot more work around town since the last time I started a new character. So it might feel more natural now.


  • Nowadays, it is exactly as complex as it sounds. There is a ton of blending, pitch and playrate tweaking, separate modifiers for current rpm and how much the accelerator is currently depressed. And yeah, like hundreds of recorded samples from the real car when possible, or a similar sounding car when not possible.

    We are probably on the verge of getting to a point where a rough simulation might soon be able to take over for this process. It won’t sound as good for a while still, but it will be cheaper and faster soon. And as time goes on, it’ll get close enough to sounding right while continuing to decrease in cost and time taken to a point where it’ll be the only way to do it eventually



  • 2019, back in #avocadotoast days. When apparently we wasted our money on extravagances like “not the cheapest fruit/vegetables”. Which wasn’t even the case. We literally didn’t even do that, we 100% had to eat the cheapest fruit/vegetable, if we were lucky enough that any fruit or vegetable met our budget. They were so out of touch that even their attempt to find a minor extravangance they thought we could afford to waste money on but shouldn’t, was inaccessible.


  • Well, you got the answers you were looking for, here is a different answer. To your other implied question, how to not worry about dust getting in other holes.

    Main thing is to develop positive air pressure. You want more powered intake than powered exhaust.

    Use fans for all your filtered air intakes, ignore powered air exhaust, run it at lower fan speeds if you can. Air will get out fine. If you force the air in where you want it to go in, dust will only go into the easily removable filters, it won’t be on your components. Any extra hole in the case will just be exhausting the already filtered air. Then just remember to actually check and clean your filters. That’s the hard part. But if you clean them when they need to be cleaned, you will never have to actually clean the inside or the fans or components or anything else, just the filters.






  • Almost all of them. I rarely finish a game. For a variety of reasons, all added together. The closer I get to the end, the more I want to put it off if I’m enjoying a game, so I will keep finding more and more nuanced stuff to do instead. A new game comes out and I eventually completely forget one of the 10 games I’m currently actively playing when it temporarily becomes 11, then back down to 10. My friends stop playing a game, but my character relied on them… maybe I’ll just start over with a character that can solo. Maybe that game will just go on the pile of “not today, but I’ll play it soon”, until it’s been in the pile so long that there isn’t much point anymore.

    I should mention I am autistic and likely adhd but I haven’t got that diagnosed yet. So while some of this is probably normal behaviours, some of it probably isn’t too.


  • You said you tried the game, there is no special surprise that happens later into that makes the beginning worth it. Which is actually what I said, if you didn’t like the start, you won’t like the rest either. For the people who liked the game, it was good the whole way through. You didn’t, there is no secret you missed, you just didn’t like it, which is also what I said. The game is only well liked by a specific subset of people, you apparently are not in that subset. The second half of my post was also just one guess if you thought you should enjoy it but didn’t. There was no way for me to know you tried it when it was new, but then at least the first half of my post was the important part for you then.