Pixel

As someone that’s put a lot of time into platform fighters and grew up on Nickelodeon, the character designs in that game are so void of personality and it makes me sad. Aang barely moves like the avatar, he just kind of generically slings around elemental attacks. It’s really frustrating how much potential they let languish

Multiversus has that overproduction stank all over it, so it being this void of sauce as it were isn’t surprising, but NASB is the one I feel actively kind of betrayed by

The sad thing is like, it’s an INCREDIBLY mature piece of software. It’s well regarded for a reason. But if a piece of software requires that I fight with it to get it to behave how I want, that maturity has zero value at all. It kind of feels like a microcosm of Linux itself like 10-15 years ago, when I was tinkering with it in middle and high school. It’s functional, but it asks you as a user to change how you think about using something like it in the first place while also forcing you to make concessions that seldom seem worthwhile.

And if Linux at large can get there, with things like proton and flatpak and Wayland and mature desktop environments and whatever else, gimp can too. But it seems like it’s got a contributor base of people that like it’s weird eccentricities, and take the UX development companies like Adobe and affinity (now canva) have invested and just shirked it on principal. And like, I get having an aversion to those sorts of companies/projects/developments, there’s a lot of dark patterns there that are concerning. But I also feel like the kind of Linux user that defends and possibly enjoys GIMP in its current state is content fighting with their machine and the software on it, and forgets that there’s value in taking joy in interacting with your computer. Good UI and good UX are implicitly valuable (not to mention the accessibility benefits, but that’s a whole different conversation), and I feel the FOSS space forgets all of that completely. It’s a shame.

the UI for GIMP is so horrifically bad that I basically refuse to use it. Not like, on principal or anything, if it improves i’d be happy to give it a shot, but because every experience I’ve had with it has been pretty immediately negative, and finding solutions to problems I have seems more effort than its worth. I want gimp to be good, it’s a mature piece of software with a lot going for it, but it also feels like its design is kind of up its own ass, in a sense? It’s weird.

do chinese players keep their accounts on these servers from before the wipe? I’m a hearthstone player and I remember feeling so bad for the players that had invested all that time to build all those decks and collect all those cards and then suddenly they just poofed out of existence.

I don’t expect that data to have been preserved, but it’d be nice for the CN playerbase of blizz games to actually get their account back

Piggybacking on my genshin suggestion, another suggestion would be Guild Wars 2? It’s world is more open than most MMOs and since it’s over a decade old there’s a ton of content there. There’s a lot as a free2play player, but you can buy expansions if you want even more to explore, and I genuinely think gw2’s exploration is best-in-class. It’s also benefitted by being an old game in terms of old computers being able to run it, you’d probably have to play on low graphics but it’ll certainly run. Hope that’s more useful if you dont wanna do gacha stuff like genshin!

that’s totally fair. I think you can do most of the story and exploration stuff without grinding much but if even that is too much grinding it’s probably not worth the effort. Hope you find what you’re looking for!

In all honesty, genshin impact is a pretty reasonable facsimile of that sort of game. It’s really grown into its own, and it’s really fun and absolutely massive

That said, I’d only advise it if you are 100% confident you won’t engage in any of the gacha systems – you can play and enjoy the game with the free characters the game gives you, but once you start engaging with the gacha that can be a really dangerous slippery slope. If that’s something that you could fall prey to, I wouldn’t recommend it. But if you think you can play it without investing any money (or, really, more money than you can afford, I don’t know your financial situation) it’s actually a really great time, and the story’s only gotten better as it’s gone on. There’s definitely some stipulations with it, but it’s worth experiencing if you feel like those are acceptable

IIRC the quest 2 is jailbroken, if you can get your hands on one secondhand might be worth looking around to see what your options are

i hate facebook as much as the next person but the products definitely aren’t worse, I just figure that iteration on VR tech is really hard. The quest 2 and quest 3 are, genuinely, kind of incredible devices from a technological perspective, they’re just hamstrung by faceook. that’s bad but I don’t think it’s fair to say the products are specifically worse when oculus was acquired so early on

I used gog galaxy 2.0 until steam support died one day then switched to playnite. Took a lot more configuring but it’s p robust and I’m techy enough to have figured it out, I like where I landed but galaxy 2.0, if it works again, is a great option.