This kinda flies in the face of what I heard the Palworld devs are: a rag-tag handful of nobodies on a budget of $0 making a Steam game in their free time.

I heard they didn’t even use a version control system because they didn’t know how to use one, they just put a copy of the code repo on a flash drive once a day, and when they ran out of drives, they went to the store to buy more.

If even a slightly less embellished version of half of what I’ve heard is true, I wager none of these people got anywhere near a lawyer before putting this game out.

Mario Wonder is a fantastic game, but it has absolutely no business being on this list.

I would classify it in the same mental bucket where I put activity and workout monitor apps that track steps or calorie goals.

Now, whether it actually produces consistent, net positive health results, I can’t say either way.

I’m not into the culture so I didn’t want to lean too heavily on this one source. It’s good to have some corroboration!

“Tubular” I can at least trace where it came from. It’s surfer lingo. Sometimes when you catch a wave, the wave crests all the way over you and encloses into a tube. Surfing through that is supposedly the most euphoric thing about the sport. “Tubular” is thus “anything that makes you feel the way a surfer surfing through a tube-shaped wave feels”. Thrill, wonder, excitement, etc.

I have no idea where tf “based” came from. Wiktionary suggests that it ultimately comes from the chemical definition of “base” (i.e. the opposite of an acid). “Freebasing” is a way of converting certain drugs, particularly cocaine, into smokable form by converting them from acid to base. Rapper Lil B. is alleged to have coined “based” to describe his lifestyle as someone who is unafraid to be himself as an individual (which, I guess, included smoking crack). This supposedly filtered into 4chan to become an alt-right slogan for “admirable person who bravely maintains alt-right opinions in spite of adversity” (“based and redpilled”), and later was claimed by groups outside the alt-right to simply mean, “someone with admirable opinions”.