TBF, when it comes to The Sims specifically, that’s the same as EA’s model: a bunch of DLC/expansions you don’t have to buy.

As an RPG player, people kept saying I should play Fallout, but I never have because it always looked more like a shooter than an RPG, and I want to play an actual RPG, not a shooter with RPG elements (especially because I despise shooters).

I live in one of the most rural states in the country, where loads to haul are generally large and the posted speed limit on the highway is usually 75 mph, and the de facto highway speed is usually 5-10 mph above that. No truck that can barely push 70 is gonna keep up with that. On top of that, you’re dealing with ice and snow on the roads half the year, so you’ll need to be able to deal with that too.

2 was the best for actual fighting gameplay, 3 had the best outside content (good campaigns, extra modes, and create-a-fighter with actual unique movesets), IMO. 4 just felt underwhelming (they gutted pretty much everything but a brutally short story mode and arcade ladder and then PVP) and had the real most broken guest characters (the Star Wars characters). 5 is the “black sheep” of the franchise but I actually still enjoyed the short time I had with it, I liked the new characters that weren’t copies/descendants of the old cast. 6 felt mid to me, don’t have much to say about it since I played it even less than 5.

Or Meta Knight in Brawl or Bayonetta in Smash 4, haha.

Being super smart and super evil are NOT mutually exclusive. Intelligence =|= morality.

I’m slowly converting my dad on it but the rest of my family likely sees me the same way, lol.

This won’t last long. It’s too public now. Google will find a way to kill it and force their AI on you as much as possible.

Linus himself just seems to give off that “nice guy on camera, exact opposite behind the scenes” kind of vibe. I’ve seen him get a bit riled up on podcast videos and it really comes off like he’s holding back. Perhaps the employee’s story was all too believable from others who get that perception of him. So I could see how the defamation threat would be like him/the company to try to show “we’re really angry and could do more but we’re gonna hold our temper”.

I’ve brought it up before with /e/, that because it’s based in Europe it tends to focus on the European market, IMO too much so. Lots of Europe-exclusive phones supported, barely any US-available phones that support tech like 5G (which is not available in Europe). If you want 5G in the US, you’re pretty much stuck with the Pixel or the Fairphone, and like you said, you also won’t find the Fairphone in a US store (though you can order one from /e/'s website in the US). While I did buy a Murena One (which is a cheap Chinese OEM) in the short time they were selling them in the US market on their website a couple years ago and I’m using it now, good luck finding a US carrier that will support it (T-Mobile was the only one that would) or a repair shop that will touch it if it breaks. I’ve dropped it a couple times and have a large area of dead pixels on the bottom of the screen, but nobody can get a replacement screen for it.

Exactly. Until around 2005 with the advent of affordable HDTVs and the war between HD-DVD and Blu-Ray, anything more than what came stock with your TV, which was usually standard definition picture and stereo sound, was something of a luxury. Sound bars were only really starting to become a popular thing.

I’m guessing they made significant changes, but although I didn’t think this game was too bad the first time around, I don’t have too much hope for it. The only successful revival of a game after being taken down temporarily that I can think of is Final Fantasy XIV.

Seriously, if I hear “X, formerly known as Twitter”, one more time… It’s been over a year. If people don’t know the name has changed by now, I don’t know what will help them.

The term “dark pattern” refers to any deceptive practice, no matter how small or insignificant it may seem, that online websites, apps, etc use to get people to do the site/app’s desired behavior, such as in this case, not cancel their Prime subscription. Not all of these examples may apply in Amazon’s case, but some examples would be making the fields or buttons for canceling or keeping your subscriptions different colors or sizes, making the default choice to keep the subscription, making you view a bunch of ads to keep the sub or go through a bunch of other pages before canceling, or hiding the cancelation option in fine print in a corner of the site. The “dark” part means that the average person usually doesn’t notice the deceptive nature of the practices.

The eternal excuse of those who profit or benefit from children getting involved in things they shouldn’t.

+1 for Odysee here. Some give it a pass due to it being a haven for people whose content gets kicked off YouTube, but the same is true for just about any alternative out there, including many instances of PeerTube. With PeerTube you have greater control by being able to self-moderate and federate if you run your own instance, but that takes time, effort and resources you may not have. Odysee has a greater variety of viewpoints and video categories/topics on the front page than many other competitors such as Rumble, which is basically just right-wing YouTube (and IIRC that’s what Rumble is meant to be) and it has a nice balance of enough content to find new stuff to watch every day and not being so overwhelmingly big that you’ll get lost in the vast ocean of content. If you just want to find a place to upload videos, join a PeerTube instance that seems good to you or use Odysee.

Yeah, I’m a Jerboa user too. The left-right swipe is my only criticism as well, mainly because it can be sensitive when you’re just trying to scroll up or down.

There have been some generally well-received games since Adventure 2, like Generations, which you mentioned, along with Colors, Mania, and Frontiers seems to be generally liked enough.

Some of them also worked on the recent release Penny’s Big Breakaway. More platforming, but not with quite the emphasis on speed.

Very few third-party games remain exclusive to one platform forever, so in those cases I’m usually content to just wait it out until the exclusivity deal is over then pick the game up on a platform I own. Sometimes the wait can be pretty long but I really don’t have much of a sense of FOMO most of the time.