Some controllers are almost integral to the experience. Intellivision and Colecovision come to mind. Having said that, emulation and modern controls are generally great, and generally my preference.

Some might say it’s giving finger counting too much thought, others might say it’s a tangent too serious for dad jokes, I say… the efficiency gains seem to come from a change in technique for how a count is stored.

Base-10 finger counting technique just accumulates, the number of fingers held up is the count.

Base-12 uses a pointer (your thumb) to point to a value (a knuckles or finger segment).

Base-2 uses a finger up or down to show a place value as one or zero.

You could tattoo numbers on your forearm so all five fingers from your other hand could point to a value for up to five more places to point.

ISO 8601 ftw!

Filters out the casuals.

Someone else who knows how to finger count in base-12 and binary!

I think the binary one I learned as a joke, show someone they are number four.

The base-12 was an explanation for how the ancient Sumerians finger counted, using the other hand’s fingers for groups of 12, leading to base 60 (5×12).

I have the same problem with binary counting practically though, and using a modified Sumerian system (both hands to 12) gets you to 144, which is plenty for anything where finger counting is actually useful.

One other thing, I use the finger bones rather than the knuckles, little easier but same idea.

Still, Indie games continue to be developed. This will be gaming’s salvation when the big studios are fully committed to squeezing every loot box/DLC/microtransaction out of “Live service” forever games.

I don’t think Clash of Candy Shadow Tanks is going anywhere, but there will always be the next Stardew Valley passion project.

On that note, I think Indy’s have embraced a retro aesthetic because you don’t need a whole art team rendering your graphics. Combine this with AAA games being rather formulaic (can’t risk a big studio budget trying unproven ideas) and I think you have an audience willing to accept older graphics in retro games.

Not mobile, but I remember TekSavvy blasting the CRTC head for having some pints with his buddy, the CEO of Bell. You know, as the head of an impartial regulatory body should.

https://www.iphoneincanada.ca/2021/06/24/teksavvy-blasts-crtc-chair-for-having-beers-with-bell-exec-at-pub/

I find comparing mobile prices to Australia is more apples to apples, Australia has similar population density as Canada, with a similar urban/rural divide.

Granted Australia is cheaper than Canada as well, but it’s not as outrageous as some other comparison you could make.

True. Any random unverified instance could be set up just to harvest data from the Fediverse.

…and at least a little Lemmy.

Honestly, Heroic and Lutris arguably give a superior experience to inumerable windows installers…when they work. Which is pretty often.

I think that the best solution is probably “best practices” and defederatiom used to enforce some sort of minimal Code of Conduct wrt the actual mechanics of running an instance.

Otherwise, the only other way I could see to address this is to lump some data at the instance level. I.e. each instance simply reports a total of upvotes and downvotes from it’s instance, and you just have to trust the instances to behave. There might be some checks to make sure the vote totals are plausible.