Stock market derivatives are essentially all betting. You won’t get someone to bet with no date to resolve the bet: after all, you might just hold on to it until you kick the bucket.

‘Antiyoy’ is a simple strategy game, fit well for shortish sessions. Free and with minimal permissions. Iirc ‘Antiyoy Classic’ is offline-only, while the regular one has multiplayer.

‘Diplicity’ is a multiplayer-only (afaik) strategy like ‘Risk’, but with zero element of chance, only diplomacy. However the games can be rather slow, from what I’ve heard.

‘Fabularium’ is an app for running text-adventure games — one of many such apps, but I like it because it supports modern game formats. You’ll need to download the games themselves elsewhere, mainly from ifdb.org — there are a lot of games, some of them with quite novel mechanics.

‘Hocus’ is a geometrical puzzle with impossible shapes. Iirc additional levels are paid.

I’ve heard that ‘Mindustry’ is a good open-source clone of ‘Factorio’, but idk how it plays on a phone screen.

In web development, it’s customary to create a user named something like Constantine Constantinovich Constantinopolsky and see that the interface accommodates it everywhere.

I struggle to choose a name that doesn’t stick out like a sore thumb

A buddy of mine played many Western fantasy RPGs, and christened the characters with various elegant and dreamy names, until he started ‘World of Warcraft’ and met two guys called ‘Foot in my Mouth’ and ‘Get Yer Hands Off’. After that, his characters were named something like ‘Bitten by a Shark’.

Some racing games, and in particular the third-party app Crew Chief, allow the player to either set a name or choose an addressing like ‘dude’. I don’t like using a personal name, so my racing engineer says stuff like “an incident in turn five, mate”.

Actually, when I played ‘OpenTTD’, i.e. the remake of ‘Transport Tycoon’, I wanted the game to broadcast telemetry of my enterprise’s economy, so I could dump it into a spreadsheet and gawk at the numbers. This indeed could’ve also been a second-monitor activity (or rather, second computer since I played on a tablet).

Try ‘Wreckfest’: it’s similar to ‘Burnout’, but with better physics. Also ‘Circuit Superstars’ for a top-down racer with decent physics, pit stops, and multiplayer.

There are also ‘The Crew 2’ and ‘The Crew Motorfest’, ‘Tokyo Xtreme Racer’, ‘Asphalt Legends’, ‘Formula Legends’, ‘iRacing Arcade’, and of course ‘Forza Horizon’ 4/5 — but I haven’t played any of these, so ymmv.

SuperTuxKart is alright, from what I understand. They’re also making a new version apparently. Though I’m not into karting arcades, so dunno for sure how it compares.

When I was replaying ‘HL2’ around ten years ago, I ran around the whole map looking for where I can get outside of the plot course, especially in the slower parts of the levels. This culminated in me driving the hoverboat up a three-meter-high wooden platform, falling from that platform myself, and not being able to climb up again to get the boat. After which I had to run from the attack helicopter on foot, and swim by myself later on that level.

I use about the same approach in the original ‘Deus Ex’, which I’ve been replaying recently: investigating every nook and cranny, being 100% stealthy, trying to go where the game shouldn’t allow me to be. I actually found an exit from a scripted part of a level where only one path is normally possible — though there was nothing to do outside of that part. The game also gives experience points for getting into some remote or secret places.

Check out Wreckfest. It’s mostly basically rallycross with plenty of damage. The physics is better than in Burnout, afaik. The sequel game was just recently either released or announced.

Racing sims typically support telemetry that can be used to display info for the driver or overall race info. E.g. a dashboard on a phone mounted to the wheel stand, or a realtime online display and timing. People even make devices like wind simulator or ass-shaker for immersion.

Check out SimHub for customizable widget software that supports many games.

Check out the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, and think of that instead the next time.

I don’t quite understand what ‘stop development’ means here. Do you mean developing support for OpenGL in the GPU drivers?

Someone else said that Apple want everyone to use Metal on MacOS, and don’t properly support OpenGL. Which seems like a bigger problem than absence of some variants of Wine.

don’t think it is such a pain point that it’s a frequent issue to prevent further use

I don’t have statistics, but:

• I myself didn’t do any research specifically on this matter, and only learned of these problems through osmosis by randomly reading various threads on Reddit’s r/all

• I installed one single game from a repack by FitGirl

• my experience right away exactly mirrored that of which I’ve read previously

I don’t have problems with FitGirl using this compression, in fact I find it fascinating that such an algorithm exists. However, it obviously doesn’t meet standards to which a commercial publisher or storefront are held.

Great rejoinder there. “I didn’t research how stuff works, but I have an irrelevant rebuttal, and when people point out that it’s not how stuff works, I will reply ‘alright’, that will really put them in their place.”

Do you know how law works? There’s no law against Newell accepting cash from Russia. Whereas, if the US wanted, they would easily make a law saying it’s forbidden to accept any kind of payment from Russia. Steam operates entirely within what the law says.

Are you aware of what you yourself wrote in the original comment?

Russia is sanctioned and they are not supposed be able to make purchases at all.

Explain to me why they’re supposed to not be able to make purchases.

Oh really? How come it installed fine the second time from the same file?

It’s well-known that installation of FitGirl’s repacks can fail, and the recommendation is exactly that one don’t touch the computer while it’s going on, and retry again if it fails. Mock yourself for not knowing this, as this very thread contains more ‘anecdotes’ about the same.

It’s some kinda super wonky compression that gives extreme space savings but is so fragile that the result isn’t guaranteed, which is precisely why it isn’t widely used.

There are no ‘Western sanctions’ that prohibit from selling stuff to all Russians. Visa and MasterCard stopped doing cross-border transactions by their own decision, and most Russian banks are cut off from SWIFT. That’s all, aside from more individual and sector-specific sanctions.

Russia is sanctioned and they are not supposed be able to make purchases at all.

Might want to try finding sources for this, because you’ll discover this is untrue.

Wow, very mature.

“Developers should do compression like FitGirl does.”

“Oh no I didn’t mean developers should do compression like FitGirl does.”

At that point perhaps it’s easier to just not use FitGirl’s releases.

winetricks should be able to install all of those dependencies, including versions of .net and vcredist. But it’s a terminal script, so requires the environment variables that Wine uses for the paths and stuff.

do an extremely bad job at basic tasks like compression

I’ve installed one game from FitGirl so far. It took three hours to unpack while hammering all the cpu cores, failed, and required another three-hour go to install properly.

So you’re saying that all games should install like this?

Well, the game uses portable bytecode for the ‘Z-machine’ interpreter, and there are dozens of third-party interpreters for it. You can run these games on your phone, no need to compile them.

Morbius

Fittingly, produced by Columbia Pictures, which is owned by Sony, and distributed by Sony Pictures Releasing.

‘A AA AAA AAAA’

There’s a small strategy game called ‘Antiyoy’, with simplistic mechanics, which works for short-ish games: you can do a stint while waiting in queue or such. Iirc ‘Antiyoy Classic’ is entirely offline, while the regular one has an online mode. Both have no ads and near zero permissions, unless something changed since I last played.

You can try ‘Diplicity’ for an online strategy a-la ‘Risk’ where you bargain and do alliances with other players, until one of you wins the whole thing. There’s no randomness. It’s an implementation of the board game ‘Diplomacy’.

‘Hocus’ is a nice spatial puzzle with impossible geometry. Iirc it requires payment for additional levels, but has no ads.

The app ‘Fabularium’ runs text adventures, i.e. games where you type your actions and read the description of what happens. There are a myriad of such adventure games, many with novel mechanics. You’ll need to download the games themselves separately, mainly from IFDb.org. ‘Fabularium’ isn’t the only app that runs text adventures, but I like it and it supports more formats than some other apps do.

OpenTTD is fine on a tablet — though controls aren’t specially adapted, they just emulate a mouse. On a phone screen the controls are too small and everything is crowded.

Good question, especially considering that the site is owned by Fandom, Inc. now.

I’ve seen several sites dedicated to old games go down in just a few recent years.

It’s just that I made a resolve recently-ish that I need to properly get into stories in games. Unlike back in the day, when I played through ‘Half-Life’ 1 and 2 and gathered pretty much nothing about the plot. ‘Disco Elysium’ seems to be the type of a game where a lot of the story is in the details dropped by the characters, reading materials, etc.

I’ve been recently replaying the original ‘Deus Ex’, and had Denton crawl around every level for hours, reading each newspaper and poster he comes across. The papers do in fact frame the main story, clarifying the relations between factions and such.

An extreme case of this is apparently the ‘Elder Scrolls’ universe, with which the community gathered sizeable lore and history that goes several layers deep. I’ve never played the games (perhaps for the best), and only happened upon a tangential discussion about this, but the impression was that they’re deciphering it like ‘Ulysses’.

Stuff about the setting that I learn from the characters. Perhaps you have better memory than me.

Steam has notes built in

This is great to know. I need to see if Steam accepts my copy of the game, for which I didn’t pay to the company after what they did to the developers.

But he’s a professional detective, presumably with the skill to gather information and put it together. Meanwhile I’m a professional scatterbrain who writes down notes for programming projects that take more than a day. It would be unrealistic for me to roleplay as him, especially if I step away from the game for a couple weeks and forget most of the details. If I can code while hungover, he probably can do detective stuff while hungover.

I love everything about ‘Disco Elysium’ in isolation. Art style? Gorgeous. Grimy noiry mood, right up my alley. I love isometric RPGs, though it’s been a while since I played any. Writing is great, from what I’ve heard. Novel mechanics, probably beautiful.

Only, I get into a couple dialogs and realize I need a second computer on the desk, to type up notes. Ain’t no way I’m remembering any of that, especially since I tend to take long breaks in a playthrough. And I just decided in recent years that I need to pay closer attention to stories in games, which I neglected to do back in my youth.

I’ve put twenty notes into the phone (with swipe-typing, thankfully), and that ended my initial experience.

AI is a hallucination engine

Whiplashed by one of the works by great bassist and producer Bill Laswell being inadvertently mentioned in discussion of AI.

Dunno about the artstyle: a lot of 90s to early-2000s 3d shooters had that grimy look, perhaps to show off the textures. But the jacket and the casually lowered gun definitely factored into the recognition.

Haven’t played ‘Max Payne’ in twenty years, completely forgot what it looks like in-game, and still the first thought from the screenshot was “Max Payne”.