Agree that the actual monster designs looked dull. Funnily enough in a “new pokemon” kind of way. Other monster collecting games like SMT and Digimon seem to manage to produce more interesting monsters/pals/demons.

Have they ever got the physics right on a SMB game when releasing on a non-gamecube platform?

Control is a really special game. I only got around to playing it last year but it was a wild ride!

I hope Alan Wake 2 goes on sale later this year so I can scoop that up. I got about halfway through AW1 (after getting it for ~£2 on steam) but the gameplay was too repetitive for me in the end.

I don’t really rate zsh personally. I find the additional features/syntactic sugar it adds are a poor tradeoff for lower portability. I also end up changing the settings in my zshrc to make it behave more like bash.

Stephen Fry the comedian/tv presenter is also a huge linux advocate. Specifically Ubuntu. He’s been using it for decades at this point.

I don’t think 3 is that hard if you are familiar with Press Turn but the Matador fight is a filter for people who have not learned buffs/debuffs. All of the games tend to get easier as you progress.

Persona is heavier on story, has dating sim elements and operates off a calendar system to progress the story. Hard to explain the calendar system but essentially events are timeboxed and there can be dead time if you finish the main mission quickly. Persona games try to emulate an anime.

SMT is the original series. Easier to explain: it’s like pokemon with mythological creatures and a light philosophy story. I don’t know if I’d recommend starting with SMT 1 or 2, even if they are arguably some of the best in the series.

Edit: I also prefer mainline to Persona. Should reiterate that Devil Survivor is definitely worth checking out. Not patient gamers but the new release of SMTV would also be a good starting point.

SMT1 has a great intro but it is confusing and does not hold your hand. Some mechanics are straight up broken so you can steamroll the game if you know about them (electric bullets). All of the games are like that to some extent. SMT2 is less confusing and might have the best story in the series.

I’d say SMT4 on the 3DS is a good starting point if you wanted to dive in head-first to the mainline series. Otherwise maybe Persona 3 Reloaded for the Persona games.

Edit: A curveball good entry to the series would be Devil Survivor for the Nintendo DS. It’s extremely easy to emulate with modern phones, physical copies are not as expensive as the 3DS games (but still expensive) and there is no region lock on DS so you have some lattitude to shop around if you want to use original hardware. In some ways that game does Persona better than the Persona games do, all while having a classic SMT mainline story of law vs chaos.

If you want to experience travelling back in time with an operating system then OpenBSD feels like a time capsule, albeit one which is still being maintained. I realise it is not linux but using it is very similar to what linux was like before 2010.

I think the LARP elements of this distro put me off trying it back in the day. Calling the package manager a “Grimoire” and having to “cast” packages to install them was just too much for me.

This will be terrible but I’ll watch it. The story in the games is soap opera tier but somehow it works as part of the full package.

Agree, it’s literally all I need for my browser in terms of add-ons. NoScript is nice to have but not essential.

The level requirement is offputting! I’ll need to progress another 50+ levels in the base game to be able to play this DLC. Maybe this is a sign that I ought to finish the main game (or at least get much closer to the end) before jumping on the hype train and grabbing this DLC!

In my opinion the intermediate stuff on windows is just as conceptually complex but presented with nested GUIs. People internalise that complexity out of familiarity.

A boring dystopia

Windows -> MacOS -> Windows -> Ubuntu (2012) -> Arch (2013) -> Gentoo (2016)

Gentoo cured my distrohopping

I used scoop as my package manager on windows. It even lets you install gnu coreutils like ls, cat and find to run in powershell.

Emacs is the only app you’ll ever need once you’ve mastered it.

Actually just finished the game last night and didn’t like the ending that much. At least the ride was fun!

Discord is closed source and has no way to easily archive/record conversations. This makes it unsuitable for a lot of open source projects who need a chat client. I’ve not used much Discord but potentially the “gamer” culture might put people off.

Matrix seems good but it’s not quite there yet from what I can tell. It’s got way more features than IRC but none of them seem to work that well. Like a swiss army knife full of blunt tools.

For IRC I’m on the libera.chat server. Usually hanging out in the gentoo channels since I use that distro. There are a lot of different channels for the various devs, user tech support, niche uses like gaming* and also offtopic chat channels.

*More gamers tend to use other linux distros for some reason