With pretty much all of these types of games there’ll be a cheap deck that’s really powerful. You can build that and then spam it to climb the ranks and get more resources to buy another deck. Back when I tried out Master Duel it was the Salad deck. It was pretty fun; I liked it a lot and I had it made on day 1. No idea what it would be currently.

However the games are absolutely designed in a way to entice you to spend money. They will always be slightly frustrating to play without doing that. It’s hard for me to recommend any of them if you’re not wanting to spend money.

Thanks for sharing! This was an amazing read.

Unfortunately Temtem is a terrible game entirely due to Crema’s incompetence.

It’s actually impressive how consistently they make horrible decisions. If I had to summarize their attitude, it’s that you can’t criticize them because “Hey, we’re human, we make mistakes and when you criticize us it hurts our feelings”. And when I say you can’t, I mean it literally. They will suspend or ban you from whatever platform it is for saying anything they perceive as negative.

They take an “us vs them” attitude with their player base which results in the equivalent of Crema stuffing their fingers in their ears saying LALALALALA YOU’RE WRONG WE’RE RIGHT.

It’s a shame, because the foundation of the game, the battle system, is genius and a huge improvement over Pokémon. The game showed real promise for a long time. But Crema has been dropping the ball with every update for years and it’s long since entered its death spiral.

I often have multiple tabs with different inboxes open in Firefox. No extra features required AFAIK it just works.

Simply put, the attack is shorter and easier to understand than the nuanced defense.

Politicians can put “you’re against education!” in a 15 second attack ad on the radio/TV/a poster. It takes a short media appearance to explain the nuance. Which isn’t worth the time or money typically, since so few people will see it.

Especially since a huge section of our population gets 100% of its news from Fox, Newsmax, and other right wing media. That interview will never air there. In fact, those sources will repeat the party line of “you’re against education!”

Agreed. The author seems like a bummer of a person to me.

Collecting data on users is not inherently bad, there are lots of ways that data collection can be used to the user’s benefit.

If course in this day in age that is typically not the case and companies are normally collecting data at the detriment of the user but I really don’t see that with what Wrapped shows.

Plus it’s fun to see little metrics like how many times I listened to a song this year, or see how my listening habits changed as the year went by.

It’s just a fun and cute thing imo.

Mr. Happy if you like anything Final Fantasy! Excellent stuff and he goes deep into all lore.

Josh Strife Hayes also does a good job just in general.

I’m still sad that steamingpileofshit.com finally got killed. I think within the last year or two.

Used to redirect to steam.com since the old days when everybody hated Steam lol. It’s hugely improved now and I love everything that GabeN has done for the PC gaming community; Steam being a huge part of it.

But I still laugh a bit at the old days.

If you enjoyed FFXVI, it’s worth considering FFXIV.

It’s currently free to play through its first expansion and the second expansion will be free next year. So it’s a safe game to try from that perspective.

The producer of FFXIV is the same as FFXVI. His mentality has been that he’s wanted players who don’t want to play an MMO to be able to play through FFXIV’s story as if it were a mainline FF game. I’d say 95% of story content can be soloed at this point.

The two caveats are these: This is like playing through five full length JRPGs. To finish FFXIV’s story takes months. It’s easily 400+ hours of playtime imo.

The initial base game story, called A Realm Reborn or ARR is mediocre. It’s not bad, but the story quality spikes up in a big way at the first expansion and then never backs down. Even the end of ARR is really good, but it’s only decent up until then. However, after ARR is some of the best story writing I’ve ever had the pleasure to play. Shadowbringers and Endwalker in particular still bring tears to my eyes when I hear certain songs or rewatch some cutscenes. Truly a beautifully told story.

Spotify like many others here. Just haven’t had many issues with the program and it does what I want for a reasonable price.

Wanna give a big shout out to Nebula. It’s meant to be a YouTube-esque site but solely for educational content. I found it via LegalEagle but it has a ton of documentaries and other educational content creators. I believe my subscription is $5/year or something like that. Just insanely cheap for really high quality content.

I have the Disney+/Hulu bundle. I love Disney movies and with all the franchises they own now I feel it’s worthwhile. Hulu happens to have quite a few of my favorite shows and the bundle made it worthwhile to me.

Currently trying out YouTube premium and, I know this won’t be a popular opinion, but I think it’s worth it to me. I use a lot of YouTube and also chromecast it. While it’s possible for me to get ad blocked YouTube for free on mobile and cast it to my TV it’s… Cumbersome and unstable. I generally have the opinion that I don’t mind paying for services I enjoy using so… For now, gonna stick with YouTube premium. Just so much less of a headache.

AmazonPrime but only for Amazon’s services really, the few shows that are on Prime Video for free are a nice bonus though.

And currently I pay for Netflix and share it with my family but the very first second Netflix cracks down on that I’m dropping it and have told my family as such for years. Already started torrenting most shows I kept up with via Netflix in preparation.

The only other one I consider is HBO… But there just hasn’t been enough of an allure thus far.