Lemmy is my main social media account. I also switched from Reddit when Spez killed third party apps, and I won’t go back. I use Sync for Lemmy on my phone and tablet. I paid for the lifetime Ultra account, because that’s how much of a “fuck you” I wanted to give Spez. I’ll gladly pay the $100 for an alternative ad-free app than use Reddit’s free app.

I also use Imgur, although it’s been suffering from enshittification ever since Sarah and the team sold it. I can’t even save a post without getting a pop-up asking to subscribe to the user or follow similar content tags. Or downvote without being asked if I want to block the user or related tags. Just let me do the thing and move on! Stop trying to customize my experience! I’m still able to block their ads, thanks to my VPN service, but they built a dedicated ad space at the bottom of the app that I can’t make go away. So a section of the bottom of my Imgur screen is unusable black space. I miss being able to use my full screen to browse images.

I still have Facebook, but only because everyone I know from my childhood until now is there and it’s my main way of staying in touch with people. If I dump Facebook, I’ll have practically no one left in my life, except for my sister, wife, and maybe two friends. If I need social engagement concerning something going on in my life, I’ll post it there. But I don’t use it much.

I have LinkedIn and spent years keeping my profile up to date and super detailed, expecting to need some good references and a solid history of experience and accomplishments. But then I retired at 38 years old and found out I don’t need to work anymore, so it’s just been collecting dust for the last 2 years now. I still get the occasional request to connect from someone offering to help me find a job (I’m a veteran), but I don’t need their assistance. I’m quite happy being retired young.

I have a Discord server I built for my closest friends to stay in touch, but only 2 people regularly interact on it. I subscribed to maybe 30+ other random servers, but I mute pretty much all of them so I’m not inundated with Discord notifications all the time.

I have Twitch, but mostly used it to stream the games I’m playing when I’m bored. I’m happy if I get 1 or 2 views. I do it just for the fun of it, not to build a following or anything.

I have NextDoor, but there are thousands of people in my town who use it regularly, so it’s hard to stay in touch with my “neighbors.” I mostly ignore it unless I’m trying to find suggestions for something local.

I made a Bluesky account last year; got an invite from a friend before it opened up to everyone. But I hardly ever used Twitter in the past. I always felt like it was pointless unless you were a celebrity with tons of followers. So I’m having trouble thinking of ways to use Bluesky now.

I have Instagram, but only because Facebook merged my account with Instagram when they bought it. I’ve never used it, not even to browse others’ content there.

I made a Snapchat account in high school, but never used it. That was over 20 years ago. Back then, Snapchat was just used to share selfies, and I didn’t like taking selfies so I had no use for it. Is Snapchat still a thing?

I had a MySpace account when I was a teenager, but I guess the site got sold sometime in the past decade or two. I kinda forgot about it, and the last time I went to check it out, it was a totally different site and didn’t recognize my login anymore.

I made an account on Pixelfed last year to share pictures, but I don’t really have anything to share right now. I only remembered I had the account because I just now found their app in my phone.

I use Patreon, mostly just to follow a few people I know and support them.

I worked as an IT guy in the military, and we were explicitly banned from using TikTok when it became popular, because it was a Chinese spyware program and they didn’t want it stealing data on US military members. When you installed it, we found that it embedded itself in your phone in a way that was extremely difficult to fully remove, then granted itself full access to your phone and started trickling your data to Chinese servers. It was a massive security vulnerability, which is why President Biden pushed to block TikTok from the US. But the app was so popular, he got a lot of pushback and it never got blocked. It’s still wildly popular, but I’ll never touch that program.

Not at all. I believe the game was actually made for English audiences because the speaking animations seem to match the English subtitles and look like a bad dub in French. There is a lot of French in the background, but it’s more like immersive world details. The important stuff is either place names that are explicitly mentioned, like the Saint-Michel Rotunda in the first screenshot, or written in English. Heck, I think there’s more English in that first screenshot than French.

Yeah, that $950 was already 2 years of payments, which OP was complaining about “investing” in his games. Where are they coming up with an additional $200 per month?! At that point, why not just invest that $200/mo and keep enjoying your games?

EDIT: OP changed their math literally a minute after I posted this. It makes more sense now.

For Karl!

The Driller I regularly play with has a nasty habit of abandoning our group to go drill tunnels where we don’t need tunnels. He’s always looking to take shortcuts directly to his objective instead of following the caves.

Then, when we’re trying to run to the drop pod, Molly will just go straight up one of his tunnels in the ceiling, where we can’t follow. Then we’re frantically running around, trying to find another route to the drop pod without Molly’s flags.

Oh, and he fights every large bug with C4, nearly killing us all in the process.

I’ll get there one day… but it’ll be a while before I have the free time and motivation to slog through it again.

Good to know, thanks!

You’re absolutely correct, I am approaching it from the wrong mindset. The thing is, I like my crafting games to be chill sandbox games. I have ADHD and am easily distracted, so being dumped into a world where I’m struggling just to survive, and then finding threats everywhere while I’m trying to progress on a build or something… I find myself stressed and unable to focus on progression. So I prefer games that let me go at my own pace, without distractions from the task I’m focusing on.

With Subnautica, I don’t know where to go to progress without spending time exploring and getting distracted along the way. So it will take me hundreds of hours to actually complete the game; time that I rarely dedicate to any single game. And too much time if I’m not having fun along the way.

I’ve been meaning to give Techtonica another chance. I was enjoying it, but I tried to play it with a friend and he checked out early because the build menus and crafting mechanics were too complicated for him. Because of that, we switched to another game to play regularly and I never really got back to Techtonica. I agree with my friend that it was a bit complex at first, but I was enjoying figuring it out.

For me, games are strictly a form of entertainment. I play to escape reality and do something fun for a while. So when a game “treats you like an adult,” I feel like the fun is gone and now I’m stuck working just to gain a little bit of progress. I don’t get a sense of reward from that, I just get frustrated.

Especially if there are important events that you can miss. I used to be a completionist with my games (I still am, to a degree) and I wanted to explore every nook and cranny of a game to really enjoy every bit of effort the developers put into creating this world. But finding out a game takes 50+ hours to beat, and then realizing that I may have missed important details and that I’ll need to replay that lengthy game to find them again… no way. That’s too much effort. I mentally check out really quick.

I agree with you about The Outer Wilds. I think I’ve played about an hour of that game and I had no idea what I was doing or what the plot was about. Everyone kept saying it’s better if you go into it blind, so I didn’t read anything before playing and, well… I don’t know what I was playing. That’s another game on my list to give a second chance before I give up on it completely.

I’ll be honest, I haven’t been able to get into Subnautica. I spent like 2 hours swimming in circles, trying to figure out what to do in that game before I realized I was supposed to check messages or something on the escape pod first. I felt totally abandoned and alone in the ocean, without much of a direction to go. It was a little too “open world” for me, if that makes sense.

Pacific Drive, on the other hand, drops you right into the action, with three people in your ear helping guide you through this strange and unique world. You can always go off and explore regions on your own, but your primary objectives are always clear. I don’t think I could get lost if I tried.

I’ve been meaning to go back and try Subnautica again. Maybe I’ll do a write-up on it and see if I enjoy it, now that I’m used to crafting/exploring games.

I didn’t even know Netflix had a games department, and I have a Netflix account. I’m assuming this is just another effort on their part for further enshittification of that service. Perhaps it’s finally time I unsubscribed from Netflix.

Yeah, it’s pretty easy. There’s a little technique required for climbing/balancing on ledges, but it’s not super challenging and you can always adjust your camera view to make it easier.

You’re welcome! Like I mentioned, I almost didn’t get to post today thanks to computer issues. Fortunately, I have a few other non-gaming computers floating around my home (I used to be an IT guy), so my screenshots might not be 4K quality, but I could technically find something else to play with if I needed to.

Actually I have a Steam Deck too! I wonder how decent its resolution/graphics would look on a PC screen…

If you like, the developer displays his phone number on screen every time you die. You could try to reach out to him and let him know his game is broken. If he’s still engaged with the game, he might look into it.

In the 18+ hours I’ve played, I only had one enemy takedown mission where the number didn’t go down as I killed enemies. Other than that, I’ve never experienced any bugs in this game.

But I’ve played exclusively solo campaign mode, so maybe there’s something there. I did try to go online last night and it just errored out, so maybe multiplayer/online mode is buggy.

This is actually a spiritual successor to the Road Rash franchise. Made by a different studio, but a tribute to that older game series.

I usually give a warning in advance that spoilers are upcoming and to skip the next paragraph if you don’t want to read them, then do the spoiler tag for an entire paragraph. That way, even if the spoiler tag doesn’t work, people know to skip the next paragraph to avoid it. Sometimes I’ll even do a full-caps “END OF SPOILERS HERE” to catch eyes and help people skip over them.

Unfortunately, it’s not just an Epic Games exclusive, it’s actually published by Epic Games. Which means it probably won’t ever come to Steam.

The rest of the Alan Wake franchise (and the Control franchise, including the upcoming Control 2) are published by 505 Games or Remedy themselves, so those all get Steam releases.

I don’t think I’ve posted this here yet, but I’ve actually been compiling all these posts into a separate blog. As much time and effort as I’ve been putting into them, I’d hate for them to get wiped if this community goes down, or heaven forbid, I got booted by a mod, etc. So you can either follow my posts here in /c/games, or check them out on my blog. I upload them at the same time, so it doesn’t matter where you go to read them.