I just wish they actually spent more time on their games

They’ve pretty clearly been doing that this time, which explains why this game seems a lot less rough than the SV, even if people (cough redditors) pretend it doesn’t look/run any better (it very obviously does)

Game Freak doesn’t set the deadlines either way, so I don’t fault them for the last few games being rushed, though I’m still waiting to play SV until I have hardware that can run it half decently 😩 Game seems pretty good from what I’ve heard from people who can look past the technical issues

Not sure how this is a surprise, they’re just about to replace the Switch so of course there won’t be that many major games left for it, they’ve almost certainly shifted most of their major studios over to the Switch 2 a good while ago by now

Though I mean, they still announced very long-awaited smaller games like a new Rhythm Heaven and Tomodachi Life so I’d say it was still a pretty good Direct (plus some pretty cool third party games)

And honestly? Even if they somehow only have Mario Kart in the Switch 2 Direct, it’ll probably still have good release sales because Mario Kart is just that insanely popular lmao

There’s absolutely zero chance the Switch 2 is going the way of the Wii U, there are a lot of reasons why that went down the way it did and the Switch/Switch 2 don’t really have anything in common with it

I let them know, they just took care of it 👍

Been really enjoying Dr. Robotnik’s Ring Racers lately (the newly-released sequel to SRB2 Kart), really love how its new mechanics set it apart from other kart racers and make it feel more distinctly “Sonic”, and the tracks are so great looking, I can’t believe there’s still the Doom engine underneath all this

Also just feels a lot more like a complete game of its own as opposed to a mod of another game, with its new full menu UI and its focus on singleplayer content (SRB2 Kart didn’t even have any other than basic time trials)

It really sucks how often pirates have to resort to emulating inferior Switch versions because the PC versions have uncracked Denuvo

This is true but also it’s always morally correct to pirate Nintendo games

It does very much bug me though how, unsurprisingly, there’s plenty of people on reddit and Twitter acting like piracy is the only reason one would use Yuzu, as if it isn’t such a huge value to be able to run games you paid for at a more playable framerate and better resolution than Nintendo’s outdated hardware

Like, hell, Tears of the Kingdom having such awful performance drops on official hardware even compared to BotW is basically the big reason I haven’t bothered picking it up

Not really sure who would continue developing it though, it would have to be someone who already knows enough to do so but isn’t currently contributing, because the current developers almost certainly wouldn’t risk continuing to do so if they lose

This isn’t a counterpoint though?? That doesn’t really have anything to do with SBMM, and if anything seems like it supports its existence because this way you get matched with other players in that kind of situation, instead of being thrown into unbalanced matches against the people who have loads of time to spend practicing

Like, I’m not really sure what this has to do with my comment at all and I’m just really confused

You asked how SBMM is good, so I’m gonna write way too much to answer why I think that

SBMM is important for games with matchmaking because competitive games are generally both more fun and more fair when players are matched with other players around their current skill level, people generally don’t like when a game is just rigged from the start and they can’t contribute anything because of it

It’s pretty bad for people learning and improving too to not have it, because it’s a lot harder to learn from a loss if you just get blown out immediately by someone so far above your level, as opposed to someone closer to your skill level where it’s easier to tell what they’re doing differently compared to you

It’s also a weird complaint to say that the game “punishes” you for sub-optimal behavior and playing casually, because what really happens is that you maybe lose a few matches before the game realizes you’re playing worse and puts you around that level, meanwhile if you don’t have SBMM you will always have a pretty good chance of being matched against someone trying as hard as they can to win and optimizing their gameplay and equipment (this has been a common complaint about Destiny when they have removed SBMM in PvP in multiple instances, because it lead to it being basically impossible to play casually because basically every game is full of pubstompers)

If CoD’s implementation doesn’t work like I described, then that’s a CoD problem, not an SBMM problem, there are loads of games with SBMM where people are generally happy with it (like Splatoon, or most fighting games)

It’s also worth pointing out that despite a lot of people thinking SBMM in CoD is some recent thing, it’s actually been a thing for most of its existence, same with early Halo

And as far as being casual and “chilling out and having fun” goes, you also have to keep in mind that you don’t actually know how seriously your opponents are playing at any given moment, it could very well be the case that they’re also not taking it too seriously and just seem like they’re “tryhards” because they happen to be a lot better, a problem that’s improved by SBMM rather than made worse because you’re ideally (as in, in games that do it well, not as sure about CoD) less likely to go against people like that if you’re not actually on their level

I’m currently on break from them, I can enjoy them (if they never made me really happy, I wouldn’t play them), but they can also be bad for my mental health so for now I’ve been avoiding playing online, I still play some of the games but just against bots

I’d like to return to them eventually though, I really enjoy the process of learning and improving and adapting that doesn’t exist the same way in singleplayer games

Feeling bad because of losing is certainly a big part of it, but I think another big problem often comes down to the mechanics these games have been putting in to cause addiction, like battle passes which are everywhere these days (even Splatoon, which is one of the biggest reasons I’ve grown to really dislike 3 even though I love this series)

Edit: Though, can’t forget that another reason I fell off of Splatoon 3 in particular is because they ruined the rank system in this game, designing it to be grindy and require far more games to make actual progress regardless of skill, and distancing it so far from the skill ratings which are the actual good ranking system, there’s a reason so many people switch to X Battles (the mode that directly uses those skill ratings) the moment they hit S+ instead of continuing to waste time grinding

Especially since they now have everyone rank down each season, forcing everyone to grind all over again for no good reason even if their skill hasn’t actually changed

Splatoon 2’s system was a lot more directly related to the SBMM than one might assume, and it was significantly better for it, you wouldn’t be forced to stick around in a rank you couldn’t handle and if you were truly too good for your current rank then you could move out of it pretty quickly, the whole “skipping ranks” thing happened if your matchmaking rating was higher than normal for that rank

That’s not mentioned in this specific blog post, but that’s always been one of Vanilla OS’s defining features, it’s “apx” package manager to install those various types of packages

It’s even using Distrobox actually, but the point is to make it simpler to install packages for those contrainers, with the user not worrying as much about managing the individual containers, and not having to memorize the specific commands for each individual distro’s package manager

Basically, like the rest of Vanilla OS, the point isn’t that you can’t do this stuff elsewhere, it’s that it’s trying to make it easier to do it

in Minecraft

But comrade… MINECRAFT is one of those games that doesn’t have pausing…! 😨 (In Bedrock anyway, Java Edition is thankfully safe)

The problem here is that for that purpose, Flatpak is better in nearly every way and is far more universal

I think Snap makes the most sense for something like Ubuntu Core, where it has the unique benefit of being able to provide lower level system components (as opposed to Flatpak which is more or less just for desktop GUI apps), but it doesn’t make sense for much else over other existing solutions

because the package build script isn’t available?

What are you talking about? Every Flatpak on Flathub has their build manifest available on GitHub, you can fork or download it for yourself and change it how you’d like, just like you can with an Arch PKGBUILD

And the problem still isn’t solved because now the people who can set bad defaults still exist, they’re just different people.

For one, unlike with distro packages, lots of Flatpaks are made by the developers of their apps, so bad defaults aren’t really going to be a thing for those since the developer would want to choose what’s best for their own app

And for packages maintained by a third party, bad defaults are less common because maintainers don’t need to account for each individual distro’s unique package situation or specific dependency versions, and only have to package it once for every distro

I should add a few others too probably since I do have a few other favorites

Enviro-Bear 2010 - Very funny game about a bear driving a car to collect food, was originally on PC but goes well with touch

Bacon - The Game - Decent time waster for a few minutes at a time, gets repetitive though if you play it any more than that lol

Good Pizza Great Pizza - Fun pizza shop game with an absolutely adorable art style and some silly writing

Sonic 3 A.I.R. - Widescreen Sonic 3 & Knuckles on your phone? With mod support?! Hell yeah (you’ll have to grab this ROM for it to work, but that’s no big deal)

Vita Fighters - Haven’t played it much, but this seems like a cool mobile fighting game if you’re okay with playing one of those with touch controls

SHOT2048 - Yuji Naka might be guilty of insider trading and creating Balan Wonderworld lol, but this is still a fun take on the 2048 concept

Nobody’s mentioned RollerCoaster Tycoon Classic yet, that’s a good one, it’s RCT2 with the RCT1 scenarios included and with a more touch-friendly interface

(OpenRCT2 exists on Android for free, but you’re probably gonna have a bad time trying to play that with touch lol)

Its the only DE with good, seamless fingerprint support for example

What do you mean? I’ve never had a problem with it on KDE, Fedora at least

Huh? It does work lol, there’s flatpak uninstall --unused --delete-data (and you can also pass --delete-data when uninstalling individual Flatpaks, to be more selective), this is just someone’s new GUI app to do the same thing, and you could already do it through KDE Discover for example

I have Fedora on an old Lenovo Chromebook, the on-by-default btrfs compression goes a long way on that 16GB eMMC

HoloISO is essentially a version of Valve’s SteamOS 3 repackaged to run on systems other than the Steam Deck, since Valve hasn’t released a general-purpose one yet

People generally use it so that they can get as close to the Steam Deck’s user experience as possible, though most people usually agree that a more standard desktop distro is a better idea unless you’re using console-like device entirely for gaming