By that logic, “You don’t have a contract with me, therefore you can’t own my intellectual property,” should also apply, no?
Like, if your intellectual property was given away on the basis of an ongoing royalty payment, and Disney decides not to honour that contract, then they can’t keep the IP.
Honestly at this point just the peace of mind of working in a FOSS engine and not under a corporation that can do this whenever is enough to motivate me to learn godot. I’ve got some prototypes I can port into that engine to learn on, it might even be some good motivation to start integrating them into a single project.
Oh well, I should’ve said “acquired” there. I mean I bought it on sale, then forgot about it because I wasn’t jazzed to play it right then and there. With pirated games, the act of acquisition is the download, so they are generally available when I’m thinking about them.
Yeah, I remember the Duke Nukem Episode 1 shareware, one of the first games I remember playing actually. There were others but this was the first one that really gelled as a functioning game. A lot of the others were sort of incomprehensible to my small child brain. It’s wild that I can remember these old games then just search them and they’re immediately playable with no setup needed.
I used to avoid it too, but I was less worried about the bugs and more about possible viruses. When I realised there was a crack scene with certain uploaders that are trusted by the community I lost a lot of that worry.
I guess I’m talking about launching and trying the game, rather than finishing it. Like once I start playing, the chances I continue are mostly about the game itself, and probably more about my mood at the time than I’d like to admit. I’m talking about games languishing completely untouched. As someone that’s been collecting a steam library for 20 years, I’ve got well over 1000 games and I haven’t played even close to half of them. I play almost all of the games I pirate. I’ve only started doing that a lot in the last year or two, but even in that time I’ve bought a bunch of stuff I don’t play. The pirated ones just call to me stronger.
Oh sure, if you count the emulator libraries I’ve installed on a retropie in bulk then this number changes, that’s every NES, SNES, N64 and SEGA Mega Drive game ever, but I mean games I specifically sourced. I find if I compare full price individual game purchases versus individually pirated games, the pirated ones still have a better hit rate.
Plenty of mainstream distros have versions designed with an RPi in mind. They should be designed lightweight for that purpose, but also the default version for rpi is called raspbian, and it tends to have the most support for rpi applications. If you’re not committed to a particular distro for any reason that’s a good place to start. All the software should work regardless.
If you want the whole setup to be headless (no screen), you’ll have to do a lot of work in the command line. If you want a screen to play things on, well then just the regular OS version should be fine.
Anything serving a desktop will be more resource intensive. I’m pretty sure the VNC option should have minimal impact whenever you’re not connected to it.
Also though, no matter what you do, it’s linux so you should accept that you’ll need to spend some time in the command line to get things done. It’s getting better with making things accessible via GUIs but I think it may always have a heavier reliance on the CLI because of the hacker nature of it.
I would love to see what actual academics in this field have to say about course material for children that equates copyright infringement with theft. I imagine it wouldn’t be good.
Having a few comments on record about this issue might help steer schools away from adopting it.
I mean, fair enough. If you don’t like grind then Subnautica isn’t going to be for you. A lot of these grindy games I use as podcast games - I listen to stuff while I’m doing the boring bits, then when shit gets real I pause the sound to focus.
Again, you can get past some of the grind, but if you don’t enjoy the process to get to that point it’s maybe not worth it. Even once the worst grind is gone… I mean there’s still grind. The actual story is pretty fascinating, it’s all about conservation and responsible stewardship and working with the ecosystem and not against it. Oh and also you’re virtually a slave in a hypercapitalist company town structure.
Anyway, I think Spiritfarer is very bittersweet, although I would consider myself very at peace with the concept of death, so I understand others may feel differently. If you’re a big crier it will definitely do that for you. A big theme is letting people go when it’s their time. I played it on a week when I was particularly sick and didn’t have the energy to do something more active, and it was the perfect thing for that time for me. I personally think it’s very wholesome and healing in many ways. The ambience is very soothing, you spend time tending your gardens on the ship and keeping everybody happy whilst you travel. One of the things they sometimes need is hugs. It never feels like a grind imho, but again I’m happy with minecrafty/subnautica type games. I have to admit I haven’t finished it, it was very much an experience limited to that time I was sick, which is weird. I’ll have to try it again.
How far did you get into Subnautica and what turned you off about it? I understand it’s not for everyone. It can be a little bit obtuse in the way it gates your progress behind radio transmissions, and if you don’t find the right blueprints your journey can be made much harder or easier respectively. I’ve been replaying it recently and I can see how it’d be hard to get into. One thing to note is that as you advance a lot of the annoyances of finding food, water & power to upkeep everything get eased through different technologies, so you slowly get more freedom from the grind, and the story is worth seeing to the end. In fact every new tech makes the game easier and faster and opens up the world that much more, either by making it easier to traverse long distances or go deeper, or carry more, etc. The early game is slow and frustrating in comparison.
I could cosign a bunch of suggestions already, but Outer Wilds is one of my favourite games of all time. I’ll try to explain it without any spoilers: It doesn’t gate your progress behind anything but your own curiosity and acquired knowledge. It also gives you a sense of freedom that you get from fully simulated physical movement in space. It is also deeply emotional and if you’re halfway to the end wondering, “How could they possibly stick the landing on this and end it well?” the answer is just trust, omg it’s so good. You can’t really experience it twice - it’s designed such that when you possess the right knowledge, you can finish the game extremely quickly, but also to do so you must truly understand and master the ideas you are being taught - so you can only experience it again by watching blind let’s plays. I’ve watched 4 so far and each one was a moving experience watching the person go through their own process of understanding over many, many hours.
If you like platformers, Teslagrad is a beautifully illustrated and impeccably designed metroidvania which I’ve played through many times. All the story is delivered through puppet shows rendered within the levels themselves and gorgeous collectible cards. They’ve just released a remastered version with a number of QoL changes that I’ll be playing again, and the sequel is out. I believe they’re still available in a Fanatical bundle right now.
The metroidvania that got me into the genre is actually a free game by the maker of Celeste, from many years ago. It’s called AnUntitledStory and I’ve played it through many times. Some quite hard platforming challenges but the whole aesthetic is extremely cute, and as you’d imagine from the dev of Celeste the controls are crisp and precise.
Hollow Knight is another incredible metroidvania/souls like. You play as a bug in the ruins of an ancient civilisation of bugs and it is quite haunting. Again, amazing aesthetic.
And if you want something chill instead, I’d go with Spiritfarer. You build your boat and travel the spirit world helping souls on their journey to the afterlife, except each soul is unique and has their own personal needs and closure you help them achieve before they’re ready to pass. Most importantly you can pet your cat whenever you want, which every game should have.
Steamworld Heist is an incredible twist on a turn-based tactics game, just by adding a tiny element of skill to your aiming. It gave my twitch-reflex monkey brain just enough dopamine to engage in the turn based gameplay that usually turns me off, and I had an incredible time.
I had more or less gotten over the game when the ender dragon was added. It was too grindy and slow and I felt like I could never get far enough to even approach the end. Then I joined a server where they had a bunch of infrastructure already set up. Suddenly I had access to enchantments and elytra and the game became super accessible, and I discovered just how much faster and more fun the game is now with all the incremental improvements. It’s given me something to play with my kids.