Boy Boy

Neon White, Cyberhook, and Crumble are all excellent, though you might be looking for a more traditional platformer.

Blue Fire is decent and definitely worth checking out while it’s $4 right now.

Regarding social media feeds, I have mixed opinions, because you’re right about the echo chamber, but I also am only still on any mainstream platform for the memes, and I only want it to show me memes, which it wouldn’t do if not for personalized recommendations.

As for games, I don’t want my recommendations to be dominated by whatever has the biggest marketing budget and can take over my feed. I mostly play indie games, and I think if my store page wasn’t personalized, I wouldn’t see nearly as many small games as I do.

Would you be willing to share why you don’t like the “corpo spying”? I personally never understood - an online service has to know your requests in order to serve the results to you, and keeping revords of those requests is the only way to have personalized recommendations, which I would rather have than be served ads for games (or music or whatever) I’ll never even consider.

VeggieTales is giving them too much credit - there’s good moral lessons in there! (And the creator said all the botanically-fruit male veggies are canonically trans??)

ABC pulled Jimmy Kimmel off the air for saying Kirk’s killer was right-wing and that they’re trying to use Kirk’s death for political points.

Full story Machinima style series are rare, but if you just want heavy editing and a somewhat coherent plot as opposed to nearly unedited gameplay, Alpharad and LarsBurrito might work. Alpharad heavily edits his videos and usually writes a script to go over the gameplay that does a good job pulling a story out of the footage. LarsBurrito does a similar style, but also often does themed playthroughs where he writes the script to flavor the playthrough to fit whatever character he’s roleplaying as.

If you want actual story but are ok with significantly less editing, Mianite is a series I rewatch every once in a while in a similar way you describe. The scripted story doesn’t really start picking up until a significant way through season 1, but there is still enough conflict between the different players to make it more than just a Let’s Play.

Indeed. The sources I’ve read seem to lay blame with games not usually patenting mechanics (which apparently is all patent officers look at for prior art, not other games), meaning it needs active challenging to be thrown out.

PocketPair is based in Japan, which is where the previous, more directly problematic patents have been filed mid-litigation. While there is clearly prior art for the US patent, it isn’t quite as comically broad as the Japan ones, and since Japan doesn’t seem to care about prior art, those remain the most concerning to me.

In the US, yes. In Japan, it would appear such a concept does not exist.

Yeah but not raw milk straight from the udder (unless you enjoy salmonella), letting it dribble down your chin and get in your beard (unless that’s what does it for you I guess, you do you)

My main gripe with TLJ is that the editing is a total mess. Multiple scenes lose continuity between shots. The most egregious example is the milk scene, which in addition to being gross and unnecessary, was clearly jammed in between two shots meant to be continuous. Rey and Luke start walking down a skinny peninsula, no space cow in sight, then hard cut to space cow and Luke milking it, then hard cut back to the end of the peninsula and Luke setting down his stuff.

I found one for NieR: Automata at a used bookstore that has maps, a ton of concept art, and a short story.

Race condition

There are thousands upon thousands of indie games with neither of those mechanics…

Any two party system is the mathematically-inevitable result of first-past-the-post voting, nothing more or less.

It is a little insane how many games release on any given day. On July 15, 2025, 150 “titles” (of which 78 are actual games, not demos or DLC) were added to the Steam store. I would guess that their data includes all titles, but even just 78 real games on what should be a slower-than-average random Tuesday could totally contribute to 34,000 games released in a year.

I see lots of discussion about the solution / what used to be done, but I want to point out why unofficial servers stopped being easy/standard/possible to run.

The first time big money entered esports was on private Starcraft LAN tournaments. Blizzard sued to get a cut of the proceeds, but because the privately-owned software (game and server) was running on privately-owned hardware, the courts ruled that Blizzard got no money.

AAA companies learned from this that allowing the playerbase to run their own servers meant losing out on money, so most AAA multiplayer games with even a small chance of ending up as esports make it so they can only connect to servers operated by themselves, longevity of the game be damned. If they weren’t so desparate for every scrap of cash they could possibly generate from the game, I would bet most multiplayer game would still let you run your own servers, like they used to.