This is a great way to think about it… as much as I would love to completely drop the companies I hate like Microsoft or Google or Twitter, sometimes you have to use it for school/work/etc. (Good God I hate Teams.) Like food conglomerates it’s just far too hard for the majority of people to live off the big tech grid.

I just bought Subnautica and Cities Skylines, so I’m looking forward to playing them both.

I have not considered that, I think I’ll bring it up with my DM… it’s my first “all-evil campaign” so I just figured we’d be good to play without putting some guidelines in place! I’ve talked to the DM before about the player but I think next session I’ll talk to the player in private, tell them cooperation is key. They have a lot more experience with regular RP than tabletop which is probably where these issues are coming from.

As others have said, ads. The app is also overrun with spambots posting links to scams to buy followers or ForEx or whatever they’re selling. The algorithm is really, really bad, at least if you’re an artist of any kind. IG was one of the first apps to attempt to steal TikTok’s short-form video format, which means it’s hard to get your content out there if you’re just posting images. And there are a LOT of content reposters.

If you guys are interested in romhacks/fangames/Pokemon games with a little more meat and difficulty to them, I heartily recommend Pokemon Infinite Fusion. It’s based on FR/LG, with a slightly different story (but it’s still essentially Team Rocket doing Team Rocket things), with the big difference being that you can fuse Pokemon. Every Pokemon in the game is fuseable, giving you a MASSIVE possible amount of combinations. You can play it classic mode, like a regular Pokemon game, but there’s even a randomised mode which changes it up so every wild encounter and trainer battle uses randomly fused Pokemon. It’s great fun!

As for whether modern Pokemon games hold your hand too much, I dunno. I do recognise they’re made explicitly for children, so I can’t tell you how much is too much. In fact, I remember as a child being stumped enough that I quit playing Diamond halfway through because I thought the gyms were ‘too hard’. I still enjoy the newer games (I don’t care what anyone says, I loved SwSh) but I don’t let their shortcomings get to me as I recognise they’re children’s games.

This is exactly how I feel. For as much (deserved) hate as Twitter gets, it was great for small communities. I’ve made best friends off Twitter who I still talk to daily. And it was amazing to connect to people like artists or game devs. Reddit is the same – I won’t lament the easy entertainment, I’ll lament the absolute wealth of information that might be lost in comments and text posts if the site becomes harder to search. Google itself is already trash if you’re trying to find real reviews of products or troubleshoot something, what happens when adding “reddit” to the end of the search no longer helps?

The base games are all available on GOG! A lot of the custom content for it online has been lost to time, though may still be available through archive.org snapshots. But if you want to just enjoy the base games, they’re there. I was obsessed with the Creatures series as a child.