!pokemon@sopuli.xyz would appreciate if you crossposted there

Fun read, thanks for the writeup!

Ouch, can't do horror, but otherwise I love the idea. A princess who just punches everything… reminds me a bit of May I Ask for One Final Thing? (anime/manga) where the protagonist is a princess who loves to punch things.

I've also really enjoyed myself some Timberborn 🙂 glad to hear your thoughts!

Mods are allowed, but you’re not allowed to make any for you to play. You can try to commission someone else to make them for you, though

For gamers looking for ways to "get a new game" while still staying under these restrictions, it seems you pick a game with a ton of mods and an easy-to-mod and/or well-documented codebase so that the modders you hire are more willing to say yes to you.

• The Sims (not sure which one though)
• Skyrim (all the mods)
• Stardew Valley (mods, plus has been go-to #2 for gaming with friends in my social circles)
• Minecraft (mods, plus has been go-to #1 for gaming with friends in my social circles)
• Factorio
• Pokémon Soul Silver (we have ROM hacks!)
• Crusader Kings 3
• I was going to put a puzzle game here but I sadly don't remember which one
• either Kittens Game or Antimatter Dimensions. Long-lived incremental games. Gave up on Antimatter Dimensions after a certain point, but it by far has the most of my Steam hours. Limited to 10 games I'd probably pick it back up again.
• either holding out for some masterful innovation in the visual novel genre, specifically one aimed at women; or Infinity Nikki, because if I get all the DLC automatically (or magically through an unlock process more like that in pay-once games) that means I can just enjoy a pretty game and forget about all the gacha stuff.

As much as I like Timberborn, I do wonder about its replayability value. Near endgame, I kind of run out of stuff to do. Although its mod scene is definitely growing, so that should help.

Game dev clicker game about developing an MMO, not an MMO itself. For anyone like me a bit confused

Museum of source code: A gift that appears after 10,000 engineers graduate from university

LOL, source code of the game? Cute (meant genuinely, not in a condescending way)

Very cute Jigglypuff.

Went and bought it once it got out of EA. Pleasantly surprised by it being under 2GB.

at what point is bringing it up valid discussion, after all, because people need to vent sometimes and air grievances and this grievance does affect peoples' ability to even afford to play the next Pokémon game? And just because an opinion isn't all sunshine and roses and positivity does not mean we should silence it, toxic positivity sucks and censoring criticism just feels bad. And for every person who already knows, some people are newcomers to the franchise or have Pokémon as their only game they really follow and have not really been keeping up with the industry and its bad practices, so what looks repetitive to us still could be new useful information to someone else.

and at what point is it just a buzzkill, constantly bringing the mood down without a big enough benefit (or prevention of big enough harms) to justify doing that? Outrage and scandal and bad exploitative business practices are intruding on everything now so can we at least extract what joy we can from a game and enjoy talking about it with others without the constant reminder about the sucky parts? Can we maybe have a Fediverse community that does not immediately turn the conversation to political or economic complaints or other real-life-sucks complaints? Life is short and we have limited time and resources and there are too many battles to fight and it's exhausting. It's hard to find the will to keep resisting all the things going on in society without any joy. Especially when the joy is constantly being undermined by "here's how the thing you enjoy is supporting bad things actually"—whether from my own brain reminding me or comments online. So I'll play Pokémon instead of $lessRuthlessAnticonsumerCreatureCollectorGame because goddammit I like Pokémon already and I already try to make new purchases ethical and I do not have the bandwidth to drop Pokémon for whatever alternative is not Nintendo. I'm already emulating, leave me be

First option is probably best, but damn if it isn't annoying and exhausting and a reason I really have to stop touching Lemmy comment sections; and I think once enough negative comments reach too much of a mass people will start being turned away from engaging at all for similar reasons. Pinned/weekly posts to hold common topics sometimes felt like a good solution to prevent spam/overwhelm, sometimes felt like "yeah fuck you guys with your posts, to the quarantine zone you go, have fun never getting engagement because nobody checks here whereas if we didn't quarantine you to a weekly post/single pinned post you would get lots more engagement". Not sure what a good solution is for the collective (which probably wants to know these things, but also probably has limited tolerance for negativity).

As someone leaning towards the "fuck Nintendo" take it is still exhausting to see it posted around maybe 70% of posts talking about upcoming Pokémon games, including in Pokemon's own community. At some point I'd like to still enjoy the IP together with fans and maybe hear about people excited for the games (or criticizing it with paragraphs showing more passion for Pokémon than derision for the series and its fans), instead of constantly bringing up Nintendo's business practices.