With pretty much all of these types of games there’ll be a cheap deck that’s really powerful. You can build that and then spam it to climb the ranks and get more resources to buy another deck. Back when I tried out Master Duel it was the Salad deck. It was pretty fun; I liked it a lot and I had it made on day 1. No idea what it would be currently.

However the games are absolutely designed in a way to entice you to spend money. They will always be slightly frustrating to play without doing that. It’s hard for me to recommend any of them if you’re not wanting to spend money.

If you do it 15 times while holding down the B key Mew appears for you to catch too!

Thanks for sharing! This was an amazing read.

Unfortunately Temtem is a terrible game entirely due to Crema’s incompetence.

It’s actually impressive how consistently they make horrible decisions. If I had to summarize their attitude, it’s that you can’t criticize them because “Hey, we’re human, we make mistakes and when you criticize us it hurts our feelings”. And when I say you can’t, I mean it literally. They will suspend or ban you from whatever platform it is for saying anything they perceive as negative.

They take an “us vs them” attitude with their player base which results in the equivalent of Crema stuffing their fingers in their ears saying LALALALALA YOU’RE WRONG WE’RE RIGHT.

It’s a shame, because the foundation of the game, the battle system, is genius and a huge improvement over Pokémon. The game showed real promise for a long time. But Crema has been dropping the ball with every update for years and it’s long since entered its death spiral.

I often have multiple tabs with different inboxes open in Firefox. No extra features required AFAIK it just works.

Do you mean Alyx? I actually do own that, but haven’t got around playing it yet.

Yeah absolutely. I think with a lot of these older games that are considered to be the GOATs of their respective genres you’ll run into the same problem: They were so good, that the mechanics/ideas become the minimum requirement for all games thereafter. So, if you played the game on day 1, it was an innovative masterpiece the likes of which you’d never seen before. If you play it 10-15 years later after having played modern games in the same genre, it feels like the same old shit except without the 10-15 years of improvements.

For me personally, the game I’ll get crucified for not enjoying is Half Life 2. I played through the entire game. It was ok. I was pretty bored for most of it though. Shooters aren’t generally my thing for one, but even that aside the game was very milquetoast to me. I did a lot of reading up on the history of HL2 afterwards because I was astonished that I didn’t enjoy such a legendary game and I think I came to the conclusion that some new mechanics such as the cover system and story-driven nature of HL2 were what made it such a hit in 2004. But 15 years later those mechanics weren’t new and exciting to me and the story is decent but a far cry from amazing.

The other game that stands out to me is Assassin’s Creed 1. I couldn’t make it more than a few hours into that game. Just so boring and repetitive, the combat was boring, the collectables were boring, most mechanics didn’t actually seem to matter…I just hated the game lol. I do think it’s another example of later entries in the series/other games doing the same thing but better so going back to the OG just felt like a slog. But I really hated AC1 hahaha.

Simply put, the attack is shorter and easier to understand than the nuanced defense.

Politicians can put “you’re against education!” in a 15 second attack ad on the radio/TV/a poster. It takes a short media appearance to explain the nuance. Which isn’t worth the time or money typically, since so few people will see it.

Especially since a huge section of our population gets 100% of its news from Fox, Newsmax, and other right wing media. That interview will never air there. In fact, those sources will repeat the party line of “you’re against education!”

I feel people are way too quick to jump down Biden’s throat for the rail union.

First off, it’s worth noting he continued to work with the railroad to get the employees the sick pay they wanted on the back end.

But in the midst of the situation… I’m not going to pretend this hypothetical is completely correct. But I don’t think it’s crazy.

Imagine you’re Biden and you hear about this railroad strike. Your advisors are telling you if the strike goes through how many rail passengers are stranded in the middle of nowhere, how much food is just going to go to waste and not make it to various towns, which factories manufacturing hospital equipment will be without material and unable to continue production. On top of a gigantic economic impact there could be deaths associated with the strike.

Imagine you’re that guy and have to make the call to say nope, I don’t care, the strike continues.

I’m super pro labor and anti corporation and even I would struggle to make that call. Especially if someone proposes the idea that on the backside of forcing the railroad workers to work we could pressure the railroad to give into the demands.

I’m not saying he’s perfect and I’m not saying there wasn’t a better way. But I think that hypothetical is plausible. And I think people are too quick to forget that often times these decisions are which tragic situation would you rather allow to happen, and it’s not as clear cut as it sounds.

Edit: Oh yeah, the comparison. This time, cars don’t get built and these corporations will see problems to their bottom line. The impact to human life isn’t there. The economic impact still may be, but it’s not as devastating across the board like shutting down the railroad would be. Much easier decision to make.

Spotify like many others here. Just haven’t had many issues with the program and it does what I want for a reasonable price.

Wanna give a big shout out to Nebula. It’s meant to be a YouTube-esque site but solely for educational content. I found it via LegalEagle but it has a ton of documentaries and other educational content creators. I believe my subscription is $5/year or something like that. Just insanely cheap for really high quality content.

I have the Disney+/Hulu bundle. I love Disney movies and with all the franchises they own now I feel it’s worthwhile. Hulu happens to have quite a few of my favorite shows and the bundle made it worthwhile to me.

Currently trying out YouTube premium and, I know this won’t be a popular opinion, but I think it’s worth it to me. I use a lot of YouTube and also chromecast it. While it’s possible for me to get ad blocked YouTube for free on mobile and cast it to my TV it’s… Cumbersome and unstable. I generally have the opinion that I don’t mind paying for services I enjoy using so… For now, gonna stick with YouTube premium. Just so much less of a headache.

AmazonPrime but only for Amazon’s services really, the few shows that are on Prime Video for free are a nice bonus though.

And currently I pay for Netflix and share it with my family but the very first second Netflix cracks down on that I’m dropping it and have told my family as such for years. Already started torrenting most shows I kept up with via Netflix in preparation.

The only other one I consider is HBO… But there just hasn’t been enough of an allure thus far.