CoderKat

Nobody drinks diet sodas for the nutrition value. They drink it for the taste.

And there is a benefit in not having sugar. Sugar is far worse. If artificial sweeteners mean you can enjoy the taste of something without sugar, that's healthier. Not nutritious, but healthier. I mean, they're saying up to 14 cans of diet coke a day is fine. But 14 cans of regular coke is 490 freaking grams of sugar and nearly 2000 calories (a pretty typical amount that many folks should have for the entire day). Obesity is a far bigger risk factor for most people.

The anti aspartame thing is just a combination of crackpots, people who have fallen for the "appeal to nature" fallacy, and people who really want everyone to know that they're better than you because they don't drink soda.

The quote is about background performers. Nobody notices their acting and they usually aren't even professional actors.

I'm not sure about many of these and wasn't aware of most of them being on phones. But you're the first comment I've seen that mentions Stardew Valley. It's by far the best mobile game I've ever played.

That said, I preferred it on PC for better controls, easier modding, multiplayer, and quicker updates. Though you actually can mod Stardew on Android. I still started with it on Android and it's a very high quality mobile game.

GBA emulation is the best. All the games are meant for small screens and modern hardware has absolutely no issues with emulating the GBA. It has soooo many games. You can also get ROM hacks (most common for Pokemon games), which are fan edits to games. Some of which are such massive edits that they're basically entirely new games only using the existing framework for the style of gameplay.

Only downside is controls. Touch screens are simply not as good as physical controls. I don't recommend trying any games that require fast paced and precise controls, as you will hit wrong buttons plenty. You can get Bluetooth controllers to help with this I think, though I've never personally tried them. I've also seen "case controllers", which go around your phone and make it sorta like a Switch form factor.

Orna's dev is great! Played that for several months myself. Eventually I burnt out, but it was still a good GPS game. It is however the type of game meant to just be played during your commute or the likes. Basically a Pokemon Go alternative. So it is long and grindy by intent. So it won't satisfy anyone that wants to play a "normal" game where you just play for 10-100 action packed hours and you're done.

But for anyone who enjoyed Pokemon Go, you'll enjoy Orna. It's much more in depth, with traditional RPG classes, equipment to collect, dungeons to find, and raids to do with a guild. The combat is mostly fairly simple, but that's exactly what you need for GPS games, since it's meant to be played on the go. It certainly encouraged me to take more walks and that's the big reason I love GPS games.

The dev is like the anti Niantic. I actually gave him money cause I wanted to. There's no need to pay for anything at all and the game doesn't have nearly as much FOMO as Pokemon Go.

You can carry around an external battery pack with any phone. It's not quiiiite as convenient because you have have your phone plugged in and that can sometimes be awkward to carry (but not bad if you normally carry a purse or backpack). Though it does avoid the need to power cycle your phone and my battery pack can charge my phone several times (and can charge multiple devices).

Honestly, best purchase I've ever made. It's so stressful having a phone die and the battery pack keeps that from happening.

You can buy third party batteries. The batteries are customized to the phone, but they aren't exclusively sold by the OEM.

Yeah, and they don't just lie. They lie extremely convincingly. They're very confident. If you ask them to write code, they can make up non existent libraries.

In theory, it may even be possible to use this as an attack vector. You could ask an AI repeatedly to generate code and whenever it hallucinates, claim that package for yourself with a malicious package. Then you just wait for some future victim to do the same.

Meh, AFAIK they're all genuine updates. I mean, you can read the patch notes to see for yourself. They're actually really amusing patch notes always full of jokes. I can't fault em for wanting to regularly push their subscription considering that you get so much for free. Software development is expensive.

Did War of the Lions fix the game's balance? I loved the original Tactics, but wow that game was whack where balance is concerned. You could go from utter broken characters being unbeatably strong to being soft locked if you only had one save because some battle was so hard.

I didn't really feel the story was much. I'm struggling to remember it at all! But damn the gameplay was really something.

That's true, but I don't think that makes it worth playing these days unless you're curious to see how things have evolved. You'll find better written stories and more interesting features in pretty much any modern RPG.

Yeah, I really hate the fragmentation because of that. Reddit admittedly had this problem too, but it didn't feel like the same degree.

I think it also is a barrier to growing a community because it can sometimes take some time for it to be clear which community is the biggest one. To avoid duplication, I usually only join the biggest community of each "type" and it's not always obvious which one that is.