If you enjoy Titanfall 2 you might like Call of Duty Black Ops 3. I still havent found a game that handles so well and feels so smooth. It got a lot of flak at the time (2014) because everyone was tired of future shoooters, but imo it has the best fps mechanics not only in cod, but in any fps game. The story is also really good; I wont spoil but it does get kinda philosophical and has plenty of twists and turns.

As others have said, the Half Life series is probably the best fps objectively. I started with 2 and then played 1, so while they do go in order, it isn’t required. HL1 is a bit clunky but still great.

Also James Bond 007 games are criminally underrated. Everyone knows about Goldeneye for the N64, but some of my favorites are Nightfire, From Russia with Love, Everything or Nothing, and Goldeneye Reloaded. A lot of the Steam pages were taken down for them though, and are only really playable on console, but definitely worth it if you are able to play

That first sentence hit me like a truck

No thanks, I’ll just keep playing Morrowind on my 2009 Toshiba

One area of The Talos Principle is set in Greco-Roman ruins. It captues a very specific tone. The puzzles are fun too

I also enjoy dualsense and there is definitely quality there, but I could not get it to work with a handfull of emulators on linux for some reason. I’m sure there could be some tinkering to do to get it working but I’ve just been using xbox series for plug n play

Not generic, but I’ve been using Xbox Series controllers with LMDE. They were plug n play and work flawlessly out of the box. I’ve used them with both bluetooth and wired and have had no problems with emulation and steam. You’d probably save more buying a used xbox controller for about $30-$50 than trial and error with cheaper off-brand gamepads

It’s unofficial, but you can play it via browser at shin.itch.io/elden-ring-gb, or download it and play via emulator

Legend of Zelda: Minish Cap for GBA is my all time favorite from the series. It was made late in the gameboy development cycle, and feels miles ahead of other gba titles. Imo it’s the pinnacle of 2d Zelda.

Another great title is Fire Emblem. It’s not the first one, but a lot of them can be played out of order, and it’s tons of fun if you like turn based strategy.

Other mentions: Pokemon FireRed/LeafGreen, Pokemon Yellow/Blue, Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, Legend of Zelda Oracle of Seasons/Ages, Link’s Awakening, Fire Emblem Sacred Stones, Final Fight One, and the Elden Ring demake

This is way too accurate

For my use case, I wanted a hybrid distro that is more rock solid/no hastle but also updated enough for gaming. Og Debian’s update cycle is too slow for some of the things I was doing with proton and wine, while rolling release distros like Arch/Manjaro broke or required fiddling too frequently for my taste. I feel like LMDE is the perfect balance for me personally, taking the rock solid stance of Debian even further than og Mint or Ubuntu, while also being updated enough to not have problems gaming.

Secondly, I greatly prefer flatpaks to snaps, so that’s another reason I stay away from Ubuntu or Ubuntu forks.

I also respect the ethos of Mint and Debian much more than “corporate” owned Ubuntu. It feels much better being on a Debian based fork rather than an Ubuntu based fork, in case Cannonical wants to do stupid things to their OS.

Overall I think it comes down to me just wanting to use Debian, but with more frequent updates, that isn’t Ubuntu.

I use my pc for similar purposes on Linix Mint Debian Edition. Basically mint which is based on Debian instead of Ubuntu. Steam and emulation have been a breeze on it with flatpaks and I’ve fiddled around with Lutris as well. A lot of features are plug n play in many aspects, but the os gives you enough freedom as to not feel restrictive.

I’ve found that the community is helpful and big enough to have all my questions answered. You might need to do some tinkering if you use an Nvidia GPU though. I have an all AMD system, and it was relatively easy to get and install graphics drivers, which will probably be your biggest hurdle/headache with other distros outside of PopOS.

Greedy corpos aside, going back to BO1 the audio design was fantastic; everything from the subtle crunch of a boot on gravel to the clack of reloading a gun. Pure ear candy (except for maybe the crazy over-dramatic melee sound). BO 2-5 were good too in terms of sfx but nowhere near 1. I feel like that era had a special attention to detail to audio that modern games don’t care to emulate. Maybe they will with 6; either way microtransactions suck and I’ll stick to playing the older COD games for this very reason

With firefox or a hardened fork of firefox (like mull/fennec/iceraven etc.) there is a button in settings where you can install/add to homescreen and have an app-like experience for any site including instagram. (Not sure if this is on ios though.) You can also have noscript, ublock origin, and privacy badger addons running for a bit of extra protection and as you said email alias and vpn at all times. If you’re on a hardened OS like CalyxOS or Graphene you can also sandbox or work profile the browser to add another degree of separation.

You may run into problems during signup because meta has been known to use viseo/photo upload verification for accounts made with alias emails and/or from a vpn IP, but once you’re in there shouldn’t be an issue. If there is, you might want to bite the bullet and sign up in a normal way, then use privacy measures to mitigate data collection, depending on your threat model.

I only use Indeed.com so that my info is only siphoned from one place. I feel like they have good listings and they have options to hide some of your info from employers and random observers. Avoid linkedin at all costs, having a profile has gotten me zero benefits and it is an extreme pain deleting your account.

You can also take steps to protect your contact info, specifically your email/phone/address. I only put the city I’m from on my resume and you can use email masks or alts like firefox relay or protonmail plus, or just make a separate email only for work. For phone numbers I use JMP.chat to give me a second number to use solely for work and Indeed.

In the end a lot of your work info is gonna be pseudo-public, because you do need to convince prospective employers of who you are, but you can control the sphere of that information to keep it confined. Imo, having a stable job is worth that trade; you don’t have to do a deep dive into your personality or personal life to get a job. Just enough to be convincing

I second CalyxOS, been using it for about a year now and I think it’s a good compromise between privacy and convenience. Is it the absolute most secure and private? Maybe not, but my threat model is low and I don’t mind trading a little bit of privacy for a bit of ease of use.

I like to lean towards the concept that objective natural law is the basic state of existence, and that it is then observed by consciousness and subjective experience/sense. This provides two perspectives of the universe: the objective and the subjective, which are both equally important IMO.

Objective/big-picture If life and/or humans never existed, or if we weren’t there to observe it, the universe would still run its course and end in eventual heat death, observed or unobserved it remains the same even if some of the atoms are re-arranged.

We may be able to use our free will and/or consciousness to re-arrange some of the atoms and direct some of the energy with the concept of cause and effect, but natural laws will remain unchanged, and in a big-picture sense, nothing (in terms of natural law) will be very different because of consciousness or human will. The laws of physics will remain the same, the end remains the same, the universe will be relatively unchanged; conscious or not.

In terms of after-death, it remains true; there may or may not be an afterlife, but just because we cannot sense it or are conscious when we are present in it does not mean it can’t exist or does not persist after we are unconscious. If there is a world after death, it too will continue to work despite consciousness, observed or unobserved.

Subjectuve/Individual Bringing in some psychology, humans absolutely love to assign significance to things. It’s in our nature. Thus our whole subjective worldview is based on our senses and how we assign significance to our experiences so in a subjective sense it would be impossible to know something outside our knowledge or current mode of operation.

But unlike the objective view of existence, this perspective adds purpose and importance to the world. A vital part to self discovery is forging your own purpose in life. Whether that is serving a Creator, investigating the secrets of the universe, or simply being happy, the essence of being conscious and sensing the world is about what you make of it, and how you forge it into something valuable to you.

In the end, we have the natural law that dictates what the universe is, independent of consciousness, then we have the subjective senses that feed into what we know to be consciousness, thus creating individual worldviews. In my opinion, both perspectives are important to understanding what it is to exist and to be conscious.

TLDR: Objective existence is the natural state, and is then observed through subjective consciousness– Objective existence will persist regardless of consciousness or perception– Subjective existence is based on humans assigning significance and forging their own purpose

My favorite console has got to be the original Xbox. I would play it all day when I was younger and to this day I still use it because emulation is iffy for a lot of titles. Games from that era from like 1999 to 2006 hit home for me and I love replaying the greats like Knights of the Old Republic, Halo 2, and 007 Nightfire.

For everything else I do a lot of steam gaming and emulating on my linux pc, steam deck, and mobile. I use mobile for casual, quick, or pauseable games, steam deck for games that “feel” right like racing games and old adventure games, and pc for longer gaming sessions, or mouse and keyboard games like Starcraft and Age of Empires.

It’s hard to beat pc because it can litterally do everything better (except maybe portability) and you can customize it into anything, so it’s definitely the objective winner, but og Xbox is still my biased favorite.

Go ahead, eat the Lemmy upvote beans

I’ve played most of them, and minish cap is definitely the best imo. The music, story, world, and nostalgia were all there for me. I also think LOZ was at its peak in the 2D era.

Also special mention, crossbow training for wii is C tier and LOZ CD-i is definitely A tier because Morshu

I switched my daily driver to Linux Mint Debian Edition recently and it definitely does combine the best of both. It’s easy to use and coming from plain debian has everything that I’m used to. Been loving it so far.