monotremata
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I kind of disagree about AI, I guess.
I do think it’s a valuable tool, but honestly there’s not a ton that it does that you couldn’t already do with an asset store. And there’s a fair amount of risk associated with using AI in the near term. Folks already have a lot of qualms about the ethics of how those AIs were trained. And the first games that come out that rely heavily on AI are likely to be really janky–there are devs who will have tried to entirely replace a role on the team with AI, and the quality will suffer as a result. So I think in the near term there’s going to be a pretty severe backlash against AI-generated stuff in games. Folks will say it all feels generic and low-effort; it’ll be the new “asset flip.”
Long-term, I think it will have a place in the workflow for sure, the same way that store-bought assets do; you’ll just need to adapt them to fit in with the feeling you’re going for in your game, and hand-revise some things. But near-term, I think there will be a lot of folks who lose interest in a game if they find out there’s AI involved. And that goes triple for AI voice acting. A bad human voice actor can at least be interesting, but AI has that uncanny valley quality that really turns people off once they notice it.
I think it’s going to get even better in the next few years, too. The tools for 3d modeling are poised to improve in a way that makes it dramatically easier to create very high quality graphics. Nanite is one component of this, reducing the need for multiple levels of detail in polygon-based rendering. But 3d reality capture is improving too, both thanks to hardware like depth sensors and software like Gaussian splatting and NeRFs.
Indie games are just going to keep getting better, basically. As will AA games. I think the days of the AAA blockbuster may be numbered.
Frustratingly, these lists keep going out of date, because apps are marked as incompatible with new devices unless they’re constantly updated. So I have a limited number of recommendations. E.g. the game Trainyard was terrific, but it looks like you can’t get it anymore. Auro and Glyder 2 were also excellent. And Trap! was great on the original G1.
Some of these games also do have in-app purchases, but they’ll be strictly “you pay X money for Y more levels” deals, which is basically fine in my book. No currencies, no gatchapon, no “pay or wait” mechanics.
10000000 and You Must Build A Boat are fun match-3 games. No in-app purchases.
The Room 1, 2, and 3 are all escape-room games.
If you liked doing constructions in geometry, the games Euclidea and Pythagorea are both good.
Puzzle Retreat by The Voxel Agents is, well, a puzzle game. Pretty fun, good slow difficulty ramp.
The Quell games (Quell, Quell Reflect) are a bit like Puzzle Retreat, but I didn’t find they had as much variety. I got a little bored with them. They’re quite polished though.
Star Realms is a two-player card game with deck drafting mechanics, sort of like a cross between Dominion and Magic. It’s available as an actual physical deck game, but also as a decent android game with both multiplayer and a single-player campaign. Since it’s a drafting game (i.e. you both recruit from the same deck), buying card expansions just changes what mechanics are available to both players, so it’s never pay-to-win. I’m very fond of it.
Freitag is a single-player deck-drafting game. The android app isn’t the best thing ever but it works. It’s based on Robinson Crusoe.
Spaceplan is an increment game, a bit like Cookie Clicker or Clicker Heroes, but it’s got a plot and an ending and is over in a couple of days. Plus it’s really silly. Recommended.
Super Hexagon is a very brief action game. Only uses the edge of the screen as its two buttons, so it basically works despite the touch screen. It’s only got…I think it’s twelve levels total? I forget. I think I’ve gotten to level four. It’s better with the sound on, though.
Slay the Spire is another great deck building game. Touch controls aren’t perfect and the UI is kinda small on a phone, but the underlying game is good enough that it’s worth playing.
Ridiculous Fishing is a very simple game, but very well made.
Pinball Arcade is pretty good, though you have to pay for each individual table you want. There are always some free ones on any given day though. It was easier to recommend before they lost their Williams and Bally licenses, since then they had all the classics like Theater of Magic and Attack from Mars; now it’s all Stern tables unless you already own the old ones. The simulation quality is pretty good, though. It’s all a bit more forgiving than the real thing, but I don’t think that’s entirely a bad thing.
Bart Bonte’s games, which are all named after colors (black, blue, green, etc.) are pretty amusing. Not very difficult but kinda diverting for a bit. Kind of like an escape room game crossed with warioware? Each screen has unique touch-screen mechanics, and you have to figure them out to advance.
SetMania is a decent implementation of the card game Set. Make sure to turn off the (frankly bizarre) setting that randomizes your settings constantly.
Nonograms Katana is a pretty good nonogram (picross) game. Gotta buy levels though.
Monument Valley and 2 are kinda fun. Easy puzzles but diverting, with nice graphics.
If you find it fun to make fine distinctions between colors, I Love Hue is interesting. But I can also see other folks thinking that’s a circle of hell.
Oh, and I’m enjoying Cryptic Crossword by Teazel Inc. They’re not very difficult ones, and it would be nice if it had some kind of “explain” option for when you really can’t grok a clue even after seeing the answer. But you usually get an “aha” from most clues and the packs of puzzles aren’t too pricey.
There are a few more games I enjoyed, but that was at least partly because I got them from a Humble Bundle, and those versions had the in-app purchases turned into things you could earn in the game, which was way better. E.g. the Kingdom Rush games. I can’t really recommend the versions you can get now, because they’re all microtransactioned up. I think the same is true of some of the games I used to enjoy like Cut The Rope as well.
Emulation is also a good option, but if you don’t want to bother with that there are a few purchasable apps that will basically do it for you, like Sega’s Shining Force games.
Hope this helps someone. I wrote it up partly to get myself to organize the things in my own brain.
“Scary” may also be the wrong word; “tense” might be closer to the mark. In Fusion there are these sections where you’ll be exploring and then suddenly your doppleganger will show up and start hunting you. It’s surprising and actually pretty unnerving; you have to get away, but the thing can move basically as fast as you can and there’s really not much room to maneuver. I was under the impression that the “EMI” sections in dread were basically a refinement of this, but maybe I was misinformed.
It’s not FOSS, and it’s been a few years since I used it, but I used to rely on Jota text editor. It was a very straightforward one, no bells and whistles, but that was kinda what I wanted from it. It didn’t get unmanageable when using very large files, and if I recall correctly I think it also handled both Unix and Windows line endings, which mattered to me.
Not sure if it’s still good, though. I don’t do nearly as much weird stuff with my phone as I used to.
I just use swipe typing, but my dad absolutely loves MessagEase, which is basically a 9-key keyboard. The gimmick is that every letter is a gesture; nine letters are just taps, and everything else (including some punctuation) you start on one of those nine keys and swipe in one of eight directions (up, left, upper left, etc.). I think there are a couple of other large keys, like a space bar at the bottom and delete and “switch to numbers and extra punctuation” on the right, but you mainly use the nine for words. It’s not terrible, and he’s gotten moderately fast at it. Might be worth a look.
Edit: Oh, I’ve just seen that MessagEase is now unmaintained, and the “thumbkey” mentioned in another comment is basically a replacement. So I guess this is just another recommendation for that keyboard! Oops.
Yeah, it’s not there for me. I’ve got “view your profile,” messages (which is a fakeout, as you can’t actually view them on the mobile website), groups, marketplace, friends, “videos on watch”, pages, dating, saved, memories, events, games, “climate science information center”, “ads manager”, “orders and payments”, “most recent”, settings, dark mode, “privacy shortcuts”, language, help, “support inbox”, about, “report a problem”, and logout. No feeds. I’ve never seen it.
You were pretty unlucky to buy a Pixel 5A in 2022. Every Pixel device that’s been released since October 2021’s Pixel 6 has had 5 years of security updates*, including the A line starting with the Pixel 6A in mid-2022. So the only phone Google still sold in the first half of 2022 that didn’t have that was the 5A.
At this point the Pixel phones specifically do have pretty decent support lifetimes. iPhones are still doing better, and Android phones in general are terrible about it, but for the Pixels in particular this has ceased to be a big issue. It sounds like you managed to snag the very last phone with this problem.
*They still only get 3 years of OS upgrades, but that hasn’t made a meaningful difference in several years.
I’ve got a few unusual suggestions. I think most of these flew pretty far under the radar.
Sethian: This one is about decoding an alien language, and is carried out mostly in that language. I don’t think it’s entirely successful, but it’s a very interesting concept.
Heaven’s Vault: also about decoding an alien language, but with a lot more other bits about archaeology, social wrangling, and a weird minigame about sailing between planets? I dunno. I didn’t love this one either but the language thing is so unusual that it’s pretty easy to win me over with it.
Gateways: by Smudged Cat Games, since there are a couple of other games with a similar name. This one is a 2d puzzle platformer; it starts out pretty similar to Portal, but it gets way more involved when you have to manipulate rotation, size, and even time. Really, really challenging by the end.
TIS-100: This one is pretty well-known. This is a “zach-like” puzzle game, along with games like Shenzhen IO and Magnum Opus (also made by Zachtronic Games), but this one is my favorite. It’s about programming an unusual computer. It’s quite hard, but extremely engrossing for the right kind of brain.
Yon Paradox: This one is almost entirely a time travel puzzle game. In it you have to explore a facility, periodically traveling back in time; but with you do, your previous selves still exist, and do what you previously did. So in order to avoid causing a paradox, you have to avoid being seen by your previous selves. I didn’t actually spend much time playing this one–I got it to try in VR, and it gave me motion sickness like that. But I’ve meant to go back and try it in flatscreen. You’ve got to admit it’s an unusual premise.
Oh, and I suppose I should mention Achron as well, since I bought that one for its unusual premise. It’s a realtime strategy game, along the lines of starcraft, but with a timetravel mechanic built in. The mechanic is intended to be balanced even in multiplayer. I never really learned to play it, though–it seemed really complicated and not necessarily all that fun. But it’s pretty unique.
There are two basic ways I can think of that you could still end up using OpenDNS without setting it as your DNS server in the private DNS settings. The first is simply if it’s the default DNS that your ISP (in this case the phone company, since you mention you’re not on WiFi) supplies. If you don’t set a DNS server, then your system will obtain one at the same time it obtains an IP address via DHCP during the initial handshake with the ISP, because it needs to use something to translate website names into IP addresses. So if the ISP is configured to suggest OpenDNS, that’ll still be what you’ll use. You can override this by manually setting another DNS server. Note though that many DNS services (including a Google, if I recall correctly) use OpenDNS as a fallback setting, so if the main DNS site is down for some reason, you might still get OpenDNS results.
The other possibility is if have a VPN enabled, like Adguard or DNS66. These often affect DNS resolution as part of an effort to block ads. Again, manually setting a DNS, or disabling the VPN, should override this.
One last note is that there’s a setting in Chrome that lets it bypass your DNS settings and use Google’s own DNS for that app, so if you’re using Chrome and Google’s DNS server is down or doesn’t have an entry for a particular site, that could still lead to OpenDNS being used for resolution. I haven’t really found turning off that setting to work in getting Chrome to use my configured DNS, which is part of why I now use Firefox on Android, but in theory it should be possible to fix with “settings->privacy and security->secure DNS->use current provider,” or with a custom configuration in the same setting, in Chrome, or by turning off secure DNS in the same spot.
Note that all these settings do have privacy implications, so it might be worth reading about those before mucking with any of them!
It’s not exactly the same, but Slay the Spire scratched some of the same itch for me. It’s got the same meta-structure as FTL, but the fights use a deck-builder format. It’s really well done.
One Step From Eden seemed like it should be even better for me, since it borrows the positional strategy stuff from the Mega Man Battle Network games, but I couldn’t get into it. Mostly I remember it being just way too fast. I really wanted to like it, but basically didn’t.
And yeah, as someone else mentioned, Advance Wars is good, too. The thing that Into the Breach did that Advance Wars didn’t, for me, was that Advance Wars basically depended on the AI being a bit crap so that you could overcome an initial disadvantage and work up to victory. Into the Breach gets around that by making the enemy wholly predictable instead, which is arguably more fun. The only other game I know of that worked that way was an Android game called Auro, but I don’t think that’s playable anymore and I believe the dev has abandoned it. It’s a shame, as it was really well made.
Other than that… you could try learning Go (aka igo, baduk, or weiqi). It’s a board game with very simple rules, but very deep strategy that emerges from those rules. The main disadvantage is that it’s multiplayer only, but there are puzzles, problems, and AIs you can use to turn it into a solo time killer.