The sequels also got way too bloated imo. If i wanted to collect 50 feathers or whatever I’ll go play a Ubisoft game.

I can’t really say exactly what made the 2013 reboot special but it felt unique. Its sequels feel like any other open world game these days.

Not owned personally but my mom’s '99 Fiat Punto I used to drive in high school was awful. 60 drunk donkeys under the hood, 0-60 of eventually, brakes that yanked it to the right if you were too aggressive on them and a battery that went flat in a few days if you didn’t drive the car. It also had the tendency to just keep revving up when in neutral until you either put it in gear and engage the clutch or shut off the engine.

Anyway, I still have fond memories of that car. Going down mountain roads was fun because it was very slow, but super light, so you could just keep the throttle pinned for the most part and the rotted out muffler made it sound like a racecar lmao.

I have two from when I was a kid. Once I was waiting at a traffic light with my mom. The light turns green and I jump out onto a street without looking. Not even half a second later a car whizzes by just centimeters in front of me. It went by so fast I have no doubt it would have killed me had it hit. That was probably 20 years ago and I still always look both ways even when the light is green.

Another one was at the beach. I couldn’t swim (still can’t) so I was walking parallel to the shore in water up to my shoulders. At one point there was a drainage pipe or something and the current from it seems to have eroded the bottom, so as I’m walking the ground suddenly goes out from under me and I feel like I’m getting pulled deeper in the sea. Luckily my mom was nearby and pulled me out pretty quickly. I don’t like going deeper than waist height into the sea since then.

I also had a more recent scary moment, which wasn’t really near death, but could have easily been very bad if there was an oncoming car. Get good tyres and don’t fuck around in the rain, kids: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VXTThHtUqLk

So, I’ll just go through my Steam favourites and list the ones that fit the bill.

I recently played I Am Your Beast and absolutely loved it. Not really a story focused game, but it’s it has some of it, the voice actors are better than you would expect and the gameplay is top notch.

Pretty much all Call of Juarez games (well, maybe not The Cartel), but start with Gunslinger. The others are old and clunky, but Gunslinger still holds up and is one of my favourite arcady shooters.

Mirror’s Edge is a classic, if you haven’t played it, you definitely should. You can skip the sequel, Catalyst. That one added open world and was mediocre at best anyway.

Speaking of classics, Dishonored is probably one of the best stealth games out there, in my opinion at least. I would consider the first one fairly linear, altho the game does expect you to explore the individual levels quite a bit.

Mafia 2 (I honestly recommend you play the classic edition, you get it when you buy the definitive. It just runs better and isn’t as buggy. The remaster barely improves anything anyway) and the remake of Mafia 1. Yes, they are open world, but only by technicality. The story is very linear and you barely need to interact with said open world. The games never expect you to explore or collect stuff and there’s fuckall to do on the map besides drive around anyway.

If you like Ace combat, Project Wingman would be right up your alley. I’m not sure if I would call it simple per se, but it’s linear, level based and great.

Tactical Breach Wizards is another recent favourite of mine. It’s slightly x-com-y altho more of a puzzle than a strategy game with some pretty decent humour.

Gunpoint is another indie puzzle game with great humour. It’s by the same guy as Tactical Breach Wizards.

Since you said you like Uncharted, I imagine you might enjoy the older Tomb Raider games, before the 2013 reboot when they went open world. Legend is my favourite of them altho I know it’s a bit clunky by modern standards.

Last but not least, SUPERHOT. You probably know it, but in case you don’t, play it. It’s short, it’s simple and it’s great.

Some people believe the earth is flat, I don’t think whether the definition is scientific or not matters much lmao

Are you dual wielding mice, my man? Why do you need two? I know it doesn’t matter for your question, but I’m genuinely curious what the use case is.

Probably Call of Juarez: The Cartel. I wanted to play the entire franchise back to back, but it wasn’t being sold on Steam, so I had to hunt down a copy on some key reseller. Boy, do I see why it’s not on sale anymore. runs like absolute shit, incredibly buggy, cheesy as hell and with some pretty questionable game design choices. Still, it was somewhat entertaining in a “so bad it’s good” sense, and it ties into the previous games in a fairly interesting way, so I don’t regret playing it. It was certainly an experience, but it’s a very bad game by pretty much all metrics.

The map looks and feels amazing, one of my favourite worlds in a game, and the main story missions are really, really good

BUT

To unlock said story missions you have to do multiple hours of open world tasks, most of which consist of going to an area and mindlessly killing everybody. If you enjoy grinding, you will probably like it, I have a friend who does, but I couldn’t bring myself to finish it because I found unlocking the story missions mind-numbing.

I guess they were driving Safely, but not Carefully

“watch the ficus” - telling somebody to be more careful after they do something clumsy like tripping or nearly dropping something. I used it in front of some friends once and got confused looks. Apparently grandma used to have a potted ficus tree and used to tell me to watch it when I was playing close to it, so it stuck as a saying in the family.

Hmm, I do have tap to wake and that is giving me an idea. You can pull down the status bar while the phone is locked and in the bottom right corner there’s a power button. So theoretically my leg can double tap the screen, pull down the status bar, tap the power button and confirm. Feels like a bit of a stretch but who knows. I’ve never had it randomly turn off while I was using it or while sitting on my desk after all ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Yeah, I’d say 4 is about right. And the power button is a bit recessed (it doubles as the fingerprint reader), so it’s really hard to press it accidentally. I genuinely have no idea how it could randomly turn off in my pocket. As for the battery, I’m pretty confident it’s a software issue. It’s only happened twice in the 4 months I’ve owned the phone and a restart fixed it both times.

Keep in mind that my basis for comparison is a Galaxy S9. The Fairphone feels smoother and more responsive most of the time, but you do occasionally get freezes and lag spikes, mostly when you try to minimise an app that is currently loading something from my experience. Particularly heavy websites also slow it down sometimes, but pretty rarely.

And I wouldn’t really call the design “that bad”, I was listing off my issues with it, so it might have come across that way, but the majority of the time it works completely fine.

Never happened on my old phone. Might be some issue with the stock Android then, idk

I have a Fairphone 5 and it’s… ok. It’s definitely overpriced for its specs but you can’t really expect a cheap phone while cutting down on slave labour at the same time. It’s also quite buggy. Not unusably so, but coming from a Galaxy S9 (yes, Samsung bad, that’s why I switched), it’s a bit jarring. For example, sometimes I’ll pull it out of my pocket and it’s mysteriously off. I turn it back on and there doesn’t appear to be a reason for it and it works fine. A few times I’ve had the battery drain insanely fast for some reason, despite the phone reporting no apps having high battery usage. Some apps also have issues on occasion, Discord for example tends to get stuck in the gallery view after you send a picture and it doesn’t allow you to open the keyboard again. It’s also missing some minor, but neat things, like the ability to snooze alarms by turning over the phone (Edit: tbh that’s probably a stock Android thing and not really fair to hold against the phone, but I still miss it) and the fingerprint reader is nowhere near as reliable as the one in my old phone.

The vast majority of the time it works just fine and if you don’t expect the polish you’ll get out of a Samsung flagship, you’ll probably be ok with it. But you are very much paying a premium for the sustainability and repairability, not the overall experience. I don’t regret supporting Fairphone, vote with your wallet and all that, but I definitely recognise the device itself has issues and when looked at purely on specs and software quality, it isn’t really worth the money.

I’m still in the beginning of my programming career (maybe also the end, looking at how AI is going, lmao) and at my previous job I had fuckall to do. I spent nearly a year without a project, working basically 30 minutes a day. I quit mainly because I was afraid that when I change jobs I will have say 5 years experience on paper, but the knowledge for 1, because I’ve barely done anything.

Work isn’t always about money, you also want to learn stuff so you can make even more money in the future. You can’t really do that if you get paid to watch Youtube all day.

The map and gameplay of WD2 are great, but I absolutely hated the story-gameplay dissonance. “Oh, we are just a bunch of nice, happy hacker kids, we want to get more social media followers… Let’s murder half of the San Francisco police force and literally thousands of criminals”. I am aware the game has non-lethal options, but they make playing much more of a slog and unlike WD1, this game does nothing to encourage using them. Ubisoft removed the morality system because everybody hated it in the first game, but ironically it would have fit much better in WD2 imo.

https://xkcd.com/927/

I am partial to “code monkey”

On a serious note, I usually refer to myself as a developer or a software engineer when I wanna sound a bit more important.

I bought a Steam Deck so I can play games while on the go. I just kind of forgot I’m never actually on the go, so 90% of the time it’s just gathering dust on my nightstand, because I’d rather play on my proper gaming PC when I’m at home.