Silksong surprise dropped this September after 7 years with like a 2 month heads up

Clair Obscur Expedition 33 came out of absolutely nowhere and is a work of art in every way

Deltarune chapters 3 and 4 finally launched, 3 is fun but 4 is incredible.

I think Balatro came out in that timeframe, and CloverPit in a similar vein this year (though the latter’s most recent update is frankly terrible and hopefully most of the charges will be reverted in the next update)

Ball X Pit becomes more of an idle game once you make progress, but it’s a great little casual take on Breakout, with a fair bit of grinding for completion.

Eden Ring Nightreign is an interesting take on the formula and IMO a far better game than its original counterpart

Alan Wake 2 may have been 2023, my memory’s a bit fuzzy, but I think if anything they dropped a decent sized update last year.

Mycopunk is a fantastic early access FPS, coop emphasis and super chaotic

Path of Exile 2’s early access is phase is finally nearing its end. Game has solid bones

Ninja Gaiden Ragebound is pretty underrated, first modern game in the series that builds on the classic NES formula instead

Antonblast is a great little Wario-inspired platformer. Not as speedy as Pizza Tower, but really tight.

Yakuza Pirates I guess, though I’d argue it’s legitimately the worst game in the franchise. It’s not bad but it’s not good.

Witchfire is another early access FPS about to hit 1.0. It’s been out for a few years now but they’ve been really cracking down on the updates lately.

I Am Your Beast is an underrated one for sure, very fast paced speedrun-driven FPS about taking down a fascist private military. Strange Scaffold never disappoints.

These couple years saw a huge resurgence of casual party-based games. Lethal Company, REPO, and Peak are all fun with the right group, though popularity of the first two is dwindling last I checked. A bit of a fad but they’re fun.

I’ve definitely missed a handful here and got my years wrong in some places, but these have been some standouts for me lately.

I love the new area, I do think the bosses are a bit overtuned (especially the two new superbosses, but those should be a huge challenge), but I was also super rusty and on NG+5 so I can’t really say for certain.

Super cool stuff. All 5 new bosses kicked my shit in after I’d been steamrolling the rest of the game, only beat the new area boss and called it there - the new tower shit is way too much for me. Might edit my save back down to NG+ and see how they feel.

Not a fan of the Breaking Death nerf though, I will say that. It really cripples endgame autodeath builds. One of those changes where even if it were a bug, it’d been around so long that they should’ve let it stay as-is.

In general it really does depend on the interviewer. I was honest and open about how my new manager at my last job fucked over the team and myself, with specific details, and it led to good conversations during the interview process for the place I’m at now.

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Zionism is literally antisemitic, so that tracks.

It feels like so many devs and studios have been trying to bring back the magic of that era but L4D was such a product of the times. Hard to imagine any similar games in that vein succeeding today.

Because this list is almost entirely made of and written by AI slop lmao

Came across this the other day and considered setting it up to replace Vaultwarden. Definitely need to sit down and do that now, a vibe coded password manager sounds like an absolute fucking nightmare.

https://github.com/aliasvault/aliasvault

Oh motherfucker we can’t have anything

I don’t believe so but I could be wrong. Last I checked it’s been around for years, long before the whole genAI shitshow took off. Might be thinking of Deepseek, which despite the similar name I don’t think are related. Though again I haven’t really done much research on this one, just seems to be a common recommendation when trying to move away from google products as a whole.

The only real answer is breaking away from Google as much as possible, and that’s a hard ask, especially without getting into selfhosting.

Search: DDG is okay but offers its own AI shit and gives a pass to Microsoft trackers. Kagi seems great but it’s a paid service and an expensive one at that. The best option IMO is SearXNG, but unless you host it yourself, and while there are a good handful of big public instances, you’re putting your trust in whoever’s hosting the service at the other end, plus it’s just an aggregator of other search engine results. I do feel a selfhosted SearXNG instance is the best option though for sure.

Drive: ProtonDrive seems fine but I don’t trust Proton as a company after their CEO expressed support for a fascist. Once again selfhosting wins out, with Opencloud or Nextcloud or really any service along those lines.

Gmail: Proton again is a good option, but also again I don’t really have faith in them. I’ve been using Tuta which works fine, the inbox is very slow admittedly but otherwise no complaints.

Youtube: Incredibly difficult one to move away from, so something like Invidious or NewPipe is the way to go to cut out their bullshit. Alternatives are slowly cropping up but not remotely anywhere close to the size and scale of youtube.

Photos: I honestly can’t think of a non-selfhosted alternative here. Immich and Ente are the closest things by a mile.

Maps: Personally I like CoMaps for general use and MagicEarth for navigation. The latter isn’t FOSS but they seem solid enough and have earned plenty of recommendations from those trying to leave google behind entirely.

Translate: DeepL is alright I guess? It’s worked fine for me but I admittedly don’t know much about the company or product, just seems to be a common recommendation. It’s not nearly as accurate unfortunately.

After ditching D2 last year well past the 10k hour mark, I’ve been bouncing around a bunch of different games, mostly working through the backlog but also looking for a long-term grind to scratch that same itch. Out of everything I’ve tried, PoE2 and Warframe feel like the only ones doing live service “right”, especially the latter. Between both games, the only MTX gripe I have is PoE2’s stash tabs.

Last Epoch had a ton of potential but the team were in way over their heads and forced to start cashing in, and the Krafton buyout was the nail in the coffin. It feels like they just flat out didn’t have the budget to keep it going.

As soon as Krafton bought them out it wasn’t just downhill from there, it was a steep drop off a cliff. The game had so much promise but got royally fucked.

Everything is cosmetic last I checked aside from stash tabs, which granted should be earnable in-game, but it’s nothing like an entirely MTX-only class. I do wish the game had a transmog system though at least, even Diablo 4 does, and we all know how Blizzard is.

Could be better, could be worse.

Really depends on the instance. Most lemmy.world subs are cesspools. Hexbear and the like tend to be much better overall.

When I first set up my server this year it was a VERY easy decision between this and jellyfin. Why would I ever go with the corporate, closed source option?

I set this up a while back (and recently moved to Forgejo, see the update note at the beginning of the article):

https://nickcunningh.am/blog/how-to-automate-version-updates-for-your-self-hosted-docker-containers-with-gitea-renovate-and-komodo

Probably a tad overkill honestly but it works amazingly well, and turns every potential upgrade into an approval process so nothing will update when you don’t want it to.

Play stupid games, get shot in the neck