I’m already never buying another Samsung phone - or any other Samsung device, for that matter. You don’t need to keep convincing me.

Most is Slay the Spire, and I don’t even think it’s close. And I say that having bought it twice, once on Steam and once on mobile.

Least, I’m tempted to day League of Legends or Overwatch, both of which I bought extra cosmetic stuff for and neither of which I play anymore - and I’m not sure I even liked either of them much when I was playing.

But not knowing (and not wanting to know) how much money I’ve spent on either, I’ll instead say either Imperator: Rome or Victoria III. I preordered both with extras, and ended up only putting around 40 hours into both before giving up. Compare that to other Paradox grand strategy games, where I can easily have 500+ hours played, and I really feel like I didn’t get my money’s worth.

Slay the Spire is one of my top 5 favourite games ever, and I’ve probably put more than 1500 hours into it. I’m super excited about the sequel.

The only downside is that it’s only on Steam right now. 90%+ of my playtime in the first game is on my phone. I mind paying twice, but I will miss the convenience while I wait for the mobile release.

This article only talks about the number of Copilot 365 licences that are active. It doesn’t even consider the situations like my workplace, where everyone was given a licence but hardly anyone uses it.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the actual usage rate for these licences is also very low, meaning the situation could be even more dire than the article makes out.

I don’t know how to feel about it being an RTS, as I’m pretty bad at those.

I guess a straight slow-time game might end up too similar to the board game, though.

I can think of a bunch of other things that Google should be embarrassed about, but Gemini is uniquely humiliating because of how proud they are of it and how hard they are pushing it.

Copilot is one of two LLMs I’ve briefly tried. It was noticeably better than Gemini was at the time, but still seemed entirely pointless. Nothing it (or Gemini) offered to do were things I wanted help with. I enjoy research and writing, so why would I outsource those things and burn down an acre of rainforest in the process?

Nah, just the sad message of “Pretty please love me (because we sunk a bunch of money into this).”

One of the things I initially liked about Pixels was that I could uninstall/disable a lot of the proprietary garbage that would be mandatory on other phones. But now it looks like Google is abandoning that flexibility in favour of shoehorning Gemini into everything.

My only interaction with Gemini so far was telling it to kick rocks when it sent me an unsolicited text message. I also barely use Assistant to begin with. So once my current phone dies, I guess I’ll have to find something new.

I’ve never experienced that, and I’ve definitely told Google Assistant to fornicate with itself on multiple occasions.

I had never heard of Humane until I read this article. After also reading Engadget’s review of the thing, it sounds like an absolute nightmare to use.

Maybe I’m too old-school and impatient, but I’ve never been able to make voice assistants work for me. It’s a feedback loop: the assistant fails to do a task, so I become resistant to using it in the future. Even the thing I’ve used an assistant for the most, playing music out of a Nest speaker, seems to still be hit-or-miss after years of trying, and in some ways seems to be getting worse.

The gestures also sound awful. As with voice assistants, I’ve never gotten comfortable with smartphone gestures beyond the most rudimentary. I strictly use 3-button navigation on my phone, and I use Connect as my Lemmy app of choice because it allows me to disable all the swipe commands for upvote/downvote.

I’ve gotten the pop-up once or twice, but updating uBlock fixed that.

I have instead noticed a large decrease in quality, things like frozen images/pages and endless buffering. I don’t know if all that is related, but it did start around the time YouTube started cracking down on ad blockers.

I’m in the same camp. I was generally fine when it was an occasional skippable pre-roll ad before some videos. But the last time I watched a video without a blocker, there were two unskippable ads at the start plus two more each at the 7 and 14 minute mark of a 20 minute video.

This hour has 22 minutes indeed.

Reporting players for in-game behaviour rarely did anything.

And there was no reporting mechanism at all if they decided to continue harassing you through DMs after the game was over - all you could do was block them.

Maybe they’ll confirm the rumoured Fire Emblem 4 remake? I think enough time has passed since Engage that it wouldn’t be completely overshadowed.

It really is just a coincidence.

I got an Android for my first ever smart phone because the friend who was advising me happened to be an Android user too. If they’d been an Apple user, I probably would have gotten an iPhone that day.

I’ve stuck with Android since then because it’s what I know. I had an iPhone for work for a while and I found it annoying to try to learn all the differences.

Symphony of War: The Nephilim Saga

I’ll say up front that it’s a niche game and isn’t for everyone. This is especially true because most of its aspects outside of the gameplay are pretty unremarkable. But if this is your thing, it’s really your thing.

What makes it so special is that its core gameplay loop is a very satisfying meld of Fire Emblem and Ogre Battle - essentially a turn-based strategy RPG where you control semi-autonomous squads instead of individual characters. And if that description made you perk up just by reading it, you need to go buy this game ASAP.

Now, if that description didn’t immediately pique your interest, I’d check out some gameplay videos instead. Because it fills such an obscure niche, it’s actually hard to know if you’ll like this game just from a brief description. There’s a good chance you’ve never played anything like this, and it will scratch an itch you never knew you had.