I’m not sure how the term “patent” is to be interpreted here. It could be used like back in the days when Apple sued Samsung because their phone had rounded edges too…
Like a “design patent” (sorry, I’m not a native English speaker, so I’m unsure if this is the correct translation).
A lot of the pals in the game look quite close to Pokémon. Not identical, of course, but so similar that one just has to wonder if the design has been “inspired” by Pokémon…
Amnesia.
Short answer: Whales.
Long answer: Watch the South Park episode on the topic. They explain it in detail. It’s titled “Freemium Isn’t Free”.
Need to enshittify it enough to make the AI features feel like an improvement.
Oh, and just in the moment I hit send, I remembered another gem from the olden times:
Unreal World: Basically the survival game. 99% of today’s survival games are just a pale shadow of this. I mean, nowadays there are even “survival” games without hunger mechanics or proper simulation of wounds… No, this is not one of those easy mode survival games. This is Fantasy Finland, and it’s the Fantasy Iron Age. Available for free or, if you want updates faster, also for money on Steam.
If I weren’t currently at work and would have time to think about the answer, I could probably come up with more titles, but those are the top 2 that come to mind, if I ignore cRPGs (at least that’s how I read your “avoiding final fantasy-esque” requirement):
Settlers 2: It’s new enough to still look decent by today’s standards, and has amazing game design. Available at GoG.
Star Control 2: One of the best early open world games. The graphics have definitely aged by today’s standard, but the humour hasn’t. Or maybe it has, but just a bit. Available for free and open source.
Just look at the trailer. Of course there is still some animation jank, but the overall visuals are just stunning.
It’s so uncanny valley that I might feel bad for deleting the pool ladders (or whatever the equivalent of that is in inZOI).
I would like to answer Vagrus, as that is what I would want to play.
However, I spent way too much of my spare time playing Lean4, and that isn’t even supposed to be a game!
Almost all the rest of my gaming time goes into Palworld multiplayer with my wife. What left about 1 hour for Vagrus last week…
I wanted to play Baldurs Gate 3 multiplayer with my wife, but couldn’t convince her. She really doesn’t like turn-based combat, and the game has too much dialogue for her taste…
So, we are now playing Palworld instead. It’s a lot of fun in multiplayer, but still quite grindy.
Xbox Series X/S.
It isn’t even particularly bad by itself, but compared to its predesessors (Xbox One and Xbox 360) the Xbox Series X/S gamepad is a clear step back when it comest to build quality (just try pressing the D-Pad buttons without thinking “this is cheaply made”), and that comparison is what makes me hate it.
And what adds insult to injury is that the quite expensive Elite version of the controller is just as cheaply built as the regular model…
Technically I’m still playing “Vagrus - The Riven Realms”, but I didn’t play much lately, since I rediscovered my love for the Lean4 programming language and am now playing around with a formally validated heap again.
Not really that big of a deal, but Baldur’s Gate 3 can be launched with the --skip-launcher command line parameter to, well, skip the launcher.
I wanted to be a bit more productive in my spare time, but I have made a huge mistake:
I started playing Vagrus - The Riven Realms again.
The world building in Vagrus is excellent. It’s set in a post-apocalyptic fantasy Roman empire, and there is a massive amount of text that details the world, and the people living in it. There is so much to read, that the devs even thought it necessary (and rightfully so) to display a warning about the sheer amount of text on the game’s startup screen, with the suggestion to refund it if one doesn’t enjoy a lot of reading. Sooo, of course this is the perfect game for me - or would be if I had more spare time.
The game is a mixture of trading sim and role playing game. You play a vagrus (a caravan leader), and travel the land trading wares, transporting passengers, spreading gossip and doing missions for different factions, you also have a lot of story elements that you can (and should) follow. There is turn-based combat, and during story events there are plenty of skill checks.
The game is relatively difficult, due to its interwoven mechanics. You need to calculate relatively tightly in order to make a profit, but if you loose people in combat, not having reserves might lead into a morale-loss and hunger death spiral… Also, due to the game’s grim settings, the choices one faces are more often than not to either do what is right, or to survive.
If you are using systemd, there’s a tool called coredumpctl.
I feel like I have to link this here: The open source project (which also has builds for other platforms than Windows): https://sc2.sourceforge.net/
I don’t know that particular system, so I can’t give any hardware-specific suggestions. However, it might be worth checking out the games that previously were included in Humble Mobile Bundles, especially the very first ones. Sorry, I don’t have a nice to browse list, but this site seems usable enough: https://barter.vg/bundles/3/76/
That said, OpenTTD is available on F-Droid. That should keep you busy for a while 😉
Ubuntu was pretty good, until 2010 or so. People who still recommend it probably haven’t used it in the last 10 years.
“PPA” is Ubuntu’s branding for third party repositories. So, of course you will have a hard time adding a Ubuntu-specific third-party repository to anything that isn’t the Ubuntu version it’s made for…
Debian of course supports third party repos, just like Ubuntu. On Debian they just aren’t called “PPA”.
For more information on how to add third party repos to Debian (or Ubuntu, if you don’t use Canonical’s weird tooling), check out the Debian Wiki page on UseThirdParty or SourcesList. There’s also an (incomplete) list of third party repositories on the wiki: Unofficial. And just like with PPAs, anyone can host a Debian repo.
It depends on what kind of patent. I just googled the term I had used before, and it is indeed what I expected it to be: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_patent
And yes, that name is stupid. That’s why I am happy that my native language, German, has a better distinction between “Patent” (what you described) and “Geschmacksmuster” (design patent).
About patents being public: They are. That’s because the idea behind patents is that after they expire, anyone can use them to build the technology they describe. The temporary exclusive usage rights that they offer are meant as an incentive for inventors to publish their findings. The only problem is that the legal situation did not keep up with the creativity of patent lawyers… (I will stop now, otherwise this will turn into an endless rant about how broken the patent system is.)