Fair warning: lots of roguelikes on this list. Just seems like the devs of these games really like 2d non-demanding visuals. And I don’t know how low do you need to go, so check these individually.

Don’t even need a sale for Moonring, which is a retro turn-based RPG, completely free. Runs on a potato.

Original Monster Train should work decently well, it’s 90% off.

Shogun Showdown is really cool, 50% off. Necesse is a very fun Terraria-like, coming out of EA in like a week and on sale now.

Look into Reus 2, very fun, but it’s got some more visual effects so may be a bit too much. Same with Astral Ascent, one of my fave action roguelikes but, well, it’s action. Needs a decent framerate. Same with Dead Cells, Cult of the Lamb and Chronicon - great games, 2d, but may require a basic dedicated video card or a beefy integrated one.

Spellcaster University is not a forever game but it’ll be fun for a while.

Cook Serve Delicious series is really good. You can start with 1, they are each a bit different.

Cross Code if you want an RPG. Citizen Sleeper or Road Warden if you want an RPG that’s borderline a visual novel. Slay the Princess if you straight up want a visual novel.

Library of Ruina and Lobotomy Corporation if you’re a masochist who likes a good story.

Then there’s eternal classics like Stardew Valley, Balatro, Terraria,FTL, Into the Breach, Slay the Spire or Binding of Isaac: Rebirth.

And on the incredibly niche side of things, I recommend Intergalactic Fishing and Rings of Saturn.

Hopefully something from this list catches your fancy!

Well that’s going immediately onto the “things that looked promising but what the fuck, so actually don’t read ever” list.

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Re: minecraft - kids/people who aren’t very good at technology can’t or are unwilling to learn how to host their own servers, so that’s your potentially paying audience. Or people who want to play with a ton of other people, not just their family/friends. And you can do some interesting things with custom scripts and so on on a server, I remember briefly playing on a server which had its own custom in-game currency (earned by selling certain materials) and you could buy potions, equipment and various random perks for it (and of course there are ways to connect that to real money, although you might get banned for it).

https://lemmy.ml/post/31490862 pretty interesting article linked in this post, tl;dr researchers tried to get AI agents to run a simulated vending machine (which, let’s be clear, is a solved problem and can be done with a normal algorithm better and cheaper) and it didn’t go that great. Even if some of the test runs actually managed to earn money, they mostly devolved into the AI becoming convinced that the system doesn’t work and desperately trying to email someone about it (even FBI, one memorable time). I think it illustrates quite well just how badly things would go if we left anything to AI agents. What are the odds anyone involved with pushing autoplag into everything actually reads this though…

Yeah, that video was rough. I wasn’t actually expecting him to be super lefty or anything, but the “both sides bad and should talk more instead of screaming” take was still a blow.

Eyup, I’ve waited 6 years to get World and now I am comfortably playing it at max settings with a light sprinkling of mods. I’ll do the same with this one.

Good news: I’m sounding less and less like a conspiracy theorist nowadays. Bad news: see above.

It’s not isometric though, the camera can be controlled, zoomed in/out/rotated, and it has a full 3d world. And it’s huuuuge. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think any game should be that large, but BG3 has at least some justification for it.

Ah damn, I have it and enjoyed it a lot - it’s fun! The card assets have always been obviously generic, store-bought assets… but at least they were still made by humans. I remember the first AI controversy in that game, I think it was centered around the main menu’s background image, where the castle turrets and towers kinda didn’t line up.

I don’t know how I feel about this, on one hand this is such an incredibly niche product that I can understand wanting to save every scrap of money, but it sets a bad precedent going forward.

Name and shame? Which game?

Musk got banned in Path of Exile 2 for cheating. I’m not sure what angle to take here, but you gotta admit that it’s a bit funny/satisfying. (how does such a busy [assume I’m making air quotes with my fingers] guy have time to play video games? why is he so obsessed with status that he’d try to cheat his way up the leaderboards, and not for the first time either?)

I’ll bet quite a lot that they’ll learn the exact wrong thing from this and decide that they just weren’t republican enough.

So how many ChatGPT 4s have they precariously stacked up on top of each other this time?

A seemingly small detail that really bothers me about this story is that those glorified chatbots were given backstories like they are actual humans - in their bios they have things like “an acoustics engineering student at AGH [local university]” or “passionate about queer issues”. And… can a chatbot have a student id? I somehow doubt that AGH has ever issued an id for a bot. Can a chatbot be “passionate” about real issues that real queer people face (especially in a country like Poland which, while it’s been getting better on LGBT+ rights, is still one of the worse places in the EU to be queer) and should it pretend like it has faced these things too? That seems like a horrible idea.

I got the testicle part :P it’s just that “piroshkis” doesn’t sound Polish at all, and since we’re talking about Poland… Even “pierogis”, with its unnecessary “s” would be better.

As a note, as this story is about a Polish radio station the word you’d want to use is “pierogi” or “pierożki”, no “s” at the end either.

A publically funded radiostation in my city has fired all of its hosts and replaced them with 3 AI “hosts” (non-English link).

They’re trying to defend this by saying that all of the hosts were just independent contractors and AI is not the main reason they’re firing them, and that the AI thing is just going to be “an experiment to appeal to Gen Z”. Fortunately, most people’s response seems to be “fuck off with this crap”.

I just… can’t with this. Even if they really were firing the hosts anyway (which is possible), I absolutely hate that they are using public money to run “experiments” with AI media. Heads should roll for this.