As a fan of story-driven games, I absolutely am NOT advocating for complete removal of stories in videogames. What I was trying to say is that if Bioware knows that their audience has an attention deficit and is developing the game around this fact, you’re going to get a crap story. And judging by the reviews for Veilguard, that seems to be the case.

If Bioware is dead set on developing games for a crowd that watches twenty-seven thing simultaneously, why develop the story at all?

“What you need to know about your audience here is that they will watch the show, perhaps on their mobile phone, or on a second or third screen while doing something else and talking to their friends, so you need to both show and tell, you need to say much more than you would normally say.”

This is so baffling to me. So you’ve discovered your audience has a limited attention span. I can see that. But for the love of all that is holy, if you know this, why even make a game with a story in the first place? The thing with videogames is that stories can be minimalistic as all hell, or even optional. Just let the gameplay speak for itself and have the story be “defeat the bad guy on the mountain” or something.

My experience as well. Fortunately, I was able to remedy this by flashing a fresh install of LineageOS. Though, I do understand that not every phone is able to do this and even if it is, the process can look intimidating for newbies.

Repairability of smartphones is such a non-issue in reality, it amazes me that people are so crazy about it.

I’m sorry, but I take issue with that statement. Here’s how many steps you need to take to remove a battery from popular phones:

• Google Pixel 9: 39 steps. Involves applying heat to the battery. If that sentence doesn’t make you wince, then I don’t know what to tell you.
• iPhone 16 Pro: 40 steps.
• Huawei Honor 10: 20 steps.
• Samsung Galaxy S25 Edge: 27 steps

And I have to stress, this is the number of steps to just GET to the battery. I didn’t count the steps for battery replacement and reassembly. And all of these require some sort of specialty tools like having a gel pack to melt the glue inside the phone, or specialty screwdrivers for proprietary screws, etc. Not to mention the time and patience you need to expend.

Contrast this to the Fairphone 4:

• Fairphone 4: 4 steps

No tools needed. 2 minutes. So no, I absolutely refuse to believe that phone repairability is a non-issue.

A filter some AI used, probably.

What’s that table thing above Mario and Toad? Was that in the original game? I can’t remember.