Sometimes I like to browse Mastodon just to see what's going on, especially when breaking news is happening (similar to how twitter used to be useful for). I don't have any interest in posting or commenting or boosting or anything, I just want to browse. I'm currently just using mastodon.social as a PWA and it works ok I guess, but I'm wondering if there are any android apps that will allow me to browse Mastodon without requiring a login.

I tried looking at a bunch of Mastodon apps about a year ago and every app would start with a login page and wouldn't let me proceed until I logged in. Is that still the case? Or are there any apps that will let me browse anonymously without logging in first?

I will say, this is one thing I love about Lemmy over Mastodon. Every Lemmy app I've tried defaults to anonymous browsing but still has the option to login if you want. This makes it so much easier to try out multiple Lemmy apps to see which one I like best.

As I get older, I find I have no interest in playing the cutesy/silly games that are everywhere on retro consoles (obviously, they were targeted towards kids). But I also don't have the patience for survival horror games like the resident evil or silent hill series. I'm just looking for a fun spooky game that I can jump into and start playing.

So what are your favorite action-oriented games featuring skeletons and bats and horror movie monsters that aren't actually trying to scare you? Any platform, any year. I'm looking for games whose entire theme is spooky, not just a single haunted house or graveyard level.

The cyberpunk metropolis Shinjuku—a massive city-state bedecked with neon signs, towering skyscrapers, and the latest cutting-edge technology. It is here, in year 2099 of the Fused Era, where the legendary Demon Lord Veltol has his second coming five centuries in the making. But this landscape is nothing like the one he conquered all those years ago, for the fusion of magic and engineering has elevated civilization to dazzling, unprecedented heights. Veltol may have been reduced to a historical footnote, but make no mistake…this brave new world will be his for the taking!

This game looks similar to Observer as a first-person game with no combat about a detective trying to solve a case in a cyberpunk world. At least, that's my understanding from the trailers.

Available on Steam, Playstation, Xbox.

I've mentioned this before, but I'm a fan of the Watch_Dogs series. And I can't believe they're actually making a movie for it. I have no doubt this movie will be terrible but that won't stop me from seeing it in the theater. Can't wait!

Released in 1995 (the same year as Hackers and The Net!) and I've never heard of this movie. I think it was direct-to-video though, and there are plenty of terrible direct-to-video movies from that time.

Here's a description of the movie from someone's review on imdb:

An evil billionaire develops a weapon that will entrap its victims in a catatonic state of virtual reality. His girlfriend steals the disk (back when DVD discs were considered a big deal) that creates the software for the weapon and amazingly, it's the only copy. She makes friends with a sailor who helps her escape, and they put the software in a tattoo on his back.

Here's a trailer. If you think you can stomach it, the entire movie has been posted to youtube. For what it's worth, one of the reviews says there's a lot of nudity in the movie but I guess it isn't enough to trigger youtube's algorithm for removal. I think it's a little too low-budget even for my tastes so I haven't tried watching but maybe someone here might be interested.

I happened to stumble upon this today and wanted to talk about it. Bujji & Bhairava is an animated 2-episode mini-series (15 minutes each) prelude to one of the most expensive Indian movies ever made, Kalki 2898 AD.

Now, as far as I can tell from the trailer, Kalki 2898 AD doesn't actually look cyberpunk to me. It looks more like Stargate or Gods of Egypt, where "the gods" have glowy futuristic technology but the humans are just living regular (non-scifi) lives. Yet this 2-episode animated prelude absolutely takes place in an Indian version of a cyberpunk city. The main character is a high-tech low-life bounty hunter who finds an android head and installs into a car to help him capture bounties. He's trying to make enough money so he can enter The Complex. Although I can't tell if The Complex is where all the rich people live (which would be even more cyberpunk) or if it's where "the gods" live (which I'd call less cyberpunk).

Anyway, these two 15-minute episodes are available on Amazon Prime. And the movie they're leading up to, Kalki 2898 AD, releases on June 27.

Nivalis is a life sim set to be released in spring of 2025, from the makers of Cloudpunk.