All I see is four badass apps with no ads and no dark patterns.
this post was submitted on 15 May 2025
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I got a Minesweeper app for my phone a few months ago with no ads. It's amazing.
In general, get stuff like that from F-Droid. Ads and other enshittification basically isn't allowed.
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Whenever people mention Space Cadet pinball, I HAVE to recommend the reverse engineered open source version on github (source ports for almost every type of platform).
It's also available on flathub.
"Reverse engineered open source" isn't a thing. You can decompile a program and look at the source code all you want, but that's not the same as having the legal right to modify and redistribute it. Open Source specifically means the latter.
What you've linked to there is just some pirated proprietary-licensed source code that, frankly, I'm a little surprised Microsoft hasn't taken down yet.
(Also, I don't like the term "open source" for exactly the reason that it leads to this sort of confusion. According to both the OSI and FSF it means the same thing as "Free Software," so folks should use the term Free Software instead since it emphasizes the four freedoms.)
If you want a pinball game that's actually Free Software, check out Vector Pinball. I recommend installing it via F-Droid.
Ahh, my nostalgia. Thanks!
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In paint be sure to make a bunch of random lines and then use the fill bucket to fill in random colors in the spaces.
Oooh I totally forgot that I did play with MS Paint! I invented cities, countries, or I just did what you described. Fun times!
I used pixel-level zoom and drew top-down Star Wars starfighters and then copied and pasted them to have battles.
How do you know?!?! This is one of the most laser precise call out to my childhood ive ever seen in an internet comment.
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MS paint used to have a spray paint tool. I spent a lot of time using that tool to fill the entire canvas.
It's nice to know that even without internet, they still had Balatro ❤️
Space Cadet.
What about winamp and windows media center audio visualizers. Trippy patterns
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I played the hell put of Freecell back in the day. Started going through the seeds in order, and over the course of about 2 years I made it through 1500 or so.
I should pick that up again. Only got about 30000 or so games left to finish the whole thing...
'Member when you bought a magazine and got a FREE floppy or CD with a bunch of (shareware/demo) games? I played the same 2 demo maps of Age of Empires to death - the game had 3, but the 3rd one was too hard for youngster me.
Navigating some Microsoft Bob ass Flash launcher where every installer link is a door on a space station, guided by the Coconut Monkey.
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skiifree was also a solid choice
And Chip's Challenge.
Encarta was the internet
Was Encarta the one with a trivia game? Or was that Britannica? Cause I remember my antisocial young self playing it to death.
I still got some useless facts stuck in my head, taking up valuable space.. I can't conjure any of them on demand; but someone could randomly mention a species of frog and I would go, "oh yeah, they're native to Madagascar!"
My Encarta 97 CD-ROM had a game where you went through rooms of a castle answering trivia questions to move on.
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No love for SkiFree?
I mean we did have internet, but it was billed by the amount of data you used, and being online meant that people couldn't use the phone at the same time.
I had internet, I used all those a bunch...
Loved old school paint. I used to try and recreate 3d renders of Nintendo characters that I'd seen printed in magazines and on my Gameboy pocket pouch by doing a kind of primitive dithering technique that 10 year old me thought up drawing 1 pixel blocks of specific colours in alternating patterns to try recreate shading or gradients of colour and I'd draw whole rows of them with the line tool which naturally had a staircase effect to it. Used to save it all on a zipdisk.
I just had a happy flashback into my pst of playing that pinball a lot.
I had totally forgotten that.
Thanks for triggering this memory :)
I grew up with a a Windows 3.1 machine, so for me my game selection was Chip's Challenge, Miser Mind (MasterMind), WinTris (Tetris), Atmoids (Asteroids), and JezzBall. Oh and SkiFree of course but somehow I never played it.
Chip's Challenge was my favorite. To this day I still haven't beaten every level.
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Man this takes me back.
Encarta and Paint were where I spent most of my computer time as a younger teenager. The trivia games on Encarta were dope, I also spent a lot of time walking around the 3d castles and ancient ruins. And a lot of time in the ummm.... Art section. Learned a lot about myself from Venus of Urbino.
Used to waste time by painting giant graphic and bloody battle scenes between stick figures in paint. Did it pixel by pixel! Good times!
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Had dialup from 1994, still spent hours playing Space Cadet and Solitaire.
What is this fancy shit? I had to launch my games with MS DOS commands.
> qbasic nibbles.bas
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Don’t forget Hover!
39 seconds on minesweeper expert
I loved that game so much.
You can still play it
https://flathub.org/apps/com.github.k4zmu2a.spacecadetpinball
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You can play a reverse engineered version of Space Cadet from the AUR!
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