1. Get half-kilo of fresh tomatoes, three onions, and three carrots. You can use the cheapest tomatoes for this, the heat treatment will average the taste. Wash everything. Chop onions and carrots, dump into the frying pan. Add salt.

2. Fry diced onions and carrots in a pan, using a generous finger-thick layer of oil, preferrably olive, until the onions don't sting anymore and carrots start to soften.

3. Cut tomatoes in 2 pieces each, you'll mash them anyway so thin slices do not matter. Dump tomatoes into the pan. Cover with a lid, cook on a slow fire for about 10 minutes until they become sauce. Mash and stir each 3 minutes so they won't burn. Cooking less will preserve taste of fresh tomatoes, cooking longer will make it taste closer to canned pasta sauce. But they won't have that taste of the can that you will get with canned tomatoes.

4. Add the secret ingredient - half-kilo of canned pork. This is an optional step - if you prefer taste over calories, it's better to prepare a separate meat dish instead. If you want to add hot pepper, add it now so it will spread uniformly.

5. Boil pasta while tomatoes are cooking - the standard 500 gram package will do, preferably something with a lot of surface like penne so it can soak up more sauce.

6. Dump Italian or French spice mix into the pan. Turn off the heat, let it simmer for 1 minute so the herbs will soften.

7. Dump pasta into the pan. Done! Plating is optional, you can eat it straight from the pan. And the next day you can prepare another wonderful dish - yesterday's pasta re-heated until it's crusty.

Lemmy Connect attempts to add ?format=webp to the image URL when loading .gif image, this makes many Lemmy servers return an error. When opening the post in the web browser, without the extra addition to the image URL, the image loads correctly.

Post where the bug is present: https://lemmy.world/post/19556846

I often want to copy some phrase from a post to search it on the web. Long-pressing post text minimizes this post into a single line, which is not very useful IMO, I would rather have text selection cursor like in a web browser.

Some studios are still releasing premium games in 2023. Undead Horde 2 is a dungeon crawler with no ads or IAP, and it costs $10.

It features 3D blocky graphics, although less blocky than Undead Horde 1. The combat is moderately paced and depends more on upgrades than on button mashing, most of the time your minions do all the fighting. There are no puzzles, just some fetch quests to progress the story.

I've unlocked all weapons in Vampire Survivors, and I'm too bored to grind the remaining 14 unlocks.

Please recommend me some proper, $10 up-front games.

I've alrealy played all versions of Space Marshals, Tesla vs Lovecraft, Tesla Force, Jydge, Crimsonland, Grind Infinity, Solomon Keep, PewPew, and Vampire Survivors (although it's not twin stick but close enough).

Are there any new twin stick shooters, preferrably something I can pay for once and without IAP going up to $100?

I want to open large image with comments below when clicking on a post, like in Jerboa

I've encountered many, many mobile games where the character needs to perform five different actions, so the developer adds five separate buttons to the screen. Of course you will mis-tap them and die in the middle of a boss fight.

The best touch controls are achieved when the dev designs the game around touchscreen, not attempts to adapt touch controls for some existing game.

For platformers there are two movement buttons on the left, and three buttons on the right part of the screen - jump, attack, and alternate attack or some action like dodge. Any more buttons make the game hard to play. There is also a common mistake of making buttons the size of a thumbtack. Ideally the buttons should be as big as a 5 Euro coin, that would be a third or even a half of screen width for most phones.

My recommendations are SuperTux and Swordigo.

For twin-stick ahooters there are two joysticks, and maybe one or two extra action buttons above the right joystick, but not anything more.

The best examples are Space Marshals and Crimsonland.

Top-view RPGs and dungeon crawlers also tend to use twin stick controls. The gameplay tends to be more relaxed, because you can slways grind few more levels and don't bother dodging enemy attacks.

Shoot-em-up is another type of game that works really well with the touchscreen. Your aircraft follows your finger no matter where you touch the screen, it's simpe and it works well. There is a wide variety of quality shmups on Play Store, try OpenTyrian for some classic DOS gameplay.

Honorable mention to swipe controls. You can swipe up/down/left/right without aiming for a specific button and even without looking at the screen, ao it's impossible to mis-tap the wrong button. The downside is that swiping is slower than taps, so the gameplay tends to be slower. Reaper is a good example.

First person shooters are okay for casual gaming, but playing any competitive Counter Strike clone like Critical Strike or Critical Force will earn you a friction burn on your finger, because you are swiping the screen non-stop to aim.

I'm not reviewing strategy games here, they can have 10-layer menus and dialogs and still be playable.

Some racing games support gyroscope as a replacement for the steering wheel, it works rather well.

And of course there are infinite runner games. I don't want to call the whole infinite runner category trash, there are some good runner games like SmashHit or Vektor or Alto's Odyssey, but if it's three lanes infinite runner, you will watch ads each 30 seconds, and the gameplay is only fun for the first 30 seconds.

Flappy bird. Best touch controls ever, but the game itself is garbage.

There is a specific class of mobile gamers who are using gamepads. The gamepad is great for sure, you have a separate button for each finger, however the gamepad is more often than not bigger than the phone, so you are losing convenience and need clothing with huge pockets.