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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   3224 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for January 17, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Anyone have a video game or a movie or a book or anything else like that that you want to get into, but you just can't every time you try?

For me it's Red Dead Redemption 2. I just can't get through the winter prologue. It has idiosyncratic controls that I can't remember and the fucking lasso just doesn't work after I rebind 200 different buttons to adjust the controls to ESDF. And there's no quicksave, so every time I watch people enjoy the open stage of RDR2 it wants me to replay a long enough segment before I even can try and fail to lasso a dude again. I guess I should just mod the game to skip it and try again.

Any game My boys play some in the PS5 and sometimes I think "That would be fun to play." I used to play WoW probably oh 15 years or so ago until I realized it was making my wife hate me. Also I believe suddenly pandas became part of gameplay and that really brought me out of it. These days I don't have the time to devote to a proper game where you learn kits and builds and lore and all that. Sometimes we all play Catan but not really since COVID, when had many game nights.

Every game today has a skill tree, a detailed crafting system that requires you to gather rocks and twigs, a room/house/town/level design system, cosmetic DLC, online multiplayer with a parallel PvP meta, a perk system, premium currency, an achievement system, an unskippable 45 minute tutorial with forced cutscenes, and more. I wish more games picked one or two things and did them very well. I try out maybe a dozen new games each year now, and I turn them off in the first 5 minutes if any of the above crap is shoved into my face to distract me from doing whatever the game's box/title said I would be doing.

It would be nice to sit down and enjoy a AAA game for a couple of days without feeling like it was trying to surgically attach itself to me. I quite liked Helldivers: the equipment tree is a premium currency hellscape but it gets straight to the gameplay loop and the loop is fun.

Every game today has a

This really isn't close to true, unless all you play are AAA games.

You're right, I'm mostly just shaking my cane and telling AAA games to get off my lawn.

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