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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   2947 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for August 22, 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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Gaming subthread.

I recently gave Metal Garden (https://store.steampowered.com/app/3539440/Metal_Garden/) a look, because I happen to have a thing for megastructures and this game is set in one.

Within five minutes of playtime, what struck me was

  • depression grey all over
  • anthropomorphic animals
  • featureless protagonist
  • extremely unsatisfying gameplay

So I quit playing and decided to just get a lore dump via TV Tropes. Where it said that Metal Garden was

developed by Tinerasoft, a Croatian one-woman company

Alright. That's more than enough evidence says I, and off to check out the company page, which lead to some kind of social network, where lo and behold I see what I expected:

🏳‍⚧ (she/her)

And good night.

Hmm, reviews are good. IT does look boring tho.

Currently playing (among other things) Etrian Odyssey HD. I'm considering making a longer recommendation post about it, maybe in the next fun thread.

Been playing Helldivers 2 with some old friends. Lots of fun. I recall some mottizens complaining about it being a bad shooter, which is a sentiment I'm amibvalent about, or about it being a grenade-lobbing simulator, which isn't entirely incorrect, but ultimately I think the game just contains lots of mechanics to recommend itself.

  • You can generally make do with common-sense tactics and a little experience; finely honed twitch reflexes or esoteric game-specific knowledge aren't required.
  • The theme of "squishy humans attaining superiority through firepower" occupies a sweet spot in between power fantasy and challenge.
  • The game makes do with very little hand-holding. You can get killed by the smallest enemy when you don't pay attention. You can teamkill and there are no guardrails against it.
  • The game is exceptionally well-crafted, full of lovingly-implemented detail, little nods to realism and in-depth mechanics other games would simply elide.
  • There's no woke in the writing. The game's campy lore and plot can be played straight or seen as parody however you like; much like w40k but without the need to fit into a tabletop figurine merchanidse form-factor.
  • The game can be approached easily enough by my challenge-averse friends, and once they get into the groove I can slowly ratchet up the difficulty on them.
  • A level 1 player can be just about as effective as a level 150 player, give or take some very minor bonuses and, of course, experience. All the equipment that goes into loadouts is side-grades, and there is zero grind required to be able to contribute to a team. All the grind does is unlock more equipment variety.
  • Speaking of equipment variety, each and every item in the arsenal is useful. Some are more specialized than others, some are perhaps too niche or slightly underpowered, some are perhaps a little overpowered, but there is overall a good sense of balance in everything.
  • There are always multiple ways to solve a given problem, but my problem-solving-averse friends ("I already do that for work and don't need it in my free time!") can just pick the one they're most used to while I get to improvise and experiment.
  • You can play a mission or three in the evening and still go to bed well on time. It doesn't take a massive investment of time to play.

Helldivers 2 earned a ton of awards, and I'd say it well deserves them. It really is an unusually well-made game.

If any Mottizens want to go on a dive together (and our time zones aren't too incompatible. German time here, I usually play between 21:00 and 23:00), let me know.

I think the only person who dislikes the gameplay of HD2 is Cjet, or at least I think he was the person who says it's a grenade chucking sim. He prefers the Starship Troopers game, which is a highly confusing stance! I got my money's worth out of HD2 even though I only played sporadically of late. I also got my money's worth out of ST, if only because he gifted me a copy haha.

I'd love to join in, assuming there's room!

I still feel bad about Cjet gifting me a copy of Factorio: Space Age and me never making it to the multipalyer sessions. Based mottizen, too generous for his own good.

You can teamkill and there are no guardrails against it.

Some of the most fun moments I've had with friends in HD2 involve hilarious team kills. From the accidental "Uh oh, got sniped and dropped the orbital bombardment on our present position" to the intentional "Why does someone always call a bombardment on our extract point as they get in the chopper, sometimes hitting stragglers?"

My buddies get extremely frustrated by teamkills, so I maintain the best trigger, stratagem and comms discipline I can manage. I try to lead by example and take my friendly fire deaths with good grace and cheer, but so far it isn't rubbing off. Hell, they even get prickly when they smell a whiff of gas or have to take five slow steps through an EMS field, never mind the fact that it just saved their lives! They'd rather get eaten by bugs than accept that sometimes danger close is the correct response, and good luck getting them to take cover. No, they'll stand out completely in the open, on the wrong side of a chokepoint, with me calling out to them to just take ten steps back and not get mulched, but they'd rather magdump and then complain about running out of stims and ammo.

I like my friends, I like playing with them, but they really don't want to think about what they're doing. To them (nominally very intelligent people), play-time is brain-off time. And they will absolutely, every time, die trying to get back their support weapon rather than just call in a new one.

I really need to stop playing Vintage Story. But the moment I finally get out, they pull me back in...

Started playing Route 96, a coming of age story + illegal emigration simulator. The idea is that you traverse the same route multiple times with different characters, interacting with NPCs in ways that change future playthroughs. Pretty enjoyable so far.

Road 96 is an adventure video game played from a first-person perspective. The game's campaign has the player assume the role of several teenage hitchhikers attempting to flee the authoritarian nation of Petria without being arrested or killed

It sounds incredibly naive. If emigration is actually illegal, the border involves things such as

  • self-attacking dogs (they chill in their kennels until it's time to maul a border intruder who unwisely tripped an alarm releasing them)
  • a 'fake' dummy border, to make the intruders think they've made it
  • electric fences, silent tripwires, flare tripwires
  • sometimes, patrols unloading at the intruders with machineguns

It does actually get so bad people would hijack aircraft to get out, or fly a hang glider over it, or if they're a pilot, steal their plane. Usually, though, people just left through a foreign country they could travel to but which did not have prison camp style border. In the real world, this was Yugoslavia.

It's totally unrealistic. Not once did the player character need to take a shit despite the length of the journey.

They need to do a crossover with My Summer Car.

Or Desert Bus.

I put down Elden Ring last week. Will hopefully continue on it soon, despite my poor record of picking games back up again. I have a pretty solid character in that game. Level 82.

I'm playing some Civilization V right now. I've put custom names on my empire/ruler, etc. Makes it a bit more personal. :3 Immortal difficulty is difficult when not using one of the most OP civs. But I'm in good shape in my current game. I was the first to reach my chosen ideology and I've attained control of most city states worth allying with.

You ever play with the vox populi mod?

It actually makes it the 4x GOAT imo, civ5 with VP may never be topped

Easily the highest quality mod overhaul I've ever had the privilege of playing

Yup, I played a few games with VP. It's very good. But it's not Civ 5. They basically created a new game with it. Which is fine, lots of people love it, but I actually like un-converted Civ 5 more, despite it having its issues with balance etc. VP nerfs the wonders too much for my liking, and the wars turn into long slogfests and meatgrinders. The AI fights them more skillfully, I'll give them that. But it wasn't necessarily super fun after a while.

I tried Lekmod too for a few games. It's very good. It's somewhere in-between in terms of how much it changes. Only real downside is they haven't added graphics for all their new civs/leader screens. You get many grey screens during diplomacy. It's mainly a multiplayer focused mod, where I guess you don't see leader screens or something.

VP nerfs the wonders too much for my liking, and the wars turn into long slogfests and meatgrinders. The AI fights them more skillfully, I'll give them that. But it wasn't necessarily super fun after a while.

I use every "more wonders" submod and I find them in a pretty good place, but that's also personal taste.

Supply reducing mods are mandatory, they can be found on the forum

I'm back into Stoneshard, an early access turn based gritty RPG in the vein of Battle Brothers, created by Ukrainian devs disrupted by the war.

You're basically a medieval merc doing merc things for merc reasons. Detailed injury/morale system.

It has its flaws, but its great if you like the genre. You start out useless, but eventually carve your way into legend (and your enemy's guts).

Still waiting for the character creator.

I'm waiting for them to add some sort of endgame. Its like 0.9 and been in EA for years.

Started playing Project Highrise. I was a big fan of SimTower as a kid, and this is the best spiritual successor I've played yet. The mechanics are more interesting and complicated than SimTower which is nice as an adult. It's very sandboxy, by which I mean the difficulty levels are not scaled -- in easy mode, it feel like you just get infinite free money (even with "infinite money" turned off), where normal and hard actually require you to carefully build a flywheel before you can start building financial momentum. The different types of tower you can focus on (residential, commerical, hotel, office, mixed use) makes things strategic and rewards multiple playthroughs.

Overall, good value for money if you like sim games.

The amount of content in Genshin Impact is absolutely staggering. I know everyone thinks of it as just a gacha but it's gigantic compared to full-price open world rpgs too.

It's got a huge map with lots of verticality and ambient content, puzzles and regional features. It actually looks pretty, unlike Skyrim. A tonne of characters with their own unique abilities. Mechanical complexity beyond just stacking on more attack.

And the story just goes on and on and on. There's a fair bit of BS they put in like 'you NEED to sit through endless tedium with Zhongli gathering ingredients for this ritual before you can go to not-Japan', clearly they want to do artsy character-development and worldbuilding stuff rather than just gacha moneygrabbing. That's just the main story, which is well over 100 hours at this point.

Then there are heaps of character side missions which are also long and voiced. And then dozens and dozens more area missions which are unvoiced but are still long with plenty of cinematics. Or just exploring the huge map, that would take ages.

There are more limited-time events than you can shake a stick at. Player housing. A card game. Really the only things missing are deep endgame like Path of Exile's mapping system and proper modding.

There is however a grindy element to it, you have to kill a bunch of bosses over and over again and pick huge numbers of flowers to level your characters and advance through the story. Surprisingly it seems you can't even skip this by paying, which seems odd to me given it is gacha. You're supposed to pay to get the character you want, not to skip the grind. I refuse to pay either way.

But WTF were Starfield devs doing with their 400 million if the Chinese can make something so huge for 800 million, get whales to pay for it all and have it actually be good too? Does Call of Duty Black Ops really cost nearly that much to make?

Apparently Genshin Impact is second only to Monopoly Go in cost, the latter is pure marketing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_video_games_to_develop

In 2025, the game surpassed $1 billion in marketing spending since its launch.[12] The game generated $5 billion by April 2025.[3]

What a sad state gaming is in, Monopoly Go makes considerably more money. There's always sloppier slop.

Genshin Impact

I loathed the aesthetics on sight. But then, maybe mission accomplished - I was told I have an abnormal personality profile.

Admittedly, almost none of these extremely well-dressed young people look like they can fight in their outfits, or do rock-climbing in heels... Form is clearly privileged over function.

It is very much a game for normies, you play as a pure-good hero. Sometimes the saccharineness of it all does get a bit over the top. But it is remarkable to think how far it can go into horror only for the artstyle to make it not-really-horror.

Played Final Earth 2. Good game, looks like crap, but mechanics are fun.

Full-strength no caveat endorsements for recent releases:

You should play them if you haven't.

I had Blue Prince strongly recommended to me, but it just looks a little expensive for a puzzle game.

Also, having been introduced to the game in a verbal conversation, I got its spelling completely wrong - "Is it 'blueprints' or 'blueprint'?" - and originally failed to find it in the store.

I don't know what your heuristics are. If it's a game you would like at all, there's enough of it that it's easily worth $30. It's the pinnacle of most of the genres it's attached to, a masterpiece in almost the traditional sense (one very competent guy polished it for 8 years, it's a completely realized coherent vision), and very fun.

Probably 15-20 hours to beat the part of the game that most people will stop at (having greatly enjoyed their time with it), and 100+ hours to optionally go beyond that if you still don't want to put it down.

I usually don't make it very far into puzzle games (me dumb), so I'm reluctant to part with an entire month's fun budget (me poor) if I'm not very confident that I won't regret the purchase.

That said, I should probably just try the demo.

That's the second strong recommendation I've had for Blue Prince. The first told me to go in as blind as possible so I know almost nothing else about it except that it should indulge my predilection for keeping a hard copy journal as I play.

Guess I will!

It's worth beating the main ending, but I stopped shortly after that. Spending an hour hoping for good rolls so you can test a theory...then another hour running a second test on that same theory wasn't fun.

The supposed "RNG problem" is a skill issue tbqh. I found that keeping a list of tasks and theories loosely sorted by likelihood, and playing each run flexibly with "I'll start out aiming for X but will pursue something else if that's where the rolls go", I was never bottlenecked to grinding on a single theory until very late in the game (much later than you would have gotten by your description), and almost every run moved at least something forward.

And by that point you should have certain RNG-biasing unlocks, reliably abundant rerolls, and be able to draft ~whatever you want most runs

But then again I just loved the basic drafting game and would take any excuse for another run. This would probably still be GOTY for me just for the main gameplay loop without most of the stuff beyond the first credits-roll.

I never got down to a single task. I failed a few times to

  • get a full set of chess pieces, when I didn't know exactly what they were, or
  • connect the boiler to the garage or pumps or,
  • get the secret garden after assembling the power hammer,

or make progress on your spoiler. At that point, I dropped the game. I was also keeping an eye out for other dates, other locks, references to the countries and the symbols, more letters, etc. and didn't make any progress during that time, but those don't have a specific path I was prevented from following.

Played Slay the Princess recently (still exploring the remaining threads). So well written, I'd wholeheartedly recommend it to pretty much anyone.

Enjoyed Cataclismo, a sort of a survival city builder with block-by-block fortification placement and a proper campaign to play through. Spanish studio, competent attempt at unique aesthetics and worldbuilding (at best distinguished and fablelike, at worst a little sterile), ok-ish campaign narrative. Fortification building satisfying, but gets tedious if you overbuild at every opportunity - difficulty is bit low and spiky, in retrospect better to build more than one layer of simple walls rather than elaborate, optimal walls & towers.

Playing Synergy currently, another city builder, set in a hostile, post-collapse world (a failed colony world? did not pay attention): people live in small numbers, climate is harsh, water is toxic, but since it's made by the eco-faithful, it's all a good thing actually, just the world where harmony with and respect for nature is finally non-negotiable. I'm being unfair, it's not preachy at all, serious about its aesthetics, very pretty and detailed. Plays well - both building placement, and plant management (near all resources come from foraging, flora changes the soil/humidity/temperature, not all plants like each other etc). Resource carriers are a bit buggy (trips happening for minimal amount of resources, building input inventory sizes mismatched to crafting speed), but it only means you should build densely. Recommended.

Dream video game subthread:

  1. An XCOM-like, but one that eschews turns (even interleaved ones) in favor of real-time with pause. Small unit tactics, but with realistic weapons (scifi stuff allowed). More emphasis on training and hardware versus soldiers shooting enemies till they become Majors and develop not only better aim but a resistance to bullets. You can, by expending some kind of currency or skill point, manually seize control of a soldier and puppet them in first person. Otherwise they semi-autonomously follow your orders, think being a squad leader who tells Ramirez to hole up in a Burger King, as opposed to having to choose the exact toilet stall he needs to occupy like in XCOM. Land vehicles as special units, air units as call-ins or on rotation.

  2. Civ/EU/CK/Total War hybrid: An ungodly behemoth where combat between armies is either resolved with Paradox-style stats, or you can manually fight the battle TW style. There is literally an existing mod that does that, you initiate a battle in CK2, and then the mod imports units and stats into a Total WR title and then the results back into CK2. Realistic AI, in the sense that other leaders or generals act like simulated characters, rather than generic optimizers or min-maxers (which is why I don't play multiplayer in these titles). This could be done today by having an LLM make overarching command decisions or RPing, while delegating the micromanagement to more real-time AI.

Imagine if you could negotiate with Julius Caesar about the petroleum in Sicily, and use your own wits to argue with him. Imagine if you could convince Roosevelt to support you to stave off the Commie menace. What if you could talk to your subordinates, every general or governor being simulated entities that have their own thoughts and feelings that aren't just thinly veiled stats?

Hell, have a hardcore mode with true fog of war. If you're Caesar, you might send several legions off to Germania and only get old, vague reports. They might vanish in Varrus's hands, and you need to find out the hard way. Are the taxes from Asia Minor having too much skimmed off the top? Do the plebian demands have a point? You have to vet and trust agents to find out, unless you absolutely must go there yourself.

Are you familiar with the Combat Mission series? Real time with pause (
and turns), small unit tactics, obsessed with hardware, semi-autonomous, models the limitations of command. All the features you’d expect from a milsim in a strategy game. Has campaigns where you have to preserve your assets; I don’t know if anyone has made ones that let you progress in tech.

I have my own submission for the dream video game question. Maybe I’ll write something up for Friday.

I have heard of Combat Mission before, but haven't had the pleasure of playing it. Looking at it, definitely seems up my alley. I'll see about tracking down a copy, thanks!

There’s a great YouTube channel which covers the different games. He’s also got PvE and PvP matches. I’ll see if I can dig up the link when I get home.

I have long ago dreamt up my ideal game, and started working on it about ten years ago. SInce then, I have learned a lot about making games and even more about how to not make them and I still have nothing playable to show for it. At least it gave me good practice for starting a career in software development.

Here's the pitch: First-Person Kenshi (*) in a low-tech high-existential-horror sci-fi setting.

  • Sandbox game, no plot or story whatsoever. You have some freedom in character generation, and then you're just dropped in there.
  • Low-fidelity simulated world. Everything that you see in the game is interactable, nothing is mechanically empty set-dressing. There would be economics and politics simulations running in the background for NPCs, but the only way to interact with those is through the NPCs themselves; not through menus.
  • Realistic scale, speed and precision. The world is big, there's a lot of space, vehicles move fast, and when you see something impressively big, then it really is big.
  • To pay the performance price for the two points above, the world is also largely empty. Many may dislike this, but it suits my aesthetic sensibilities.
  • There should be basic survival mechanics - humans need food, temperature matters, injuries don't heal magically, inventory management needs to be done - but it's not meant to be a survival game. The player should be able to just hire a servant to handle all that.
  • Optional automations for the player character. I don't want players to ever be forced to do reptitive, mindless actions - you should be able to just do some light scripting to have your avatar do those for you (or hire NPCs to do them).
  • The player characters and NPCs to a lesser extent should have a sort of inner world, a collection of notions linked by associations that serves as a sort of semantic database.
  • Most content is procedurally generated. This includes meshes. Consequently, graphics would be very low-fi.
  • The world would be a large wasteland planet like everyone knows and loves from all kinds of fiction, with dramatic landscapes, ruins to explore and small civilizations scrabbling for survival on the surface. There would be a space layer with some orbital infrastructure and activities and microgravity gameplay. Technology would be constrained by the setting being a sparsely populated economic backwater, even if the game is set many millions of years in the future. The world is under constant threat by economic collapse, war, universal expansion, unfathomable AIs eating whole worlds, moral decay, and god switching off the universe because he's done with it, and the NPCs are aware of it - but all these threats loom at realistic time-scales, which is to say that it's in the far-off future for everyone. It's more background than game mechanic, thematic rather than interactive - how do people deal with the fact that for all their acitivity and thought, it will all come to nought in the end?
  • It would be full of cool things I like to see. Spaceships, guns, swordfighting, hiking, stargazing (yes I thought of actual stargazing mechanics), intergenerational contributions to the commons in the face of inevitable annihilation, conversations about one's role in the universe, megastructures, things going fast, big wide open brilliantly blue and golden skies, synthetic aliens, geology, nation-building, and the player free to explore or reject all of it.

Obviously this is all a big technical ask, but over the years I have done little other than tinker up various technical solutions for these various challenges. Some work. Some don't - yet. What I haven't really gotten around to is tying all that together into an actual game, and of course in all my experimentation over the years each individual component ended up being incompatible with most others. It's been a journey, and it's entirely unclear whether I'll ever reach any kind of destination.

(*) A note on Kenshi (https://store.steampowered.com/app/233860/Kenshi/): I had my concept largely worked out long before Kenshi ever became visible to the public, but it does hit a lot of the same bullet points. And then goes a completely different way. Still, it's the closest equivalent to what I want to do. I recommend Kenshi as a game that breaks with many conventions and really strikes out to do its own thing.

Dream game recently has been something I've thought about making.

A mix between the Wuxia genre and the Heroes of Might and Magic overworld mechanics. Instead of controlling a civilization and multiple heroes. Its just one hero, or not really a hero, but a cultivator. The cultivator you control is trying to advance in realms. An end goal of true immortality and full unkillability. Massive world to explore.

Thoughts on fun/cool features:

  1. World is only randomly generated once, and then hand populated with a bunch of cool features. World is large enough that a single playthrough would only let you see 1/100th of it. But online guides to cool spots, or the joy of finding your own cool spots could carry over in different playthroughs.
  2. Game is about cheating. I always love wuxia stories where they have cool "cheats". An absurd ability to make money, turn back time, or gain stats that no one else can. Difficulty mode at the start of a game is chosen entirely by how many "cheats" you want to turn on.
  3. Roguelite option. One of the cheats could be resurrecting with similar character stats in the same starting place (or stats that improve based on past lives).
  4. Areas or parts of the game are brutally and stupidly difficult. They are possible to avoid with knowledge about the world. Or possible to beat with some of the cheats. Or are endgame challenges.
  5. Reactive world. Over one very long life or multiple lives watch as the world evolves. Demon factions take over if not stopped. Cataclysmic beasts destroy wide swaths of land. Beast tides sweep through human cities. Humanity paves over and extracts the hell out of all available resources in their area.

I just have this feeling that the lore of such a game could be like Dwarf Fortress adventure mode. A kind of cool organic story telling. I've thought about making the game as a dwarf fortress mod rather than its own standalone thing.

Its one of those true dream game ideas where it just keeps growing way out of proportion and obviously its a pipe dream cuz I just keep stuffing so many features in it. I likely wouldn't even be able to enjoy it that much if I made it, because someone would have to know the secrets. But part of me wants to find a way to use AI in the creation of it, and have it modable enough that I could build the system of the game, and then just input an AI mod folder that makes everything new and fresh for me.

Have you heard of The Matchless Kungfu? It's practically beat for beat what you're looking for, even if it's closer to Wuxia than Xianxia:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=o-4snPeCyWw

Another game of potential interest, Amazing Cultivation Simulator:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=wJxM3POU92w

Warning- Sseth's videos are both incredibly funny and incredibly NSFW.

Awesome videos. I'd seen the amazing cultivator simulator one. And it is part of what makes me think this genre has untapped potential.

I had not heard of The Matchless Kungfu. It does sound of potential interest.

My dream video game is to get a Final Fantasy VII remake which is actually good. :(

Actually, this is why I'm hoping AI gets good enough to build complex software. I can never build something like that myself (I can program but I can't do music, 3D modeling, etc), but it would be neat if I can have AI build something like that for me someday.

I have! I enjoyed it quite a bit, though I did not enjoy the emphasis on dodge/parrying and wound up using a mod to make that easier. But that aside the game was quite fun and the story was very moving. Excellent game, I look forward to more from that team.

I’m hoping Ascent of Ashes lives up to the hype I have for it. Getting another real time with pause colony sim would be a dream come true, especially if it’s more focused on exploration and combat than Rimworld

I've been keeping tabs on that one. Ex-Combat Extended modders from Rimworld, one of the mods I simply can't play without. It turns the combat in the game from two retards with bent muskets shooting each other in a greased room after sunset into something with a semblance of realism. Unfortunately, the game had had a very rocky development. The previous publisher went bankrupt, the new one was only able to provide partial funding. They were forced to release into EA in a very barebones state, and it's simply not a very good day circa today. I remain cautiously hopeful, the idea has great potential.

There is real-time X-Com. X-Com Apocalypse, IMO the best official game out of all the X-Com games.

It wasn't released entirely finished (they cut a lot of content) but it was still very, very good.

I've heard about Apocalypse, but I've never seen anything beyond screenshots. I need to look up a good overview, I heard the lore went to some strange places.

Not really, no. It's an invasion by entirely different aliens, this time someone was messing around with dimensional portals and fucked up. There's actually one common element - you can find a certain alien race as prisoners in the other place, and it canonically takes place in the same setting.

Find a copy and play it, if you have time. Once you get used to the graphics, it is a very fine game. The real-time mode was quite good, some people hated it but I liked it. I actually wish you could have that in OpenXcom.

Oddly, since it was realtime, it felt so slow and repetitive or maybe I just got too involved with the faction wars of my sonsors and bogged down. I never really got into this one.

Civ/EU/CK/Total War hybrid

Dreaming up a game like this, I'd put the emphasis on it being a living world rather than a very complex, but largely static boardgame (you do touch on this with the fog of war bit, in a way).

Take playing "tall" in baseline EU4 - it amounts to stacking modifiers and clicking a button when you have the points; if you don't click, nothing happens. Compare to EU4+MEIOU - goods flow and populations rise, development increases along the trade routes, you can at most shape the flows. I love in particular how, with low state capacity and sky-high corruption (includes local, non-state interests), you initially are barely in control, and how you get to take this inefficient, inert society and get to build its momentum, rolling towards modernity.

Gimme a game that does that better, and preserves player agency.

One of the reasons I threw Civ into the mix is because I think the additional latency from LLM calls would be less of an issue if it was turn based. Hardly an insurmountable problem, you could phone home on in-game triggers or after X time in a real time game, but it would simplify things.

Age of Empires II, except terrain matters, troops don't immediately break rank and jump into a mosh pit when you click attack and walls are both tougher and more expensive, so you have to put your farms outside the city.

That sounds like Total War my guy, with the exception of the farms (maybe in Napoleon or Empire). Very different game, of course. I think Manor Lords might be relatively close to your vision.

I'm leaving home for 2 weeks, 2 days after Silksong releases.

I beat Stellar Blade recently, with all the achievements, collectibles, etc. It caused a minor culture war kerfuffle in the video game community due to having a conventionally attractive female protagonist being highly sexualized in costumes and camera angles and such. It was also the first 3D action game of this type by Shift Up, which is better known for Goddess of Victory: Nikke, which is a gacha game definitely on the "gooner" side of the spectrum, so it was actually reasonable to wonder if it was just going to be shallow eye candy, but it turned out to be right up there with the best action games I've played recently, like Elden Ring or Lies of P (latter of which was also the 1st 3D action game by that dev, IIRC).

Looking at trailers, I remember wondering if it was going to be a DMC-like or Ninja Gaiden-like, something sorely lacking in the industry these days (we'll see how NG4 does soon). Turned out to be a Sekiro-like more than anything, with a similar perfect parry-based posture system, except it's discrete perfect parry counts, and it doesn't recover automatically over time, and it's not a deathblow but rather big hit like a visceral in Bloodborne. It doesn't feel as natural as, nor does it incentivize aggression quite as much as Sekiro's, but it also had its own quirks that I appreciated, like being able to count to set up for viscerals right after boss phase transitions. It also had perfect dodges, which slowed down time during the dodge like Witch Time in Bayonetta, though that didn't extend to giving you time to punish.

These mechanics only work if the enemies are designed properly for them, and that's where the game really shone. The bosses were the highlights, but for every enemy, it was clear the devs thought carefully about how to communicate timings to the player via animations and attack patterns. It wasn't as well executed as From Soft's best work both in terms of telegraphing attacks and pushing the player to really tight openings, but it was only a step or two behind.

I found Normal difficulty too easy after the 1st 2 bosses and restarted the game on Hard, which was originally not available until NG+ with an upgraded health bar. It took me 1-2 hours of sometimes dozens of deaths for most bosses like this, but the design of the bosses was such that it was a fun learning experience the whole time. Regular mobs in the overworld were also 2-shotting me, so exploration was slow and almost souls-like in pace, so it took me about 70 hours to beat the game with all side quests, but played normally, I've heard it's about 20-30 hours.

Like Sekiro, it had skill trees instead of stat upgrades using souls, and also you didn't drop your Exp when you died, so the souls-like "enemies revive when you rest" system didn't really mean a whole lot. Besides weak and strong attacks on Square and Circle which could be chained in different ways for combos, there were special attacks called Bursts and Beta Attacks used via L1 or R1 + face button, which used independent but related resources that recharged through actions during combat. I think what made the combat so satisfying, besides the parries, was the managing of these special attacks and their unique abilities, like i-frames, self-heal, or attack speed-up.

So recommended highly to anyone who enjoys 3rd person action games. Especially on PC where the mods are aplenty, and also, it's incredibly well optimized and bug-free. Zero crashes in 120+ hours and solid consistent 60fps+ on my 4090. I'm glad they decided not to contribute yet another souls-like to the flood of them in the industry right now. Again, it's heavily souls-inspired, but it also draws from many other games, creating its own thing. I just wish it drew more from the crazy action games like DMC, since crowd control and 1-on-many combat in general was mostly not great.

I've heard people criticize the story for being too predictable, but I thought it was exactly right for this kind of game, which almost feels like a throwback to mostly straightforward action games from 360/PS3 era. I found it funny just how much the game took inspiration from Nier: Automata, what with the sexy woman flying down from space to the post-apocalyptic wasteland that is Earth to fight off the beings that took it over from humans, but then discovering the deep dark secret of what really happened, etc. They even hired the same composer to do a lot of the soundtrack, so I'm pretty sure they knew what they were doing.

Sounds a bit like Bujingai or Asura's Wrath? Sounds like worth looking into.

I need to start including links to clips from Asura's Wrath when explaining Xianxia to people.

Case in point:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=Gyfy2mtMeYo

Yes, when you have a human-sized character fighting against the fist of a god the size of a large moon, you're in proper Cultivation territory.

(I have never played the game. It's just so entertaining to watch that I've seen several hours of footage)

I have so much free time (and OOMs more money) and I barely play any video games. 15 year old me would cry. At one point, I would have chalked that down to depression and anhedonia, but that's way better now.

I find myself bouncing off 90% of the ones I do try.

  • Didn't finish BG3, though I think I made it halfway.
  • Played like 2 hours of Clair Obscure before getting distracted
  • Reinstalled Teardown, didn't play it
  • Rimworld, an all-time favorite: I refuse to play Vanilla, no insult to Zorba, but it's such a painful experience. I also have an addiction to installing 17 gb of mods for a 500mb game, which is great fun till it all breaks and I have to debug it. Happened again a few months back, after I had already spent 3 hours fixing my modlist, and now a DLC came out and I have to wait for everything to finish updating.
  • Total War Warhammer 3: Another favorite, same issue as Rimworld, down to updates breaking mods, or just mods breaking mods.
  • Arma Reforger: I play it semi-regularly, but it's by far best enjoyed with friends. I was a senior NCO (don't laugh) in an American clan, but then it imploded because of internal drama and burnout. I hop on modded pub matches for a few hours, but it's just not the same.
  • Escape From Tarkov: A good (but uncompromising) game ruined by bad development decisions. I no-lifed it for a while, but just couldn't bother to repeat that process. I had a lot of good buddies in Singapore and Malaysia I met playing on those servers, but the latency doesn't allow for that anymore. Great guys, I personally raised half a dozen Timmies who would shit themselves if they heard a bush rustle into cracked PvPers who are far better than I ever was.
  • There are so many goddamned games collecting bit rot in my SSD. The only saving grace is that I pirated most of them, so at least I'm not losing money.
  • I left my old Quest 2 back in India. Don't feel like buying a new one here, and it would be inconvenient in a shared apartment.

What's wrong with me? I splurged on the world's 4th best gaming pc (1 CPU and GPU down from the best of the best), I have the time. It's not anhedonia, because I clearly still enjoy reading, writing, and arguing with people on the internet. I still watch people play and talk about games, I look forward to new ones and wishlist them, I just don't really play them. I don't like this, what's the point of having all this money and fancy hardware? Don't tell me I'm getting old and crochety :(

At this point I might have a kid just to have someone to play coop with.

We have pretty similar taste in games, although I find ARMA way too boring and love battlefield (as much as they keep insisting on fucking it up).

I too bounce off games really hard, and I basically only enjoy gaming now if I also take cannabis, otherwise it's kind of boring and I stop after 45 mins.

I had the exact same experience with BG3, I feel like I should love it, but I just kinda... stopped.

I tried getting back into modded Skyrim after learning Wabbajack existed (I don't have the patience to manage massive mod lists) and it was INCREDIBLE but again after getting not that far into a run, I just... drifted away

I really want to get into Rimworld and Total war (played Shogun a bit, then stopped) but haven't gotten around to it (lol)

I basically just play heavily modded civ5 (seriously vox populi is insanely good) and Victoria 3, I don't even find either of those games super duper fun anymore as I've played them a lot, but I always end up back on them instead of diving into something new.

I never seem to enjoy video games while high on weed. Drunk? Loads of fun. While my stimulants haven't worn off? Hell yeah, I'm absolutely going to out-camp that sniper.

I find a lot of Arma boring myself, and I do have ADHD. I enjoyed Zeus because there's always something to do. Are the players getting complacent? Arrange for an ambush. Put on mood music. Start setting up an objective while they're cleaning up the last one. Eavesdrop on conversations, which is great fun because that British unit had some funny MFs in it. In contrast, while I do like the PvP, I would definitely prefer less driving between objectives or long hikes.

By all means, you must give Rimworld a go. Play one game of vanilla, or maybe three, note all the major annoyances, and then go hunting for mods to fix it. I probably get more enjoyment out of "hey, that mod looks cool" than actually playing the game lol, especially with how things break once you have too many. Can't blame them, when I've had 500+ mods running at once.

Does Rimworld have curated mod packs a la Wabbajack for Skyrim? My patience to manage mods has a strongly inverse correlation with my age lol

Definitely, but they're less common than is the case for Skyrim. Most Rimworld mods tend to play well together, but I have a taste for massive overhauls.

I don't personally use mod packs, at most, I check compatibility for some of the more comprehensive mods like Combat Extended. However, the best that comes to mind are usually the themed collections made by Mr. Samuel Streamer, he's got dozens of playthroughs up, and each one has a link and setup guide. Do you want Starwars flavored Rimworld? Medieval? Post-apocalyptic? There's a series for you.

You will (and definitely should acquire anyway) the RimPy mod manager. It can import mod lists, handle load orders, note many incompatible mod combinations and will make life a lot easier. The vanilla mod manager, while not useless, is lacking in comparison.

I believe there is like some form of gamers depression, where a game that is too good can truly ruin a gamer. And its not too good in the sense of like "oh my god this is my dream game and the best thing ever".

But more that its like "oh wow this is the perfect feedback loop of addiction, skill up, and reward" and once you hit that game, or a few of them nothing ever scratches the itch quite right ever again. Kinda like a first hit of heroin it ruins everything else. My game was EVE online and Skyrim. The first burned me out on teamwork based online games, and the second burned me out on personal skill up type games. I've been chasing the dragon on both for a while. I think you got burned on Tarkov.

I've definitely been alpha-widowed by my favorite games, lol

Hmm. In the case of Tarkov, the game just got continuously worse. Content came out at a glacial pace, the AI oscillates from aimbot to Helen Keller with an HK every six months. I would play the game if there simply was anything to justify it, such as a new massive map or other content of similar scale. I also refuse to play it solo, so I'd have to build a new social network of like-minded gamers to enjoy it.

The Warhammer branch of Total War killed my interest in the historical titles. They just seem so... boring, when you have tanks shooting at dragons. I played the hell out of those historical titles back in the day to boot.

I've been chasing the dragon on both for a while.

Might I suggest a return to Skyrim? You can't take a shit without one attacking your outhouse.

I’m up for coop if you want but IMO your problem is that you are playing only the hardest, densest games despite being a 28 year old with a serious full time job and other hobbies. Like it or not, this is your body’s way of telling you it’s time to be a filthy cashul.

In all seriousness, try playing some stuff like Subnautica or Hardspace-Shipbreaker or Doom 2016 or the original Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. Stuff where the gameplay loop is a bit more reactions-based and rewarding and the game is a bit less like a second job. See how you get on and then come back to the tougher stuff when you’ve had more sleep or a vacation.

My current thing is Elden Ring and while that certainly has difficulty spikes, there’s also a lot of downtime exploring the world.

(I know none of my suggestions are really to your taste but it’s what I do).

Trust me, I don't just play hardcore games. I had fun with Helldivers 2, before getting bored. I had played a decent amount of Doom Eternal before I moved and lost progress, now I give up after a few levels. In hindsight, I should probably drop the difficulty.

Subnautica? Played maybe half a dozen hours before getting distracted.

Forza Horizon 5? Can't be arsed, and I only played it singleplayer and with competent but not broken AI skill levels.

I will grant that I have a preference for realism or simulationist mechanics. I prefer Arma over Battlefield or Insurgency Sandstorm. I can't go back to Need for Speed after playing Forza, which has a really good balance of accessibility and realism in car handling.

I never could afford the COD games when I was a kid, so my exposure was limited to a few SP campaigns, which were alright. What I strongly dislike about newer CODs is the ridiculous pricing and cosmetics, and I always get an aneurysm with standard video game weapon balancing on account of being a gun nerd. The abominations that Gunsmith allows 😭.

I'm not sure how to describe my tastes. There's that realism/sim thing I mentioned, but also the fact that I'm ADHD brained and get bored easily, while also hyperfocusing on the rare game that I love.

Of course, everything is more fun with friends! What do you have in mind? I should mention that @Cjet89 tried to get me into Factorio, and even offered to buy me a copy. Maybe I will pop my amphetamines and give it a serious go, though I like the concept of the game more than I liked playing it for the odd half an hour.

Factorio is really fun but you basically are forced to restart a few times because it's easier to start from scratch than it is to totally refactor your mineral bus once you've spaghetti-maxxed

It'll probably click for you and delete a few weeks though, it's incredibly compelling, the factory must grow.

I usually start getting burnt out from the complexity around oil, and I tried playing a while ago with a new update, played for a while (got to oil), and then saw the tech/production tree for nuclear and promptly quit and uninstalled the game. Started to feel like I was studying or working to play the game.

Cool :) I don’t have anything in mind right now because I’m away for the bank holiday but I’ll have a think. I wouldn’t mind trying something like Arma but I’d be starting from nothing - I spend 99.9% of my time playing single-player and sims aren’t so much fun on your own.

I like the concept of the game more than I liked playing it for the odd half an hour

I get this a lot. Frostpunk, Factorio, Supreme Commander etc. My steam library is full of them.

I'll hook you up in Arma in no time haha. Just having one additional buddy allows for shenanigans like you won't believe. Hit me up when you're back!

Will do!

Have you tried any roguelikes/lites? Easier to just get one to couple of runs in when you feel like it and then do something else. You don't have to stay super engaged for extended periods of time.

Hmm.. I have played several, though the names elude me. I didn't particularly like Risk of Rain (2?), I did like Hades, but once again, a few hours of fun, then I got distracted and never picked it up again.

You may like Starsector.

It's basically "mount and blade in space" but with an incredibly well designed and tight gameplay loop for the 2D ship to ship combat.

The mod scene is also exceptional (Nexerilin is basically a DLC that massively improves the game by making it a 4x-lite). Although filled with unbelievable amounts of discord drama (totally ignorable, but hilarious).

Your allied ship AI is quite stupid, but my god it's so fun to space battle.

You can also get a free CD key from the Sseth review video (meme-y video game review channel) if you want to try it, developer approved as he's a very chill guy.

I have played Starsector, but only in the most technical sense. I booted it up once, did 5 minutes of the tutorial and then got sidetracked. Surprisingly, the reason I tried it was because I saw that mod you mentioned in an overview video, and wanted to learn the ropes before diving into the modded experience. I'll try and get back into it for good!

Definitely play vanilla first just so you get a sense of what the game is like, just enough that you can win fights against evenly matched up fleets up until mid-game so you don't suck and don't get overwhelmed

Then get into mods and it'll be less overwhelming

I hate vanilla purists though, I recommend getting QoL and UI mods immediately

Something nice about Vanilla WoW is that each location was drawn from one specific European fantasy source. It’s not just some random person concocting his own fantasy. Stranglethorn Vale has the vibe of a colonial expedition into South America or perhaps Africa, Tirisfal Glades pulls from gothic horror, etc. So they are renditions based on real preexistent motifs, and the game takes you through a survey of European fantasy and history. It’s not all just “fantasy medieval area”. There is no catboy character because that doesn’t exist in the Western imagination.

There is no catboy character because that doesn’t exist in the Western imagination.

Tales about talking human-like animals are older than castles, cathedrals and other medieval tropes.

It depends where you draw the line. If 19th century gothic horror is traditional, why not 20th century Disney style animal people?

(and WOW indeed buckled to the pressure and added multiple cute and fluffy playable races)

What are the human-animal hybrids in the western imagination besides werewolves and centaurs and minotaurs? Not too many. Werewolves were all over vanilla WoW.

why not 20th century Disney style animal people

Cut-off should be whether it is an organic development of the Western imagination, or whether someone looked at trends and spreadsheets and determined that “catboy” looks adorable and will bring in players. Remember that “gothic” is itself a conversation with the Middle Ages and folk legends. Cat boys are unserious.

I'd argue vanilla WoW is pretty unserious (and willing to throw random stuff that wasn't there historically, from goblins to kobolds). But to answer the question:

Fauns and satyrs, harpies and sirens, sphinx. The dog-headed ones were kinda universal myths in the Old World, but they existed long enough ago in European mythology that Augustine debated their historical existence. If you throw in shapeshifters, kelpies and selkies. If you include mere behavioral anthropomorphism, Reynard the Fox (and his whole company) and Puss-in-Boots, arguably Br'ers Rabbit Fox and Bear (1880s) -- which makes the 20th Century Disney variant more of a conversation with folk legends than you'd expect from first glance.

Some of these have Warcraft equivalents, but very few are furry bait even where they're fan bait (eg, there's a lot more Draenai fandom than burning-legion-proper-as-a-whole fandom).

The bit with the Chinese-inspired expansion, the one with the pandas? From the perspective of someone who will never play WoW, I felt that one was either a good joke or simply taking the piss.

I'd argue vanilla WoW is pretty unserious (and willing to throw random stuff that wasn't there historically, from goblins to kobolds).

WOW Kobolds - tiny ugly mischievous thieving and griefing underground dwellers - are fully mythically accurate.

Far more accurate that WOW elves.

Fair, was speaking more to the extent that they're basically rat-monkeys.

I've recently found X-Com Files a so-called 'megamod' for OpenXcom - a fan re-implementation & polishing of one of the first squad based tactical turn based games ever. Ufo: Enemy Unknown, which came out in 1993, back when 1999 was still in the future and was re-made into a slick but profoundly soulless if somewhat competently made corporate product lately.

Better, I've found 'Brutal OpenXcom' which is a fork of OpenXcom with a completely re-written and pretty good AI that doesn't cheat (unlike original) and is massively challenging because it's basically fine and competent and can (if the mod makers were feeling nasty) use the same brutal tactics of lobbing satchel charges 15 m ahead where it suspects the enemy is. Luckily, it's not that common at the start that the enemy has large amounts of explosives on hand. O

Very comfy game. The setting is sort of like X-Files: all the major conspiracies are true. Name a major one , probably true in the setting. You have been appointed to investigate 'weird shit' on behalf of one of the more pro-social ones. Of course you don't know anything about that yet bc you're just some sort of capable security bureaucrat, and you have a shiny permit from UNSC to go around and black-bag people all around the world whenever sufficiently weird crap is happening. And boy, is there a lot of it!

Anyway the gaming loop of classic Xcom and also this is still the same: build base-> respond to weird shit -> black bag or kill said weird ..beings, loot the corpses->autopsy or interrogate -> find out more about said weird shit -> use this to improve your capability -> SHUT IT DOWN (whatever 'it' is, and 'shut' sometimes involves diplomacy and sometimes travelling to space, other universes and being very kinetic).

Ordinary Xcom had the alien invasion. XCom Files starts out earlier: you don't have jet fighters and intercontinental ranged VTOL troop transports, you have airline tickets and vans. You go around, abduct farmers, tussle with Men in Black (well, you are technically MiB too, but there's the not-so-prosocial ones), tussle with cultists, fight alien tech smuggling organised crime (most lucrative part of the game really) and so on.

It's a long mod, I'd say 6x-10x longer than the original game, and quite difficult, but you can save & load until you figure out how to do things. Or that you need to fight that particular battle another day.

OpenXcom looks dated, but the battles can be ran at increased resolutions which makes it look somewhat better. There's a lot of extra keyboard only controls for convenience which are nicely documented in the controls menu.

Anyway, except for some sometimes uneven and mildly bad writing in a few reports, I really like it and rate it higher than Xenonauts, which looked a bit nicer but felt somewhat soulless. If any game deserves a proper remake, it's the original Xcom. And no, I don't mind the cringe one they made. Proper scale, no stupid constraints on squad size, actual sloped hills. I can't believe it but forests in the old one look less artificial than in the new one, which doesn't have slopes.)

Any rumours of Xcom 3?

I saw some people complaining on the reddit that there are none, so probably not.

Honestly though.. what we really need is companies recycling the assets in other genre. E.g. look at Cyberpunk 2077. I believe it's pretty doable to slap in a paused real-time combat system into in and real RPG stats. Could be an entirely different game, and most assets are already made.

I don't know how execs don't know what their IP is or how it works. But they repeatedly fail on exploiting it, time and again.

I enjoyed myself playing the XCOM 1 remake, and especially XCOM 2. I even tried Xenonauts, which is a spiritual successor to the original XCOM, but just didn't like it very much. I guess the 1980s aesthetic and the clunky mechanics weren't to my taste.

(Why hasn't someone made Phoenix Point but good? You can actually aim the weapons yourself! There was granular destructible terrain and cover piercing!)

Aiming weapons yourself is a bad idea in a tactical game with stats ...

?

The guns have stats. Your soldiers have stats. You have Time Units, which forces a choice between movement and action, but in the manner of the old XCOM games as opposed to the ridiculous shoot or move but not both (without perks) in the newer ones.

You bother to aim the guns when you need a sniper to dome someone, or a shotgunner to aim around a shield, or an MG/grenadier to ruin some cover. Each gun has an accuracy stat that governs its accuracy in minutes of arc. Soldiers can tighten that with experience or weapon proficiency.

Would you object to aiming grenades or RPGs in XCOM? Then why not guns? Especially with the ridiculous amount of flexibility it adds.

the ridiculous shoot or move but not both (without perks) in the newer ones.

That's not a thing in general. You can both move and shoot, unless you are using a sniper rifle.

You can't shoot then move, even if you use only half your movement range. Once again, in the absence of specific perks.

Ah, yeah that is true.

You can actually aim the weapons yourself!

In a grid-based turn-based tactics game! It's a profoundly shitty idea!

It's optional. You can just order your soldiers to shoot normally most of the time. Fine-aim is complemented by the limb-damage system, where you can wound or incapacitate enemies or destroy their weapons. The accuracy of a sniper makes sense beyond just having long range. I think it's great. Even modern XCOM lets you aim rockets and grenades, this just takes it to the next level. Tactical positioning makes sense on a far more physical level than arbitrary cover or angle bonuses. Enemies with shields actually need to be flanked or chipped away. You can shoot the facehugger mind-controlling your soldier, but make sure you don't use a sniper unless you want to give them another face-hole.

It's, pardon me, superfluous in idea and idiotic in practice.

See: Heavy troopers being unable to fire from rooftops because they hold their guns at hip level. See also: Sniper being unable to take his shot because there's a lamppost halfway in between him and his target, and leaning left or right isn't possible because it's grid-based, dammit.

You can't actually fine-control where things stand relative to each other, yet first-person shooting depends on exactly such fine control. It's the wrong genre for it!

Those are edge cases. Since Phoenix Point has rather granular time units, it is easy enough to make a soldier move a single tile to clear the line of fire, then shoot and scoot back to cover.

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