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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   2890 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for September 12, 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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Still playing Silksong. Still getting rekt. I'm now stuck at the Last Judge, but at least there's more to explore now than when I was stuck on Moorwing. That was horrible hah.

I'm mid Act 2, and got distracted by tons of sidequests and new areas in old areas that got opened up by some upgrades I recently got. It feels like the game started pretty linear but has continued opening up and branching more as I go. Very much enjoying myself, even if I'm sometimes frustrated by what feel like unfair difficulty spikes on certain bosses.

Silksong Act 2 for me. Love the game so far, exactly what I wanted from "more Hollow Knight". Last Judge was fairly easy for me, good telegraphs and I was able to heal in between attacks.

I agree though that act 2 is great compared to act 1 so far lol.

I am very lost on choral chambers. Explored everywhere I saw and am kinda stuck. ALAS! I want to look stuff up but would hate to spoil more.

I have not gotten stuck yet (though I don't remember the names of all the sub areas in the Citadel, so don't know if I've cleared that one yet or not). Without any spoilers, I'd recommend spending a bunch of time doing sidequests and/or exploring old areas since a lot of new stuff seems to have opened up in the Act 1 areas after you reach Act 2 and do some stuff there.

I stopped playing Silksong after I bought a 5070 Ti last Sunday. Thought it would be weird not to play something 3D. Clair Obscur has been bought, downloaded, but I haven't launched it yet.

I've been cyberhumiliated by The Talos Principle: Reimagined. It has one new DLC compared to the original. The first puzzle I solved was kinda tough, the second one I spent 15 minutes on and decided to come back to it later. Ditto with the third, the fourth and so on. T_T

The DLCs for The Talos Principle 2 are much easier in comparison. The first DLC promised extra-challenging puzzles, but they are all designed around conflicting beams. As soon as you grok the idea, they become straightforward.

I also tried Cyberpunk 2077, but it didn't let me fully switch to ESDF controls, so I had to ragequit.

I stopped playing Silksong after I bought a 5070 Ti last Sunday. Thought it would be weird not to play something 3D. Clair Obscur has been bought, downloaded, but I haven't launched it yet.

Clair Obscur is amazing. Cyberpunk was kinda cool I guess, but idk I couldn't get that into it. Played it for a while but never finished it.

Clair Obscur though, that game is a work of art man. Seriously once in a generation. Do it.

Ironically I put Clair Obscur on pause when Silksong came out because I got excited by new shiny (and I kind of needed a break). Definitely a fantastic game, but the combat and timing things seems to stress/tire me out more than RPG combat usually does and I have to be in the right mood for it, and can't really binge it.

Dude yeah I've been playing a lot of Silksong but I totally agree that it's stressful. Not like the original Hollow Knight where I was able to just braindead run at a boss over and over until I beat it.

It's still fun but yeah, a different approach needed.

I've been playing a shit ton of MW5: Mercs again. Haven't gotten to any of the new DLC content yet, but it's close. Jumped right into my old save, and been knocking out high value missions and Arena contracts. Now it's 3049 and it's getting so close. Can't fucking wait.

Also, finally got my favorite 4xAC/2 variant of the Mauler. But then I found a Bullshark for sale with 6xAC/2's! I fucking love infinite dakka out of my mech nipples.

Ok, dude. I've been binging this DLC since last night, and this morning the Clan Invasion finally started. I fly off to do that campaign, and on my first stab at the mission, the clan invaders get through armor crits on my cockpit killing me 3 times across 2 attempts at the mission. That sucked. A lot. Not fun at all.

I don't know what sort of RNG fluke that was though, because the next 3 missions weren't nearly as pants shittingly terrifying. There was a repair station in one of them to help service my fancy 6xAC/2 Bull Shark. Gauss is super effective against them. But even so, I only have about 10 or so assault mechs worth fielding, and 2 of those are Annihilators who are slow as fuck and a bit prone to shedding their arms and losing all their firepower. I'm just barely staying in the field, since it 1 of my mechs can be repaired in time for the next mission, 2 will usually be ready for the one after that, and the 4th might be repaired yet another mission or two after that. But so far I haven't seen a single clan assault mech either.

I went to put a C-ER PPC, C-MP Lasers and extra Clan Double Heatsinks on one of my mechs, and that refit is going to take 90 days!!! Not even sure I'll get it back before the campaign is over. We'll see.

Honestly though, this is quite possibly the best Mechwarrior experience I've ever had. MW5: Mercs has come a long way from it's launch. Almost 10 years ago now. As a platform, it's nearly perfection. The perfect canvas for any Inner Sphere adventure you want to have.

As with netstack, haven't gotten Silksong yet.

Trying to veg a bit with Star Citizen. It is, to skip to the punchline, an awful game, made all the worse by the staggering amounts of time and money that have gone into it. It's been in development over a decade and has yet to complete (or even seriously implement) a single gameplay loop, nine months into the 'year of playability' the server infrastructure still panics over moving boxes into the wrong location, and anyone who plays the game for long develops a paranoid fear of elevators; calling it half-finished is too complimentary by halves. I bought in back during the original kickstarter at one of the lowest tiers, but the game has increasingly focused both its marketing and its development on megaships marketed to whales, often to pretty ludicrous ends (eg, you can't buy an Idris even if you had a thousand bucks to waste, and even if you could, it makes absolutely no sense to own even as a way to grief people).

Which makes it all the more frustrating how good the core of the gameplay can be. The whole bit where you seamlessly blast out of a docking bay, start warping to a mission destination, leave the pilot chair to prep gear and a light motorbike in the bay, hear the decel as you get into orbit and drop out of quantum travel, fly down to the surface and land 20 klicks out dodging turrets, jump into the bike and go off to start busting heads with a rifle, and head back when done. Or you sculk around the edges of a pirate and PVP-heavy point-of-interest in your undergunned salvage ship, carefully managing ship power to avoid spiking anyone's sensors, to crack apart and chew down salvage left behind by their battles. Or you're on a ground mission and have to take quick cover because someone else is fighting a massive space battle and you can't risk eating a golden BB. Even just hauling cargo, tedious as it can be, still feels a lot more engaged than the standard Freelancer/No Man's Sky/Elite.

And then the mission system can't count to five, or you get killed by drinking a bugged soft drink, or you fall through two different floors of your ship at superluminal speeds and fuck your entire cargo and a few hundred thousand credits as it goes 50 gigameters that way. Or you do all that turret-dodging and crack a half-dozen heads, grab a mission objective, mount your hoverbike, and it shoots into outspace leaving you behind and literal hours of travel to get back to your ship. Or you look at your cargo run and realize that you're making fewer credits-per-hour than you would with VLRT missions, and this route involves dodging PVP pirates in heavy fighters while you're armed with a handheld tractor beam.

The technical implementation is challenging enough that some of this can be excused or handwaved: this giant scalable dynamically moving pile of microservices is probably necessary for the game's intended final scope even if it's almost exactly the sort of hypothetical I use to argue against the microservice of everything. But then there's other bugs that are incredibly simple model or stat errors and take literal months to fix, or parts of gameplay loops that just need a (client-side-only!) UI update. How do you have five hundred people working on a space game funded by selling ships and not have a way to sort ships in-game after ten years?

Space Engineers is my other mindless space game, as a more build-em-up. Recently dropped a survival gameplay update with some other decent tech fixes. There's some stuff to criticize -- combat is still hilariously floaty-feeling, whether two spacesuits with handguns or big capital ships, and the end-game prototech gameplay loop still feels kinda dumb a year later -- but there's still some amount of enjoyment in designing and building out a decent light frigate.

I keep hearing how the enemies in Silksong are obnoxiously spongy. But I also wonder how much of this is an effect of starting off under powered. I can't remember how weak I felt when I started Hollow Knight, but I know after a sword upgrade or two, it felt awesome. Perhaps so awesome I forgot how weak I began. Have you noticed upgrades helping with the hit sponge feeling I keep seeing people talk about in Silksong?

The first upgrade barely changes anything. You still take the same amount of hits to kill most enemies. Kind of a let down compared to hollow knight.

Idk about the second upgrade, you have to finish act 1 to get it and im still working on the last boss.

Silksong, from what I can tell, seems to be explicitly designed to avoid much of the power creep of other metroidvanias, including Hollow Knight, hence the paucity of damage and health upgrades. But it may be that I am very dumb - I got through almost all of Hollow Knight before realizing that the nail upgrades even existed. (I do have the first needle upgrade in SS; getting the second seems like it requires quite a bit beyond merely beating Act I, which I have done.)

Since I haven’t played silksong, I guess I’ll hijack this as a general video game thread.

Nebulous: Fleet Command is a sci-fi naval tactics game modeled after Cold War/modern hardware. You equip your fleet in the editor and then take that list into battles. Right now, that’s almost always 4v4 against other players, though a campaign mode is coming with the next big update.

I like you get to build towards a particular strategy and then try to play it out. I like that the micro has a relatively low floor; ships and weapons are unwieldy enough that you generally have to commit to your course of action. I think the visual design and the sound effects are great. And I particularly enjoy the existence of a game which cares about ELINT and RCS. For professional reasons, of course.

I just picked up a couple of games on the recommendation of people I work with: Hell Is Us and TMNT: Shredder's Revenge. TMNT is great, albeit pretty challenging (the third level is a huge difficulty spike and I got frustrated enough that I haven't played since). But difficulty aside it's exactly what you would want from a modern take on the TMNT arcade game of old. They added a decent bit more depth to the combat and a ton more characters to play (Splinter, April, Casey Jones, etc), plus the pixel art is beautiful.

Hell Is Us is... yeah IDK yet. My colleague pitched it to me as having a lot in common with the puzzle solving in Tomb Raider, but it doesn't quite feel to me like it has that vibe. There is puzzle solving, but so far the most prominent element has been the combat and the creepy supernatural horror atmosphere the monsters add. The basic premise is that your character is trying to navigate a world torn apart by religious civil war and see his parents, when he runs into the otherworldly monsters and... that's about it so far. I'm only 2 hours in, and the storytelling is very sparse. They seem to be going for a minimalist Souls approach to storytelling, which is very much not my jam. The game is also very proud to not have any sort of navigational aids - no markers, no map, just a compass you can consult to see which direction you're going. I can understand why they do that, but that is also not really my jam (in particular the lack of map, which I do not like at all). But all the same, I've been warming to it slowly and we'll see how it goes.

Though both of those games are getting set aside in a week, when Trails in the Sky 1st comes out. If you're unfamiliar with Trails, it's a moderately well known, long running JRPG series (like 12 or 13 games at this point) which is known for all the games having an interconnected plot. They have their smaller arcs so you can just play one arc without going balls deep, but it is kind of special to play since the very first game and see returning characters and plot threads from that far back. It's also unashamedly traditional JRPG fare, and it's become my Final Fantasy replacement for that reason (because FF is too busy trying to appeal to new audiences to bother making games their long time fans enjoy, and yes I'm bitter). Anyways, this game is a remake of the very first game in the series, and by the demo it looks to be a very faithful remake (exactly how I like them). So I'm looking forward to that one a lot, and all other games are going to get dropped when that comes out.

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