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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   3427 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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Games.

Almost finished Blood West. Shooter with soulslike characteristics, with decently sized map open to exploration per chapter, emphasis on stealth and looting, very retro feel. The setting is cool and well executed - wild west under a curse, roamed near exclusively by various monstrosities. Narration is minimal but compelling (intro features a native american blaming the white man for the curse, but that angle never comes up again), voice acting surprisingly nice. Quests amount to pointing you in the general direction of the next thing to find, but any order works, so you can explore freely.

The oppressive atmosphere is a highlight, both aesthetics and gameplay. Enemies are fast and hit damn hard, combat is bursty - you either get those headshots in (supposedly 5x damage, but not stated in-game afaik; feels like 5x) as you methodically clear an area, or you're in a desperate fight for survival. Highly satisfying gunplay, great feedback on the shotguns. A lot of weapons/consumables to pick up, inventory tetris abound unless you can resist the temptation to hoard.

Only minor complaints. Could use some "elite" enemies scattered around. Some balance issues. Too few artifact slots to permit more elaborate builds, and one slot is all but reserved for the pocket watch that stops time when you open inventory.

Random hallucinated connection: the "barn + house + tiny field + ghouls + nothing around" locations could well be lifted directly from Western Plaguelands.

Highly recommended. Put the first points into +experience perk. You can toss rocks on X, took me half the game to realize.

one slot is all but reserved for the pocket watch that stops time when you open inventory.

My pet peeve: degraded-by-default UIs that cost in-game resources (often substantial amounts of them) to partially fix. Most recently, I could spend a perk point on zooming out farther in Star Valor (top-down spaceship game) so I didn't get sniped from off the screen, and install an armor module in Outer Wilds that highlights interactive objects at a longer range so I can tell them apart from decorative objects.

My other pet peeve: High-speed menu navigation as a mandatory minigame.

Played it when it came out, and then the other two chapters as they released. My chief takeaways:

  • It's competently made.
  • Except for the writing, which is trash.
  • The old voice actor was better, but nobody will remember that because the new one is more famous.
  • The final boss fight of chapter 3 was so annoying I quit after my third attempt.

Five years ago I tried playing Deadlight, a side-scrolling puzzle-platformer set during a zombie apocalypse, originally released for the XBox 360 in 2012. The PC port was hopelessly broken and routinely freezed and crashed, so I abandoned it after half an hour.

I was curious if the devs had finally got around to patching it in the interim, so I reinstalled last night and was pleasantly surprised to find not only that they'd done so, but it's surprisingly absorbing and fun, to the point that I played about two-thirds of it in one sitting. At times the graphics are so stylised and the camera zoomed out so far that it can be difficult to discern exactly what you're looking at, resulting in unforeseeable deaths and trial-and-error gameplay, but the checkpoints are distributed so generously I didn't really mind so much. The player character is vulnerable and can easily become overwhelmed if there are more than two or three zombies, leading to moments of panic when you're trying to leg it and hoping your stamina metre will hold out long enough for you to scale a fence to safety. Cracking stuff.

What really lets it down is the writing. I've never really cared for zombie movies as a genre, and even the ostensible pinnacles of the genre rarely seem to transcend their fate as a collection of the same handful of tropes rearranged in subtly different patterns (I recently rewatched 28 Days Later and found that it has major pacing and tonal problems, with a flabby, aimless second act bookended by an iconic opening and strong conclusion; the only reason Train to Busan received the acclaim it did is because of people who want to claim they watch "foreign films" without actually venturing outside of their generic comfort zones; I will grant that Night of the Living Dead is a legitimate classic of indie cinema). But even given this remedial standard, Deadlight falls short, by virtue of being set in the US in the 1980s and yet very clearly having been written by a non-native English speaker who never bothered to ask an American-born person to spot-check his dialogue for idiomatic incongruencies. There's a bit where a character called the Rat Man asks the player character to rescue his son, in exchange for which the Rat Man will help the player character information track down his missing friends, to which the player character replies "an eye for an eye, huh". For fuck's sake — "an eye for an eye" does not mean "quid pro quo".

Update: having now finished it, it was serendipitous that I mentioned 28 Days Later.

I have been playing Hollow Knight Silksong. God damn, I agree with pretty much all of the criticism - it's brutally difficult and more of an expansion for hollow knight (gameplay wise) than a sequel. But I love the shit out of it. The visuals are great, Hornet makes a great protagonist, the story is intriguing and it is packed with cute and interesting npcs. And the music is just phenomenal, absolutely gorgeous. But yeah it's hard to recommend to anyone who doesn't already froth Hollow Knight. There are enemies in the second biome who do two masks of damage a hit, meaning you are three hits from death and there is a buttload of pogoing necessary for progress, and since hornet's pogoing is different to the vessel's (diagonal instead of straight down) you have to learn a new system - and forget the muscle memory of the old system. But if you liked hollow knight you should definitely play it (although you probably already are) and if you haven't played hollow knight but like metroidvanias or souls likes, get on it!

Yeah I had to take a break in act 2 cuz I was tired of being brutalized. I’ll probably pick it back up later.

Yeah I'm bouncing off I think the final boss now, good God what a fight. Previously when I was starting to tilt I'd whip out my threadolin and go play it for someone new (everyone reacts to it, singing along, including enemies. Trying to play it for bosses is a good way to learn their moves, because you have to play it for a few bars, you can't just hold Y and trigger it.) But I've already played it for everyone now and I just keep dying to this damn boss. At least in Elden Ring you spawn outside the arena instead of having to get back to it each time. I know it's a pretty minor inconvenience, but it gets frustrating after a while.

If you're a Gundam fan, you should be playing Gundam Battle Operation 2!!! In what other game can you play an RGC-80 GM Cannon (1 2) and have an ultra-fun battle against an RX-78-1 Prototype Gundam (1 2) in the middle of an abandoned city? Or beat down an MSN-02 Zeong (1 2) with an AMX-011P Zaku III Psycommu Type (1 2) as you dodge and weave between asteroids?

Example pulse-pounding gameplay:

The game can be played FOR FREE on PC (try to play during hours when the playercount is high), PS4, and PS5. Some MSes are available only through a gacha system, but the game definitely isn't pay-to-win, and even the gacha-only suits can be purchased with non-premium currency after a few months.

In-game power levels range from 100 (e. g., level 1 GM) to 750 (level 4 Zeta Gundam or level 1 Gundam F91) in theory, but in practice matches don't go lower than 250 or 300. Personally, I'm not a big fan of high-power battles and space battles, and stick to ground battles in approximately the 400–550 range, with occasional forays into 250–350 and 600 if no other matches are available. My most-used MSes are Guncannon Heavy Type D, Jegan Heavy Equipment Type, Dom Cannon Multi-Gun Type, and Galluss-K. (Yes, I love shoulder cannons, how could you tell?)

Sounds like my cup of tea, wishlisted.

Last night I gave Prey from 2017 a try, playing it for a few hours. It wasn't bad, but I agree with some people who argued it's so beholden to its immediate influences (System Shock 2 and BioShock) that it maybe doesn't really have much of an identity of its own. I like immersive sims, but the very fact of their relative open-endedness sometimes makes me feel a bit overwhelmed: I feel anxious that I'm playing them "wrong" unless I meticulously search every single drawer and container.

I like immersive sims

I don't like that someone decided to call them "immersive sims". What does it simulate? Why is it immersive? I know it's "just a name", but MSFS with VR is a much more immersive sim. Why can't people call them "simulationist action RPGs" or just "shocklikes"?

Immersive sims simulate a virtual environment with a high degree of systems-oriented internal consistency, and unlike most games which do this (e.g. SimCity) they attempt to immerse the player in this simulated world by having them control a specific individual therein (typically from a first-person perspective), as opposed to having them observe the virtual environment from a God's-eye-view.

In general I vastly prefer genre tags which offer some kind of description of the game's mechanics: genre tags of the form "games that are like X" are useless because they presume familiarity with X, which is an intrinsically more insular naming convention than just describing how the game plays. Does anyone seriously think "Doom clone" is preferable to "first-person shooter", particularly when most FPSs have so little in common with the original Doom? I'd love if someone could come up with a better name than "roguelike" — I'd hazard a guess that the majority of people who use the term are unaware the term is a reference to a specific game, never mind having played it.

In the case of Prey, however, I'll grant that, based on the two or three hours I spent playing it, "shocklike" is a perfectly accurate description.

“Procedural dungeon crawler.” Maybe squeeze in the word “permadeath” if you’re worried about people confusing it with procgen-as-compression like Elite.

I don’t think -like and -lite merit different terms. If adding a jump button or RPG stats doesn’t keep a game from being an FPS, adding metaprogression still leaves you with a PDC.

-Like and -lite marks the difference between audiences who want to complete the game eventually through piling on upgrades and those who want to play a game they might never complete.

That doesn’t seem right. FTL barely has metaprogression at all, and it’s a definitive roguelite.

Besides, why should expectation of completion deserve a separate genre? “FPS” doesn’t even distinguish between single-player campaigns and uncompletable multiplayer lobbies.

"Permadeath highly-variable X" and "permadeath highly-variable X with metaprogression" for roguelites respectively? Not sure how to make it not be a mouthful when "roguelike" is already a pretty specific modifier genre.

Is Minecraft survival mode an immersive sim, then? High degree of systems-oriented internal consistency? There's nothing but systems there. Immersing the player in this simulated world by having them control a specific individual therein? Absolutely.

As they have explicit win-states, I consider immersive sims a genre of video games, whereas sandboxes like Minecraft are more akin to software toys, per Will Wright's distinction.

I'd also dispute whether a game whose environment is wholly procedurally generated can be classed as an immersive sim, as the genre typically involves the simulation of a specific space rather than the simulation of a kind of space. System Shock 2 takes place on the Von Braun and the Rickenbacker, not on a generic spaceship whose constituent spaces can be arranged in any arbitrary order.

I would argue that No Man's Sky is an immersive sim (if not a very realistic one) and not a software toy, and conversely that Star Citizen is a software toy (no end game and progression exists almost entirely on player-defined axis) and an immersive sim (it has a defined world with specific spaces where they player exists entirely within a single avatar facing a systems-coherent simulation, makes you feel paranoid that you're missing out on lore/material if you don't search every corner).

I'm honestly not sure where I'd put Space Engineers there.

Minecraft has had an "explicit win state" since year 2011.

Yeah, but even at that point (and definitely since 2016) the win state has been just another toy to play with. The area with the end boss is literally called "The End", but after the final victory text the game doesn't actually end, or even restart from scratch in a "New Game +" sort of mode; all persistent world and character changes remain. As of 2016, "winning" spawns a portal that makes it easier to reach new areas that are practically inaccessible otherwise, with monsters and treasures that don't exist elsewhere in the game. To make it easier to reach more of those new areas it's recommended that you re-summon the end boss and defeat it again to spawn more portals; wiki says you can get up to 20 of them.

At least in vanilla, you're usually better served by exploring the outer islands directly instead of refighting the dragon -- a lot of the intent for multiple summonings is to handle multiplayer servers. That said, yeah, there's a lot of players that literally never do it, and another number that consider it where the game starts (since Elytra and Shulker boxes, both post-Ender Dragon, are incredibly useful for creative builders).

Modded can change that pretty aggressively, and it's common to lock 'end-game' or specialized crafting material specifically around the End Dragon's death (either as a direct drop, like old Tinker's Construct end dragon scales, or indirectly like Quark's Biotite). But then again modded will also have other end states, some just checkboxes (GTNH's final Stargate is literally useless by the time you can make it), and some more serious (completing Blightfall's last quest involves purifying the entire pregen map; you can still explore, but it's an entirely different style of play from what you were doing before).

Can this win state be reached from survival mode?

Yes, and it rolls the credits and everything.

Yes.

The player can "beat the game" in Survival mode by defeating the ender dragon in the End.

Prey from 2017

I had it in my backlog for a while, but I am a little shocked it's that old. Time flies.

I feel anxious that I'm playing them "wrong" unless I meticulously search every single drawer and container.

Tell me about it. It's embarrassing, I can't be assed to grab pencil & paper and go after the proper secrets in these games, but will obsessively, tediously loot every nook, and will get nervous about accidentally progressing. And it's rare that these games push you to use everything you find (can't expect everyone to play that way).

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