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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2533 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for September 19, 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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Video game thread.

I played return to moria this past two weeks. It's a survival crafting game. Gameplay wise it is fairly standard for the genre. The setting of middle earth is fun. I'm not a massive LOTR nerd, so I'm sure I missed some subtleties.

There are some mechanics that definitely make the game better suited for co-op. I played it alone and felt like I was missing out. Storage sizes always felt too small, there were legendary gear items that you could only carry one of, and you could be picked up upon death by a comrade if you had one. I eventually downloaded a mod to fix the first two issues. It expanded storage and allowed carrying multiple legendary items.

Progression happens entirely through gear. And gear drops on death. Corpse runs were not as brutal as I feared. The game seemed to handle agro and grave placement in a way that helped corpse runs.

Resource collecting was generally pretty standard but sometimes I'd find myself making fun little mining platforms to get higher.

The map is procedurally generated, but it's more like pre-made rooms that are stuck together in an odd assortment rather than fully new terrain each time.

Navigation was tricky with the map not helping much except to provide general directions. I ended memorizing a lot of tunnel layouts in order to get where I needed to go.

Replayability felt low. I didn't want to totally start from scratch after getting used to all my awesome gear. The next update is supposedly adding NPCs for bases, I'll probably replay the game when that comes out.

I've started Clair Obscur. I like how you can tell it's French even without a giant mangled Eiffel Tower. I also like how it's not another generic fantasy/sci-fi/post-apoc rehash, but something completely original. I haven't seen a setting this weird since... Death Stranding, I guess.

What I can't enjoy is the combat. The controls are all weird, the QTEs are annoying (even though I didn't mind similar QTEs in The Stick of Truth). I would seriously pay for a mod that adds a generic Final Fantasy/RPG Maker menu.

What's your beef with the controls? Maybe I'm just comfortable with the Persona 5 layout, or are you using keyboard controls instead of a gamepad?

Of course I am using KB&M controls, do I look like a console peasant?

Inventory management is a pain, worse that Skyrim without SkyUI: there's a perfectly fine character screen for managing your materia, but no, there's a separate screen for this and you can't just drag it into a free slot.

The confirm button in dialogue and combat is "move right", not "interact", so if you want to switch your target, you have to cancel the skill, select it and select the skill again.

You can have six active skills per character, but you have to split them into three banks.

If FF/RPGM Attack/Skill/Item arrows/confirm/cancel menu is bad because you want the player to keep one hand on the mouse for free aim and jump counters, why not use a radial menu that can be controlled from the mouse alone?

Wtf. Get a controller. You don't play third person games with kbm.

I hate controllers. I tried to play Hades with a controller and realized that I couldn't. With KB&M I can dash and attack without adjusting my fingers instead of having to move my thumb between A and X every 250 milliseconds.

I also can't adapt to controlling the camera with a thumbstick. I find FPS-style (forward is up) unintuitive, but flight sim style (forward is down) is even worse, as both regular and inverted X-axis feel wrong to me.

I hate controllers.

I also can't adapt to controlling the camera with a thumbstick.

I picked up this habit back when you had to enable mouselook in Quake console.

Very interesting.

I see that Quake was released in 1996. Personally, I was first introduced to keyboard/mouse-controlled action-focused video games by Claw maybe around year 2003, and quickly adapted to gamepads when my father bought a GameCube with Bush II's 2008 stimulus check. But I guess different people have different preferences.

I bought my first gamepad a couple years ago to play BotW and hated it. My son uses it to play Dead Cells now, so it doesn't feel like wasted money.

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