site banner
PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2371 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for October 17, 2025

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

1
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Vidya thread.

I finally finished Clair Obscur this week. Well, I didn't beat every optional boss, but I'm too old for this shit. I must say, my earlier criticism about the game's incongruent mood has been invalidated when the game provided an in-universe explanation for it.

Now I'm looking for another game to use my shiny new GPU with. Something I can beat before EU5 comes out in November. Any recommendations?

I beat Hades 2, at least the main/normal ending, not the whatever 100% completionist ending that's going to take another 50 hours if I decide to stick around.

I'm going to be vague to avoid spoilers, but overall I liked the direction it went. It was not enough to fully make up for the decrease in quality since the first game, but it was a partial recovery, better than expected. I don't think they did a great job of leading up to it, which could have made the earlier game better. My overall assessment of the game doesn't change qualitatively: the gameplay mechanics are better, the story/atmosphere is worse, and since it's a roguelite game which is primarily about the gameplay mechanics rather than the story, overall I think it comes out ahead of Hades 1. I'm more confident on this conclusion that I was in my previous post when I hadn't gotten to the ending yet. Still disappointed that it wasn't as good as it could have been, but it's fine. Get it if you played and liked the first one.

Now I'm looking for another game to use my shiny new GPU with. Something I can beat before EU5 comes out in November. Any recommendations?

The really obvious one is Baldur's Gate 3. A new mod that aims to fix the "aesthetic" problems of the game came out recently and looks pretty impressive.

Other suggestions that jump to my mind are all the recent Resident Evil games. 7, 8 and the remakes of 2, 3 and 4.

Helldivers 2 is pretty cool with friends but the installation features a mandatory rootkit.

Elden Ring is a "love it or hate it" type of game that came out relatively recently. I personally liked it, with the exception of the toxic fans.

One thing that made me roll my eyes at Nexusmods was their decision to remove a BG3 mod that replaced the default narrator (female) with an AI generated track of the wise old man from Civilization 5 voicing all the lines. I heard a bit of it on youtube and it seemed to work well. So I wanted to try it, but couldn't because it was removed almost instantly for, I guess, its horrible misogyny!!!

Is that mod (or similar) available anywhere now?

Yeah, same site. A lot of the "forbidden" mods end up there.

Thanks for the link. Do you happen to know if it works? There are posts calling it outdated (in the newer thread too).

No, sorry, I couldn't find a newer version. And I can't test it because I don't have the game installed right now.

For your future reference: I haven't tried the Civ5 narrator mod, but I'm using the White Wizard (Saruman) 1.1 narrator mod now, and it seems to work fine with the latest GOG version of the game. At least in the tutorial area, haven't played further.

A new mod that aims to fix the "aesthetic" problems of the game came out recently and looks pretty impressive.

With only a few exceptions, androgynous, purposefully made plain-or-ugly, Kara-Turan or Chultan heads were replaced.
https://f.rpghq.org/rH4UBq34Ajtg.gif?n=TIEF-BOTH-GIF.gif

Yeah, right, now everyone looks like they have an Instagram. A plague o' both their houses, I say.

God forbid fantasy races don't precisely meet the beauty standards of The Most Boring Fantasy Race(tm) aside from the superficial non-boring parts.

Does anyone play racing games on the PS5? I've had a PS5 for about a year, primarily as a 4K Bluray player, and recently I got the hankering for a good-looking racing game to play on the big TV in the living room, likely caused by me playing FF7 Rebirth & enjoying the Chocobo racing minigame a lot.

On Playstation, Gran Turismo is the gold standard for racing sims, but I noticed a lot of fans complaining about poor QOL and poor design for the single-player experience in the latest, GT7. Instead, it seems to have gone the way of Live Service Slop, with seasonal events and limited time cars that you have to buy and such. I enjoyed GT3 a lot on the PS2 back in the day, and GT7 definitely looks beautiful, but I'm not sure I want to spend $35 (on sale right now - normally $70) on a Live Service Slop game.

I also noticed that Ubisoft's The Crew: Motorfest was a big racing game on all the consoles, and I did enjoy playing the demo a bit, but also, I fucking hate open world in a racing game. I want either actual tracks or closed loops set in real-life locales, I don't want to be navigating city blocks and "immersing" myself into the world. Graphically, it doesn't look as good as GT7, but certainly not bad.

I also saw that Forza Horizon 5 was on PS5, but that one's also an open world racing game. I also saw reviews saying that it had terrible progression in single player gameplay, since it gave the player top-of-the-line cars right at the start. Doesn't seem like a bad thing, but then again, the whole Career Mode feel of getting better and better, going to higher and higher level matches, has added enjoyment to my playing of racing games in the past.

Those are the big 3 that I looked into, and none of them seemed to really nail the sweet spot of what I was looking for. If they just graphically upgraded GT3 and added more cars and tracks, I'd probably buy that for $70 easily, but I don't see that in the market today. I was just wondering if anyone has more experience with this and knows any hidden gems or qualities of these 3 games that I missed?

Most people I know who liked Clair Obscur also were big fans of Metaphor: ReFantazio (AKA fantasy-Persona-with-adults-and-HieronymousBosch). I've played the latter but not the former, so I can only recommend it on its own merits.

I'm currently trying out the Heroes of Might and Magic: Olden Era demo via Steam's NextFest. My initial impressions are that it feels like someone made a modern version of Heroes III, which is of course the best game in the series and one of the greatest of all time. The biggest flaw so far: it seems like it isn't designed for hot seat (at least in the battles), which... I get it. It's the Year of Our Lord 2025. Hot seat isn't a thing anymore. But it's the principle of the thing, dammit!

I've tried the demo of ReFantazio, and I hate-hate-hate how sluggish the camera is, it's practically unplayable for me. I've pulled every sensitivity slider to the max, and it still feels like I'm stuck in glue. The list of games I've bounced off grows longer and longer:

  • The Ghost of Tsushima (don't like this style of combat)
  • Spehss Marine 2 (ditto)
  • ReFantazio (terrible controls)
  • CP2077 (no real reason, might have to try again)

I would suggest Devil May Cry V but I doubt you'd like to play it on KB/M.

How is Metaphor? I'm a Persona fan (3/4/5), but when I tried SMT5 I didn't like it at all. The battle system was mechanically better and had more depth, but everything else was worse. Much worse. In particular, the constant echo-y audio drove me mad. I stopped playing after the first chapter and haven't returned.

Metaphor has the press turn battle system from SMT, with a job system for party building a la FF, and the social link/calendar systems from Persona. It's pretty good, though I don't personally think the story was as strong as P4 or P5, nor were the characters. I think it's worth giving a shot based on what you said.

How is the story/characters? One of the most off-putting things about SMT5 is it didn't feel like it had any characters at all. I don't even mean they felt cliché: they felt inert, like mannequins. I'd happily take a stereotypical JRPG hero over the Nahobino/whatever-his-real-name-is any day.

Significantly better. Unlike SMT5 which is basically pure gameplay with only the bare minimum of story to support it (I bounced off myself for that very reason), Metaphor has an actually pretty interesting story that it tells, and the characters are generally pretty interesting to spend time with. It's very much like Persona in that sense, not at all like SMT. Like I said I don't think it pulls those aspects off as well as the best of the Persona games do, but I think it gets a solid 7/10 on story and characters whereas I'd give SMT5 a 0/10.

I also quite enjoy that the protagonist in Metaphor isn't silent like in Persona. He's a real character who has his own thoughts and will speak up on things, even if you do have some player control over his opinions.

Thanks! Sounds worth a shot, will pick it up sometime.

I found Olden Era to simply be way too hard, hah. Partly because I'm a noob at the genre, not having played it since Heroes 2 or 3 or something, but I saw a lot of complaints about unfair AI strength when I took a look at the steam discussions.

From what I've seen, the AI is still too weak to pose any challenge to competitive players, but it can no longer be baited with single-unit stacks in combat. They are still useful if you need them to block off your shooters or to eat a counterstrike, but you no longer can lead enemy stacks away from your shooters by offering them a kill this turn.

I recall they promised to add hot seat in the release version.

I got myself Daimon Blades, a game by Streum On, the studio who made the legendary meme quarry, E.Y.E. Divine Cybermancy.

E.Y.E. was effectively a janky Source Engine mod that took the brakes off of gameplay and covered it all in obscurantist faux-symbolism and incomprehensible French dialogue that had had an English dictionary briefly flashed at it. It was horrible in many ways, but it also had a lot of ambition shine through.

Daimon Blades is a janky Unreal Engine game that took a bunch of fancy 3D models and slapped on some code that I assume the devs stole from a handful of UE5 demos. The resulting game is horrible in many ways, and has a lot of laziness shine through.

Worst of all and entirely unforgivably, unlike E.Y.E., it's just plain not fun.

It's a trash fire, cannot recommend.

YOUR LEGS ARE BROKEN

I LOST BROZOUF

Attempted multiplayer Rabbit and Steel recently with a friend.

Rabbit and Steel is a game about cute bunny girls fighting several bosses in a row that's marketed as "FF14 raid experience without having to level and grind". You go in, fight the bosses, get some items that increase your DPS in various ways in between the fights, and that's it. The fights themselves are akin to bullet hell games, but with emphasis on zones - some zones you have to stay in, others you have to stay out of. Dealing damage is not automatic, so you have to pay some mind to pressing your abilities in a specific order to maximize DPS.

The game can be played solo, but it shines in co-op, as most boss attacks force players to interact in certain ways. Instead of merely having to stay in a circle, the boss may center the circle on one of you, for example, or the ever-notorious "spread out" attacks (the name speaks for itself).

A major downside is that it just becomes plain diffucult to figure out what all the attacks are when there are 5 different areas of effect in various shapes (and one color scheme) on the screen.

I've long had a soft spot for Rockstar Games' controversial stealth/survival horror title Manhunt from 2003. The premise of the game sounds like it was tailor-made to get Jack Thompson's knickers in a twist (to the point that even some of Rockstar's own staff found it objectionable1). You play as an inmate on death row called James Earl Cash who has his execution faked by a mysterious benefactor, who then forces Cash through a gauntlet of urban environments patrolled by violent gangs actively hunting for him. Cash is hopelessly outnumbered, so must resort to the game's core mechanic of "executions": he can sneak up behind gang members and stealth-kill them with a melee weapon, whereupon the camera shifts to a grainy pseudo-VHS perspective. For, you see, Cash's benefactor directs snuff films (for which purpose he's installed CCTV cameras all around the city), and wants Cash to be his "leading man". And these films aren't just a way of making ends meet, but very much a "passion project" for the director: if Cash murders a gang member in a particularly gruesome fashion, he will commend Cash in his earpiece, or even moan orgasmically. (The fact that the director is portrayed by the wonderful Brian Cox lends him a great deal of seedy charisma.) And in spite of the PS2-era graphics, many of these executions remain positively revolting to watch, aided by the game's impeccable sound design.

It's a tremendously fun game that makes you feel tense and anxious while playing it, then dirty and ashamed afterwards, aided by the game's meta, self-referential qualities (the player character is being "controlled" by an overweight creep sitting in the dark in front of a computer monitor, who orders him to viciously murder people for no better reason than his own sick amusement — no prizes for guessing who he's meant to represent). I've played it several times before, but always on the normal (or "Fetish") difficulty, for which the UI includes a circular "radar" which shows the position of gang members in your vicinity, which way they're facing and how alert they are. I'd read that this radar is disabled on hard ("Hardcore") mode, which I assumed would make the game practically impossible (even "Fetish" is plenty challenging). I recently completed my first playthrough on "Hardcore" mode, and I quickly realised that it's the purest way to play the game. It's not a "deconstruction" of stealth-based games, but it's clearly aiming for a more grounded, down-to-earth approach to the genre than is typical (and it still feels refreshing to play a survival horror game with no fantastical or speculative elements whatsoever). Cash isn't a Sam Fisher or Solid Snake with an array of hi-tech gizmos at his disposal: he's just an ordinary guy thrust into a situation beyond his understanding, with nothing to guide him but his wits and whatever weapons he can get his hands on (you kill your first enemy by smothering him with a plastic bag, and even in the late game shards of broken glass are invaluable tools). Without the radar, you have to proceed cautiously and play close attention to the direction the enemy chatter is coming from, just as Cash would. It's a very effective means of putting the player in his shoes, and makes an already tense and stressful game positively nerve-wracking. Highly recommended if you've never played it before, and a suitable game for spooky season. But if you're trying to persuade your loved ones that video games are more than disgusting exploitative "murder simulators" — well, maybe don't show them this one.

1 "It may sound surprising, but there was almost a mutiny at the company over that game. It was Rockstar North's [the Scottish branch of the company] pet project — most of us at Rockstar Games wanted no part of it. We'd already weathered plenty of controversy over GTA3 and Vice City — we were no strangers to it — but Manhunt felt different. With GTA, we always had the excuse that the gameplay was untethered — you never had to hurt anybody that wasn't a "bad guy" in one of the missions. You could play completely ethically if you wanted, and the game was parody anyway, so lighten up," Williams writes.

"Manhunt, though, just made us all feel icky. It was all about the violence, and it was realistic violence. We all knew there was no way we could explain away that game. There was no way to rationalize it. We were crossing a line."

the game's incongruent mood

Could you restate your criticism?

The presence of childish elements like the gestrals and Esquie next to literal mounds of corpses, surreal monsters and the justified fatalism of expedition 33.

For those who don't plan to play the game, the world actually was created by a young boy as a fantasy to play in, and it's the deadly parts that are foreign to it. The boy died in a fire, his mother retreated to this world of his to mourn him, his father is covertly trying to destroy the world to get her to come back, his older sister populated the world with monsters to speed up the process, the starting party are clueless NPCs caught in the resulting crossfire, thinking they are their world's last hope.

Ahh man, such a beautiful and heartrending story. I predict it will stand as the most incredible video game artistic accomplishment of the early 21st century.

I think Disco Elysium still beats it.

Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 is pretty good if you don't mind some wokery that snuck its way in.

What gpu did you get? Just curious.

What RenOS said, and I noticed the somewhat sympathetic portrayal of the gypsies.

Good idea. It's a first-person game, IIRC, which is a bonus.

I got a 5070 Ti

Yup I considered that you're a purely kb/m player when I thought about what to recommend. You could also play Cyberpunk 2077 if you haven't already done so. It looks fantastic with all the bells and whistles turned on.

For some reason I just can't get into CP77.

Could you elaborate on that? I normally bounce off of mainstream games, but Cyberpunk 2077 actually got me good.

I don't know if I can. It just didn't grip me.

Okay. Hmm. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is one of the best looking games I've ever played. Try that. :)

Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 is pretty good if you don't mind some wokery that snuck its way in.

This always mystifies me, one of the selling points of KC:D 1 was that it used an unapologetically realist approach to the portrayal of medieval life. Not that it actually is perfectly realistic, but it at least tried to avoid the modernist left-wing lens. The author also took a clear stand against some ridiculous demands.

... And then for 2 he completely changes his tune. Henry and Hans gay, is already funny, but a coming out scene to his (by then dead) parents and they accept it. Musa lecturing the player on women's right and the player just has to take it, that's just lol. Women repeatedly outdoing the main char. Literal quote from the CEO:

Vávra made some unfortunate statements about the absence of black people in Bohemia when releasing KCD1 because he lacked PR experience.

Just why, you're already sucessful, why sell out so blatantly? It makes no sense, yet it happens repeatedly.

I mean, I think the main story of Battletech is cheesy and stupid, so I just play the sandbox mode. But nobody feels the need to defend it by "well it's optional, you can just play the sandbox mode!". Playing a game at all is, strictly speaking, optional.

Furthermore, Hans in KC:D 1 was more a specific person, not just an amorphous player insert like in, say, Skyrim or CP2077. In Witcher 3 one of the arguments against gay romance was this - the MC is Geralt, Geralt isn't gay, all the options for the player have to be broadly in alignment with that character. That wasn't very controversial.

The same goes even more for Henry; Even if pretending that Hans is just a player insert and so his optional choices do not reflect the character you're playing, the mere option of gay romance with Henry implies necessarily that Henry is now gay, despite no such indication in KC:D 1. Not to mention that the behaviour by everyone else ingame around this topic is extremely obviously anachronistic.

Just to be clear, I had no such issues with the gay romance in, say, CP2077. Even though having exactly 4 characters to cover all bases for all possible relationship patterns definitely felt very current-year, the characters themselves were mostly fine and consistent, and the portrayal of the relationships felt appropriate for the setting. What I really hate is fucking up a setting or character and breaking suspension of disbelief just to get some hobbyhorse in.

Is that crap unavoidable or merely a possibility ?

Just why, you're already sucessful, why sell out so blatantly? It makes no sense, yet it happens repeatedly.

Publisher forced it. KCD1 was financed by a local patron, some middling real-estate investor (150 million $ worth, ultimately invested $12 million into the game which isn't really peanuts). KCD2 wasn't.

Vávra hates that crap and is quite active on social networks so Czech 'liberals' really hate him, mostly around censorship where he's against the euroatlantic statist bullshit around 'disinfo' the EU loves so much but he also torches wokes regularly, it's unlikely he's responsible. The nice thing to do would be release an 'anonymous' mod that'd would just get rid of these forced changes.

That sounds reasonable, although sad. On the topic of unavoidability, see my other reply to Lazuli.

Dude, tag the spoilers. I knew about some of this already but others might not have.

Now I'm looking for another game to use my shiny new GPU with. Something I can beat before EU5 comes out in November. Any recommendations?

The ancient abandonware platforming game Claw is suitable to be played on a keyboard by a controller-hating curmudgeon such as you.

shiny new GPU

Let me reiterate this requirement. I have plenty of retro games I can play, I am looking for latest-gen graphics.

Games with shiny graphics all basically suck bc the investment is so gigantic that to recoup it, it has to be market to morons. At best games with marginally decent writing but gameplay completable while near to blackout drunk.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats