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Friday Fun Thread for January 9, 2026

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! What did you get over the holidays, what are you playing?

Having a blast playing Skyrim modded. Been playing a lot and also just looking through modlists. This is one area I've found AI to be extremely fun and useful to work with, which has been rare for me lately.

Dead Space Remake. I'm a wuss so I play on easy - the scares are enough excitement for me already, I don't need to be constantly fretting about ammo or surviving by the skin of my teeth at the same time.

In general I've been re-discovering easy mode lately. I love Dark Souls and similar soulslikes, and got very into the 'if it weren't so hard to get to the next area, it wouldn't have nearly the same emotional weight' way of thinking about games. It's a good philosophy but especially for games that aren't as tight as Miyazaki-san's stuff, it can really suck the fun out of what's supposed to be an enjoyable experience.

For example I was regretting buying Pacific Drive until I bumped the difficulty way down. Once I was getting new upgrades and story almost every trip, I got much more immersed in the story and started really enjoying it. Of course it was over soon but 13h of fun is way better than 40h of pain.

I'm still convinced that the original Dead Space still holds up and the changes in the remake just makes it worse. I think they are really screwed up with repeating "make us whole" 100 times through the game and even mentioning it so early. There was no need for extended scenes with the wife or Mercer. And surprisingly they almost didn't touch the whole "hey we spaced 1 necromorph and he took over the entire battleship full of military in an hour".

All true, but I'm a simple man. I liked the original Dead Space and I wanted to see what they could do with modern lighting systems. And to be fair they made non-graphical improvements as well: Kendra's character is much improved, and the weapons feel better too. I preferred the old zero-grav sections though.

"hey we spaced 1 necromorph and he took over the entire battleship full of military in an hour"

I loved that bit! Very much 'we're saved!' and then the slow realisation that you've really, really fucked up. Plus it makes total sense to me that the military get slaughtered, they're not informed about what's going on and they don't have the right tools. It would be like expecting Fort Knox to withstand a sudden assault by Count Dracula.

It's also funny that USS Valor is where you get the pulse rifle which when upgraded is one of the best weapons in the first game (extremely ammo efficient).

I would like to see Count Dracula assault Fort Knox. How deep into Dracula powerscaling are we going? Does he get the gypsy servants?