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 haven't played anything in weeks. Been too busy with a responsible adult mode/productivity streak. Haven't been getting enough R&R and became a bit worn down. Please tempt me into some fun gaming.
What's your preferred genre(s)? What's your tolerances for the newest "hope you spent $600 on a GPU recently" and for the oldest "just enough pixels to jog your imagination" games? How many hours of play time are you looking to spend?
My favorite games of all time are probably Portal, Deus Ex, and Star Control 2. Honorable mentions to Outer Wilds, Civilization (especially 4 and 5), Skyrim, Kerbal Space Program, (Telltale's) The Walking Dead, and Baldur's Gate.
Oh, but for
I think I'm stuck. "Fun, interesting" and "recently" make Outer Wilds a shoo-in (I literally bought a Steam Deck dock and bluetooth controller solely so that when I recommended it to my kids I could watch them play on the big screen), but no self-respecting Outer Wilds player would describe Outer Wilds to someone else! Half the fun is encountering everything for the first time and trying to figure out how it all works and what it's all about.
I probably like a good RPG more than anything! Some of my favorite games ever are KOTOR, Deus Ex, Morrowind, Mass Effect, the Persona games. I also like the odd strategy game like Civ V, but that's sometimes too demanding on the highest difficulties for a wearied brain.
I have the highest tolerance for compute hungry games (rtx 5090). And a low tolerance for low budget/pixel art stuff, although I've liked a few of them too. I'm a pretty demanding and jaded bastard who gets bored of anything resembling mediocrity or mere timesinks. I'd rather read a book or something if I'm not feeling 'engaged' or 'immersed' by the game.
How many hours: 100 per game at the most, preferably much less. I've got savegames a few dozen hours into BG3, KCD2, Elden Ring, Oblivion Remastered, etc but find it hard to get back into something I've put down. Got some weird aversion going on these days vs sinking into a game world when I 'could' be doing adult stuff instead, but of course not giving oneself enough rest and fun does not lead to anything good.
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Want to waste 100+ hours on a Top-down isometric CRPG that gives you the option to kill off your party members?
Crack open Rogue Trader and have at it.
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Mindbug! It's a Magic-style game co-created by Richard Garfield, the creator of Magic. He never liked the pay-to-win incentives of Magic, and wanted a game where you had less control over the deck and had to just roll with what luck gave you (you could see him trying to correct this with Keyforge). In Mindbug, you and your opponent draw 10 cards (that's it) each from a big shared deck and play them to attack and block and manipulate powers like in every other game. There are no resources. The twist is that each player has two Mindbugs, which they can spend to take any card you try to play and add it to their board as though they had played it. This adds a mind-game that other card games lack, where you try to bait each other into wasting Mindbugs while not wasting yours, but if you don't use them you'll almost certainly lose. One match takes 10-15 minutes.
You can get the app for phone or computer and play PvP or against a progressively more difficult AI. They have released 4 or 5 sets and each one has some unique mechanics, and they rotate these through the app for competitive play. The base set is free.
It's a really good game if you can deal with the goofy art; it just needs a bigger player base. Check it out! Right now!
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Not sure where saw a recommendation for 'Encased' and it can be best described as 'Fallout 2' but with a modern engine and somewhat less memorable writing. Takes place in an alternate past where during the 70s an 200 km wide and probably invisible from outside 'force field' was discovered in a desert somewhere, with a single entrance. Inside are some enigmatic ruins. Borrowing liberally from 'Roadside Picnic', a joint US/Soviet company is established to research what's in there. Game starts a couple years after that.
The rulest is broadly but not too similar to Fallout 2 with abilities themselves gated beyond skill levels (e.g. if your lockpick is too low, you can't pick locks at all etc). It's more complex.
Then there's people who accuse it off knocking off Stalker which is fair, e.g. the anomalies are pretty much ctr+c; ctrl+v and (so far) it seems there aren't many novel anomaly designs, but come on, it's a wholly different genre and apart from the anomalies themselves, the vibe / aesthetics /settings are wholly different.
I've found a fair amount of people hating on it. The writing and quests aren't usually very inspired but they're not that bad usually. At least it's not offensive like most of e.g. Baldur's Gate 3. I suspect a lot of people got filtered by the combat which is absolutely not levelled to the player so you can pick impossible fights.
I actually tried Encased a few years ago. I thought it seemed quite promising. Without getting far into it, I gave up on it after being convinced it wouldn't, in the end, be worth the time spent, by lots of people claiming the "second half of the game is unfinished and bad." As if it falls off a cliff after a while and really can't stick the landing. Is that true?
It seems I haven't even gotten to the second half yet, so. I'll let you know, I guess.
I'd appreciate hearing about it if and when you finish it!
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I fired up Battletech modded with Roguetech and have been trying to get my mercs solidly into the black.
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Old World Blues is a Fallout mod for Hearts of Iron IV. Compared to the base game or many of its flagship mods, it’s more about diving into the setting.
My current playthrough is multiplayer with an old friend. He’s got a vault nation up in Colorado, stomping out the neighboring raiders and negotiating an alliance with the New California Republic. My faction, though, is a loose warlord state which trades off leadership according to regular wrestling matches. Its mutant luchadors are happy to lose gracefully and bide their time for the next match. In the meantime, they like to lead volunteer troops to other nations. This has been difficult, lately, since their closest neighbor is the Sinaloa cartel. After years of suffering raids, they’ve formed an alliance to wipe those bastards off the face of the planet.
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A while back I made a post about WorldBox God Simulator, and how my chosen world had become an endless throng of insane cannibal rhino men living under the lash of a race of wicked angels.
https://www.themotte.org/post/3382/friday-fun-thread-for-november-21/386100?context=8#context
Recently this had become a bit stale, so I wiped the angels out of existence (at least in this timeline), put some rhino guys into their isolated mountain lair instead, and then wiped out all life outside the lair.
Centuries passed as the rhinos sat trapped in their mountain, their hunger having been temporarily removed by divine intervention so that they could survive this way. Over time new civilizations emerged. Elves and druids and cat people and all sorts of things. Once they had several thriving kingdoms and seemed to be heavily engrossed in their own politics, it was time to make a hole in the side of the mountain, and to make the boys hungry again.
That's right, monsters from before the dawn of civilization, God's chosen world-eaters. They immediately established a large warmongering empire that split the main continent in two, prompting everyone in the world to declare war on them in turn.
The thing is, these guys are basically feeder mice for my evil angels, sure, but they're still far stronger on an individual basis than any naturally evolved species. The world's counteroffensive is getting smashed. Not only that, but the rhino religion gives access to a devastating set of strategic-level ritual spells. It's going to start raining demons and meteors across the planet as soon as the rhino leadership can get its hands free for five minutes straight.
But you know, the rhinos weren't like this when they initially won their own world. They were strong and warlike, but not utterly insane. They had conquered the world, divided up into a few factions in sort of a permanent cold war, and then sat there being so peaceful that God got bored. I had not only made them stronger at that point, but as disagreeable as possible, so that they would continue to fight even when they were the only race or culture to exist.
Yeah these guys turned on each other, for absolutely no good reason, while at war with everyone else. With their strength split in two and fighting bitterly against itself, the elves and druids and cat and dog people and whatever else were able to crush them both and save the world. My pet rhino guys went the way of every over-engineered killer orc race in fiction.
So hey, sometimes good wins, even in my would-be miserable hellworld. I should have been taking screenshots or something. Fun toy, worth picking up, has some gimped free to play options but I don't know about them, I bought the full price version.
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Download a modpack for Skyrim.
Don't you remember me trying to convince you to play something other than Skyrim last week...? I'm done with that game. Resuming my Oblivion Remastered playthrough could be fun though. I have a pretty cool character.
lol, did not remember that was you. Forgive me friendo. Baldur’s gate three is alright.
I might spin up bloons Td. It was just free on epic games.
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There's an entire free total conversion that's supposedly better than Skyrim original.
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I have been playing Kingdom Come Deliverance and, while it was already clear that this was not a woke game from pretty early on, this line really drove that nail home for me. You would never here a line like this in a modern American video game. It's not even anti-woke: as a game from the Czech Republic, it's so far removed from the modern American culture war that it just doesn't even care. This is in response to being asked why does God allow so much evil in the world, and the man responds that it's probably a test so we can become better by overcoming it. Everyone is a medieval Catholic (except the evil foreign Cumans who are barbaric and evil, but also way way stronger than your local bandits which makes it terrifying when you stumble on one early game and you probably need to run away instead of fighting), and it's just kind of in the background morality of the individual characters. There's a quest where you go back into the ruins of a town that was just destroyed and still roving with bandits and scavengers in order to bury your murdered parents, putting yourself in danger for no reason other than respect for them and wanting them not to get stuck in purgatory. And yet it's not as if the story is glazing Christianity either, it's got plenty of evil and corrupt people abusing the system, and even a drunk and lecherous priest who is preaching protestant reformation against the Catholic church and their money grubbing ways. Characters believe things because it makes sense for their character to believe that in this culture and the narrative isn't using them as a cudgel to propagandize you that they're obviously right or wrong.
What I think I like about it most of all is that it's an open world Western RPG where your character is... actually a character. You play as Henry, a blacksmith's son from a town, with parents and friends and a personality. He speaks, he has opinions, he makes decisions that you cannot control that drive the plot forward. He is not a blank faceless self insert who gets swept along in some chosen one plot so that you can pretend he is actually you in this world. Henry is Henry in this world, and that gives the writers so much more room to actually write a real story that involves him in it because they can make him do and say things that the story needs a protagonist to do and say. They do a clever job of giving him a bit of moral gray at the beginning with a good and honest father who tells him to do what's right, and a bunch of mischievous friends trying to get him to misbehave, so that whether you decide to run around stealing and murdering or decide to be good and helpful both are still kind of "in character". But there is a character, and I really like that and think that most Western RPGs are missing this.
I haven't finished it yet, so I can't speak for an overall review of how good it stays or how the narrative wraps up in the end, but I am very much liking it so far.
I remember that quest! It was a hard hitting one. I never finished KCD, but I really enjoyed the game for similar reasons to yours. They managed to pull off having a pretty defined character rather than a total blank slate, without making him offputting. He's vanilla enough and interesting enough at the same time. It's almost an immersive sim game. Very historically accurate, which I appreciated! There's a great sense of progression and character development. E.g. learning to read and all sorts of things.
Unfortunately KCD2 is not free from wokeism, due to the devs getting new owners or something prior to making it. Still a very good game though. I was a few dozen hours into it last year. Should get back to it at some point. I loved making lots of groschen by brewing skillfully made potions and slaying bandits/cumans. :D
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I loved that game, just riding around on Pebbles after I got stronk looking for Cumans camps and deer to poach.
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Nioh 1 and 2 (fast-paced action RPG)
Dark Souls 1 and 2 (slower-paced action RPG)
Gundam Battle Operation 2 (mecha action)
Death Stranding 1 and 2 (terrain traversal)
Quarries of Scred (mining game—no brain required)
Freeways (interchange-design game)
Slipways Classic and Slipways (interplanetary transport network–design game)
I was hoping for subjective descriptions of fun, interesting gaming sessions people have had recently.
We enlisted too early in this flashpoint war. We're straining both the mechwarriors and the support staff so we're riding out in our second line mechs (and honestly vehicles doing the heavy lifting at this stage).
The company is only 3 months old. We're barely equipped for sentry duty with just one omnimech and a converted industrial mech and some looted tanks and APCs that send no fear into even the smallest pirate bands.
But the pay was slightly better than our usual ones and war is our business so when the great house put out the call for mercs to take a series of raid defenses here we are hoping to be able to cobble a lance together for as long as the war lasts.
So here I sit in my salvaged Kitfox cockpit for the third time this week, with the whole company looking for me to brawl with this pirate lance while they sit on the ridge picking off the turrets. The blasted heat of this world slowing their progress.
We fight because we can't afford not to, I just hope this job will pay better than the last one. I've clawed my a couple hundred thousand C-Bills together but that's only enough to pay this month's bills and this month is almost over. At least I have one XL engine to sell if things get dire. We almost failed in the first month from lack of funds.
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Nioh: Use seven different weapon types (Nioh 2: eleven) in three stances (dodgy-but-weak low stance, powerful-but-slow high stance, and good-at-blocking mid stance) in conjunction with yin-yang magic, ninja skills, and guardian spirits to rampage through Japan, slaying samurai and demons by the dozen. This series is more fast-paced than the Dark Souls series, with a mechanic that allows you to recharge your stamina more quickly with good timing.
Dark Souls: Plod through a fantasy apocalypse, wielding a plethora of different weapons (or several different types of magic, if you prefer) against undead, demons, and the occasional humanoid enemy who mostly plays by the same rules. Stamina management is key.
Gundam Battle Operation 2: See glowing description here.
Death Stranding: Plod through a sci-fi apocalypse, delivering mountains of cargo on your back. This game takes "walking simulator" literally—the player must pay attention to every rock in his path, and take the momentum of his burden into account in picking which way to walk. Later you can upgrade to motorcycles and trucks, but they are far from all-terrain (until you build highways).
Quarries of Scred: In this fun game with simple pixel art and arcadey physics, you mine for gems. But watch out for boulders that may fall on you!
Freeways: Draw ramps and roundabouts to solve interchanges of increasing complexity. Dozens of puzzles are included.
Slipways: Draw interstellar hyperspace routes to level up the planets in your sector. The classic version has nice pixel art, while the final version uses more polished 3D graphics and has fancy quests.
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