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PaperclipPerfector
7hr ago
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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
, since people apparently like organizing things that wayThis has been a good week for me for gaming.
I'm always kind of impressed at just how cheap gaming can be compared to other forms of entertainment.
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I got a new phone last weekend and I got one of those stretching controller grip for it (Gamesir G8), and put some effort into building a nice cosy gaming console with it at the center. I also finally have a phone with a relatively generous amount of storage, so I can stretch my legs. I have installed a few weeks ago a ROMM instance, so emulation roms are shared and downloadable from my phone at the press of a button, I have Gamenative installed with a bunch of PC indie games, my main mobile game I'm playing these days (Arknight Endfield) and a whole lot of game streaming services setup.
When it comes to game streaming, it's become more viable for me than I originally thought it would. In December and January I had to prepare to go to visit my mother-in-law in europe for about a month and obviously I couldn't take my gaming computer or Xbox with me so I gave Nvidia GeForce Now a try and was pleasantly surprised by how well it worked. I obviously wouldn't play fighting games on there, but most everything else worked fine, provided it's supported by the service (the business model for GeForce Now is that you can play games you already own on digital game stores there if they are supported by GeForce Now, with some popular recent games requiring a subscription fee and additional performance, queue priority and gaming session length limit on paid subscriptions). I also have Amazon Prime so I do have some additional games included with Luna, that's nice. On my previous phone I couldn't get a low latency enough connection to Luna to make action games playable but now on my new phone I do, so I might play through the recent-ish Indiana Jones game there, and maybe Kingdom Come Deliverance 2, that's included too. My wife wanted to play some horror games and I have an Xbox but didn't want to pay the extortionate rate for new games, so I got a game pass subscription that was on sale, and honestly the cloud streaming there is solid as well; if someone who didn't have an extensive Steam catalog and had no console wanted to play some games I think they could be quite satisfied by that service.
But the most interesting to me is how much local streaming improved. I put some effort into getting Apollo (Sunshine) setup on my gaming PC and action games are totally playable on there, no problem. Even streaming over the internet, on a VPN (Wiregard) has negligible latency for shooters. Works well with HDR (or as well as Windows ever does), 120hz... Only concession I make is that I play at a ratio of 720p since the way I hold my phone it makes no difference whether it's 720p or QHD and it helps my aging gaming rig. I also tried in the last months streaming from my Xbox Series S, but that had been disappointing, but I think maybe my new phone might be doing better there now too. I have also set up streaming the other way around with the Xbox, from my PC to it, so at least when Microsoft finally gives up on it, it'll still be useful to stream PC games to my TV.
So on the subject of games, since this is the gaming thread, I got Marathon recently; for those unaware it's yet another extraction shooter, but from Bungie. I had played Ark Raiders for a few months before, so it wasn't my first extraction shooter, but Marathon immediately came up with the reputation of being the opposite to Ark Raiders when it comes to player interaction. TBH, it also works for me. I mostly play solo, and there's no additional mental load from interacting with the players since you can pretty much just turn off your mic and treat them all the same as you treat PvE enemies, the only interaction modes seem to be shoot on sight or avoid you, I've yet to see a single interaction that wasn't that. The Rook class is also an interesting mechanic for solo players like me; you can chose to play as a relatively weak class that can only play solo, starts with free kit and are dropped later into an already started team game. There's lower stakes for you, since you don't lose your own loadout, so you run around and pick the bones off the fights that happened earlier in the game, maybe once in a while you can also ambush some players. Since you are a Rook, other players know they are unlikely to find anything worth the fight on you, and you have an ability that allows you to avoid PvE fights. It's a nice way to build your kit.
The shooting feels good, it's Bungie, no surprise that they know what they're doing with that. It's very different in shooting feel from Ark Raiders, the guns all feel very lethal. In Ark Raiders, I felt like if I didn't have my favorite guns I was useless, but in Marathon any gun you pick up feels like it'll do the job just fine. The gear advantage can certainly make a difference, but it's also easily neutralized by just shooting better. The visual language of the game is also gorgeous (again, it's Bungie). I'm not sure yet if and how it slots in with the fever dream that is the existing Marathon lore, but what is there feels mysterious and meaty.
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Still playing island defense the Warcraft 3 custom game. It’s a blast.
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In a fit of pique following an embarrassing back injury earlier this week, I downloaded WoW Classic.
I've realized that my taste in video games is the way extremely monogamous people describe their romantic feelings, I've only ever liked maybe three video games in my life. Pokemon, God of War I and II, and World of Warcraft. I don't know if it's that I have extremely specific taste, or if it's the time they came into my life (similar to sports teams), but even at times when I've thought "gee playing a video game would be nice right now" and I get a new video game, I don't play it for very long.
So now I've got a night elf hunter and Mrs. FiveHour is mocking me, correctly, for being a fucking dork. I recall hunter being the best and most adaptable class to solo PvE, which is all I'm interested in doing right now. I picked female, because I've always though the male alliance bodies looked kinda stupid for anything other than a warrior. I'm digging it, for the most part. A decade after losing my virginity and giving up on the game the first time I've forgotten enough that the game is reasonably interesting. I'll probably end up with a pile of alts, to do a couple different playstyles.
Sir, this isn't the bragging about how cool you are thread.
Chuck Norris just died. I now have zero male role models. Yesterday, I looked at a girl and today my left arm is numb and tingling. Claude Code told me I'm a handsome boy, so that helps, but it helps less when you're spamming the forum with these kind of CHAD PUSSYSLAYER 5000 posts left and right.
We get it, you're cool!
I think I'm doing it wrong.
Weird that this is how I found out about Chuck.
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I’ve been thinking of getting back into classic, played somewhat recently on a private server. It’s an amazing game.
Only to level twelve, and I'm just loving it. I'm sure there are better single player games using the same mechanics, but I just like this one. Also, it runs on my macbook air, which a lot of games don't work properly without fucking with them.
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Nothing, I haven't played a videogame I weeks :(
Maybe when Menace gets a new content update, or when something like Mars Tactics comes down. Otherwise I just can't be arsed.
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For the last two weeks I've been playing some Slay The Spire 2 every day. It's addictive! I even played a few runs in STS1 because that's the more complete game as yet, but I prefer the graphics and smooth animations in 2. I'm spending too much time agonizing over decisions and yet still losing more runs than I win. There is so much to learn for someone who never played card/deck games before.
I'm holding off on a few games, more graphically intensive ones, until I get a massive new OLED monitor whenever the next gen ultrawides launch. :D
I was somewhat skeptical towards the hyped up, graphically promising Crimson Desert after taking a peek at its videos, and it appears I was not wrong. The reviews aren't that good.
Yeah I've been having fun with StS2 as well. I think it's a bit easier than the first, or I've been luckier with my runs. Necrobinder is pretty fun, though stalling to get a massive hand seems like a pretty reliable strategy up until halfway through Act 2 or so. Still haven't really figured out what the Regent wants to do.
The funny thing about these games is that people have completely different experiences. You've got 'pros' and streamers who disagree diametrically on half of what they talk about, and yet both may have 95% win rates in their runs. Some people say a character is OP/"broken!!!", others say it's underpowered. Likewise, I thought STS1 seemed much easier than 2, but there may have been RNG involved.
I'm on the beta branch of STS2, and they've released a pretty major patch today. One of the best cards for Regent is nerfed and the act 3 boss Doormaker has been buffed to be super annoying, and of course that's the boss I draw in my otherwise promising Regent run today.
I find Regent to be a fun character. He's just some space traveling dude who decides to be king of all things. :D One of the keys (valid archetypes) is to build lots of stars. That's what I'm trying in this run. I like Necrobinder's aesthetic too though, and may play her next week.
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Played a little more Slay the Spire 2 to make progress on the timeline, and a little Helldivers 2 to buy out the last of my unfinished warbonds. Not much to say, and not much time spent on it either. Comfy games that work well for relaxtion, but no so well that I have any qualms about shutting them down after a round.
Sts2 is so gloriously broken right now it is great. I am actually archiving pirated releases so I can play the fun versions before "balancing" starts to rule.
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Eight years after its initial release, popular puzzle game Opus Magnum has just been updated with a surprise DLC—De Re Metallica (referencing a famous early-modern book), a fan-made campaign half as long as the base game's campaign.
Even if you are a filthy casul, Opus Magnum is quite fun, since, unlike some other puzzle games, it is reasonably easy at its base difficulty (with unlimited budget and board) but has built-in optimization goals with which you can challenge yourself if you choose to. Solutions to puzzles are evaluated on three statistics:
Cost (of all the mechanisms that you put on the board)
Cycles (time to deposit six copies of the required output, including startup time but excluding time to return to the starting position after completion)
Area (of all the mechanisms that you put on the board, including the area through which swing your manipulator arms and the atoms that they bear)
For each puzzle, an official in-game leaderboard compares your solution's statistics to those of all solutions found by players. Additionally, the official subreddit's leaderboard uses "sum of cost, cycles, and area" as a total metric—but, IMO, the product makes much more sense than the sum. And, of course, it's easy to think of even more statistics:
Cycles of the solution's actual period (excluding startup time but including time to return to the starting position after completion)
Convex area (with concave portions filled in)
Hexagonal area (with concave portions filled in and acute angles padded)
Footprint area (excluding arm swings)
Also, you can impose on yourself constraints, such as refraining from using the fancier tools to which you have access (multi-armed manipulators, extending manipulators, and tracks that carry manipulators around the board), or using only a single input in puzzles that let you use multiple copies of the same input.
As an example, here are three different solutions for a mid-game puzzle. (The game has a built-in function for exporting a solution as a looping GIF file. These particular examples are rather large, so I have converted them to WEBM files, though it looks like the conversion process cut off a few frames at the end of each file. In a desktop browser, you can right-click on a webm to enable looping in the context menu. It appears that mobile browsers do not have this option.)
In comparison to the four-input solution, the one-input solution cuts both cost and area by a factor of three, but also bloats cycles by a factor of four and is an absolute pain to set up in-game. (It's theoretically possible to curve the one-input solution all the way around to form an elegant circle. But, again, setting it up in-game would be quite a hassle, since the cycle count would be even more ridiculously high.) The two-input solution sneaks its way into winning in the sum category.
Even a simple puzzle has many possible solutions. Here are some (GIF, not WEBM) for the very first puzzle in the game.
Just as in the previous table, each of these solutions is better than the others in at least one of the listed statistics.
Bonus: Unicode alchemical symbols used in Opus Magnum (code charts: 1 2)
[1]Opus Magnum uses a masking empty triangle superimposed on another empty triangle, which looks a lot like a star of David (a non-masking empty triangle superimposed on another empty triangle). Unicode lists a different symbol for quintessence, 🜀.
[2]Opus Magnum uses a rotated life symbol, which Unicode does not have, but which CSS can imitate (though not through the filter of this website's Markdown). Unicode does have the similar symbol 🜞—listed as "crocus of iron", which apparently is calcined/anhydrous rust or ferrous sulfate.
[3]Unicode lists this symbol as signifying sulfur, not life.
[4]For some reason, Opus Magnum uses the plural, "vitae".
I genuinely wonder if you've ever been mistaken for an LLM. If you weren't a longstanding account that we were confident is human, say you'd just shown up as a new user, I'd have my doubts.
I don't mean this is a bad way! Quite the opposite, you display a level of diligence and effort that LLMs are trained to perform (not quite as successfully), but which is sadly rare in humans. Look at the Markdown tables, look at the tasteful insertion of a rare unicode character. My god, I'm looking even closer, and that is a lot of fucking work you put in on a random thread about video games. I only put in half as much effort when I'm AAQC-farming.
(Of course you play Opus Magnum, I'd kill to see your Factorio builds)
I don't make enough comments anywhere to be targeted with such accusations.
Note that, unlike Reddit's, this website's Markdown implementation requires the user to type tables in raw HTML, not in Markdown.
Very annoyingly, I remain too depressed to invest hours of consecutive effort into a campaign of Factorio. In contrast, Opus Magnum can be played in bite-sized chunks.
I am sorry to hear that you're depressed. I'm in the same boat, last time I felt entirely fine was after I enrolled in a study on psilocybin for treatment resistant depression. It was like the sun had come out again, and it lasted for months. I miss it desperately. And yes, being depressed is probably the main reason I don't play video games as much as I used to.
As for Factorio? It's one of those games that appeals to me greatly, in theory, but I would need to use my prescription stimulants to be able to play it. If I need medication to enjoy a game, that is annoyingly close to work. Shame, I love the idea.
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I liked Opus Magnum quite a bit!
But then I read a review that said, to paraphrase: "If you want to do programming, just damn well code properly instead of playing games that have you program through an impractical interface."
I wanted to disagree with it, but failed to. Since then I couldn't bring myself to pick Opus Magnum back up.
Approximately my experience with Exa-Punks. The coding interface is more practical, and you can just damn well code properly, but half way through I had the overwhelming sensation of "Wait, am I not normally getting paid for this? I won't even have a hobby project to show for it at the end of it all..."
Yeah, same here. And I barely even started before I quit. It made me remember writing assembler code and I had no desire to repeat that exercise.
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