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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   2360 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for May 15, 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.

I played through Aethus this week. Its a top down survival / mining / exploring / puzzle game. The ambiance of the environments was great. I eventually turned down the difficulty settings for everything cuz it felt a bit like a slog on standard difficulty. The Scottish accents were ok sometimes, but every time I heard "no" pronounced something like "no-er" I winced. The story itself was very anti-corporate. Which I knew going in from the reviews, but it was still a little heavy handed with it all. At this point an anti-corporate screed in a video game just feels as generic as you can get.

Still playing Starship Troopers: Extermination on occassion with the 1stmi (a light military sim group). They are fun to play with. I recently competed what they call a "harbinger run" which involves leading a 16 person group from the field (rather than staying with the squad at base). Its a fun balancing mix of shooting the bugs around you but also needing to maintain situational awareness of the entire battlefield.

Dropped the factorio playthrough. Didn't have enough takers, and I messed something up in map settings that would have required cheating to fix, or flushing approximately 10-15 hours of early game play down the drain to start again. Both options didn't make me feel good so I stopped.

Storytelling Exalted 2e for a bunch of friends for a few sessions now. (Not exactly a video game, but TTRPGs don't appear to be a common enough topic to warrant a subthread).

I can recommend jumping into a new setting as a DM. Even with pretty much no experience, it's been pretty fun so far, although I bungled a few things about the way a pre-written adventure should be ran, and will probably bungle more. The first thing one of my players did was to stuff a demon inside of a random peasant mook who was guarding him on behalf of the treacherous rich evil guy.

Setting and writing/wise, I feel that 1e Exalted is alot better. 2e does have more polished mechanics, however, which makes DMing a bit easier. Though it still has it's quirks.

I guess there is always someone grognardier - last time I checked (before playing), people were saying that about 2e in comparison to 3e.

I know pretty much nothing about 1e and it's hardly discussed in the discord. Did it have the paranoia combat feature/issue that allegedly plagued pre-errata 2e?

I’ve been holding on to a desire to run an Ars Magica campaign, but I’ve avoided it on account of my own lack of experience. How did you get started DMing at all?? There’s just so much to do even before the players get involved.

My current plan is to shelve that dream and try OSR instead. Less mechanical baggage, less asked of the players. On the other hand, they’re more experienced with Pathfinder and 5e, so maybe there’s a different sort of baggage.

I just took a premade adventure and kind of raw dogged it. Perhaps you're approaching this with a mindset of being prepared for anything?

Subnautica 2 just released into early access. The early game seems basically feature complete, and it really nails the feelings of exploration from the first game. Your spaceship crashed on an ocean planet which is incredibly hostile to human life. The circumstances of the crash and what happened to the ones you were traveling with, is a mystery that you slowly piece together as you explore.

I like that. Having the story be a mystery suites the game really well. It is a survival game where you explore an alien world, learn to exploit the natural resources to construct advanced technology, which allows you to explore even more, find rarer resources, and build even more advanced tech. Rinse and repeat until there is nothing left to find. I am the type who likes looking for secrets, and as such this game loop really appeals to me. Since the story is told through logs spread around the world, uncovering the truth blends really well with exploring and looking for resources.

Finally, the game is just beautiful. The fauna is of course inspired by what we have on earth, but is suitably new and alien. Different biomes feature different color palettes, but nothing feels out of place. Subnautica 1 was a game that many people would come back to just to admire the game world, and I suspect this one will be similar. The art really does tie everything together. The game can be beautiful but also scary when necessary. After all, the ocean is deadly and some of the creatures lurking in the deep are absolutely deadly.

Considering getting back into League of Legends. I stop whenever I remember how much I hated playing against other humans.

From a psychiatric perspective, I must discourage self-harm and adjacent practices.

I picked up Solar Expanse after trying the demo as it immeadiately satisfied a particular itch of colonizing/terraforming the Solar system utilizing 'hard' science. Despite being early access and having alot of 'quirks', I definately had a blast. Sadly, once you get to a certain point, it seems to be just a 'wait' game to mine all the materials you need and ship them off/shuttle them around the Solar System.

It's an absolute blast moving things around the inner solar system with a fleet of solar sails, turning Mars into an industrial arcology(because the gravity is lower, hence it's cheaper to lift things into orbit), mercury into a metal/power production nexus, or mining Jupiter for helium 3, or -

The one thing that needs work on is the market, though. Once I figured it out and how to abuse the AI, it was pretty easy for me to blow up my funds well past the 4 billion mark.

After finishing all that, I decided to give Void War a shot. It definately has some appeal given it's a weird 'Warhammer 40K at home' vibe and styling Starship Roguelike, but it's also a case that's kinda conivinced me Roguelike is getting too overused. Even Nethack had set levels that would spawn, nevermind the class quests, but it seems that modern Roguelike is basically 'everything random', which can lead to rage-inducing bad RNG in some situations.

Still kinda fun, though, even though I doubt I'll unlock all the starship varients.

it immediately satisfied a particular itch of colonizing/terraforming the Solar system utilizing "hard" science

See also the board game High Frontier 4 All (1a 1b 2).

I just started playing Lobotomy Corporation, which I dismissed back when it came out thinking it looked pretty amateur and the English translation was awful. But after seeing them come out with their third game and ongoing popularity I decided to give it a try. I'm not yet sure if it's for me. It is complicated, unintuitive, and punishing in a volatile way. Which I get is all intentional, but it might be slightly too harsh for my taste.

For those who don't know, it's an employee management type thing (Oxygen not included seems like the closest game I can think of at the moment, but I suspect there are better comparisons.) in a SCP-inspired facility. Spooky abnormalities exist and you contain them and learn about them and exploit them for electricity that your company sells. Your people have different skills which influence both their combat abilities and their proficiency at certain tasks. Each abnormality has different preferences and task-affinities, as well as different shenanigans it inflicts when you mess up and make it angry (or just randomly when timing events anger them).

The game is kind of sort of roguelite, in that you can restart your campaign, or rewind to an earlier checkpoint several levels ago, and keep some of your unlocks and upgrades. And then new random stuff happens. But at least so far it's been very stingy with the upgrades. And also although your employees die permanently and buying new ones is expensive, you can reset a level at any time with no cost other than your real-life sanity after you've tried to fight the same opponent 5 times and it's not quite clear what's going wrong, or you're almost done with a day but then suddenly all your best people spontaneously die and it's not quite clear why.

I want to like the game more than I do. I want to like difficult games more than I do. This is a similar issue I ran into with Pathologic 3. I want to bash my head against a really hard challenge and then gradually work it down until I can overcome it, and I prefer when this happens simultaneously via real skill and in-game upgrades. I like JRPGs where I can progress up until things get too hard and then go grind a couple of levels to adjust it back down. I like Rogue Legacy where when you run into tough enemies and die you get to unlock stuff and then come back stronger for another try. I don't prefer the Dark Souls experience where you bash your head into a boss 20 times in a row until you finally overcome it and then move onto the next boss to bash into 20 times. Which so far is the majority of what this game has been. Sometimes I just get lucky and nothing bad happens (since I'm still early game), but sometimes something bad happens and since I haven't yet spoiled all the game's secrets and am trying to discover them organically, it usually kills my people and then I restart the day and try something else next time.

Not sure if I'll stick with it or not. I think I need to restart my run and give myself more of a headstart on snowballing now that I have some vague idea of what I'm doing.

I went through a similar arc. Ended up just reading this LP.

I've had the same issue myself, the idea of the game is nice, but I just couldn't get into it.

There are mods that allow you to keep your employees through resets and I've seen it recommended in a few places to beginners that don't want too much trial and error, could try it if you want.

I don't prefer the Dark Souls experience where you bash your head into a boss 20 times in a row until you finally overcome it and then move onto the next boss to bash into 20 times.

I like this, but the key part is that each attempt is fast, and so repetitive attempts don't take as much effort, and at some point it you learn the fight enough that you don't even need to think about it.

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