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PaperclipPerfector  18hr ago (text post)   592 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for June 19, 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 are you playing this week?

I uninstalled Slay the Spire 1 and 2. I realized that the games (mainly sts2) took up a lot of time and capacity due to my need to play optimally, without giving me much joy in return.

Started and finished a Civ V game instead. I got around 30 wonders, because I was playing on a more relaxed difficulty than usual.

Tried out The Adventures of Elliot: The Millennium Tales (demo) briefly. Dismayed to find it has no ultrawide support. And they call it HD-2D yet all the characters are pixel art style. Might play it in 16:9 on my TV at some polnt. They've priced it very highly, and it has denuvo, so I might wait for a deep discount further down the road.

Captains of industry, playing an island map. Tried a mod to make things easier by increasing truck capacity but it backfired and the trucks stopped emptying my smallest storage things. Went back to zero mods.

Starship troopers extermination. The group I'm in has been low on participation for the hours I can actually play, which is frustrating. But I have had a few opportunities toead 16 person groups, it's always extremely fun. If anyone is willing to join and try you get special "recruit" status for your first official op and if I brought you in more chances I can be your squad lead or platoon lead.

Playing way too much goddamn Bannerlord inbetween going through the latest version of Voices of the Void.

Bannerlord is annoying in that you can get 13 million denars in to your first playthrough only to realize that your character really isn't optimized to play the way you'd enjoy playing, so you go back and start over from scratch.

I do find it amusing that you can basically play a social monster in a game that is basically about people smacking each other in combat and it works.

Also, I find it hilarious that after pursuing the wife I targeted in-game(tracking down moving NPCs is a goddamn nightmare in this game) and successfully woo-ing her, that she's currently giving me lots and lots of kids to secure my future dynasty.

Warband the last days mod for lord of the rings is still my favorite, even though the graphics are much worse. Prophecy of pendor is great too.

It's been awhile since I booted up bannerlord, I always wanted to love the game but whenever I would try to get landed without starting my own kingdom it was nearly impossible. The AI leaders would almost never give you castles or land, and god forbid a city even if you took it in battle. Which itself was bloody difficult because the enemy AI leaders always seemed to prioritize beating me up. And they spammed wars non-stop even ones they couldn't win to the point that maintaining any sort of diplomacy with NPCs in other kingdoms was pretty much pointless. Did any of that ever get fixed or is this just my gitgud moment.

I'm still playing WoW Classic TBC. I'm more playing it to goof around than anything, so at this point I've started eleven characters and my highest leveled is just now reaching Outland. I'm amazed at the variety of players in the game these days. You somehow have complete morons who have no idea how to play a 30 year old game come on dude, and try-hards who are dead set on effortmaxxing a 30 year old game. In other words, everyone trying harder than me is a loser who needs to get a life, and everyone trying less hard than me is a mouthbreathing moron.

Experiencing the game again, I've played through all the starting zones, and I'm trying to decide if, when designing WoW, the devs/lore team liked the Horde better, or if they did the Alliance first and figured a lot out before starting on the Horde. Because the Horde starting zones are all so much better in basically every way. The leveling experience to 20 is just so superior for the Horde than for the Alliance, and there's no countervailing improvement later. My ranking of starting zones would go:

Undead>Blood Elves>>Orcs/Trolls>>Dwarves/Gnomes>>>>>>Humans>>>>>Night Elves

I just kinda hate the Dranei entirely so I can't really rate them fairly. They're just so stupid that I can't even really put them on the scale, but if I had to there would 500 lbs of whale shit before we get to them.

The routing is better, the leveling process is easier, the early dungeons are better integrated into the questing process, the different races have better access to each other. It's easier and smoother in non-dumb ways. Leveling in the Barrens or Silverpine, you are consistently moving from quest to quest on level and routing smoothly without running into the wrong areas; in Westfall you can't level through without leaving or grinding, and you're constantly routing through higher level mobs if you aren't careful and getting splattered in the dirt. The Undead have a consistent story and enemies, as do the Orcs and Tauren. The Night Elves and Dwarves seem to just noodle around doing nothing in particular, the Gnomes get basically zero lore after one (admittedly great) level 30 instance. The Humans are the worst, the way the game is laid out by nature the "evil" Defias Brotherhood bandits vastly outnumber both player characters and friendly NPCs, indicating that...you're the baddie. You're the agent of an oppressive government striking down a mass peasant rebellion against an out-of-touch elite. The Defias never even really do anything bad, we're just told they are bad and evil because they're building a giant ...Pirate ship? Dumbass storyline.

Back in the day my main was a Night Elf Druid, and I can still hear in my head the ambient music, which was best for Night Elves out of all the factions. Shadowglen -> Teldrassil-> Darnassus -> Ashenvale. Who could forget Moonfall? I mean despite it being parodied in South Park. I was never one of those players who put on death metal or whatever as the music; I always kept the game music, which set the mood. Horde music sucked, except maybe the Undead, which was dark, but eventually repetitive. The music in Stormwind and surrounding was way over-the-top "We are the pure ones" herald horns and brass. I'm sure all of it was done by one guy on a synthesizer but it was all very impressive. Dun Morogh in particular I liked.

Funny, I also raided with a Nelf feral druid back when TBC came out the first time. I liked that on a Druid I could very easily tank, dps, and quest without changing up my gear or spec.

The music might have changed my opinion, but these days I'm playing on the couch next to the quite pregnant Mrs. FiveHour, who wants me in the room with her, but doesn't really want to talk to me right now.

Path of Exile 2. The new patch is just so peak. It finally feels like a true sequel to the first, even with half the character classes missing.

I started a second playground of Cyberpunk 2077 to play the Phantom Liberty expansion. It's been fun, I'm not very far in though. I'm going for a mantis blades build, but I'm too poor to afford mantis blades yet. Soon (TM).

I've been playing Slay the Spire 2 recently, and I find myself simply not having fun, either. I'll get to the end of an act and then get disappointed in starting the next act, and then quit. I'll come back, but it's not the same.

At the risk of culture war outside of the Monday thread, there was a brouhaha over Anita Sarkeesian's name in the credits, and since then I see it everywhere. Why is the only ancient who presents as feminine a man in drag, or trans (look at that jawline)? Why is there no such thing as an attractive woman in this world? Why are the two female characters 1) covered head to toe and 2) a living skeleton? Why is the potion courier "they?" And so on. I'm not blaming Sarkeesian entirely, I think Mega Crit are true believers, but once I started to Notice, I haven't been able to stop.

As for what I've been playing, I'm still trying to keep Mechabellum alive. It's got a new patch, new season, and I play a few games a week.

I've been playing 33 Immortals. It just came out, and is a multiplier roguelite thing sort of like a cross between Realm of the Mad God and Hades. 33 players get dropped into a map, and you shoot monsters and complete objectives, getting randomized upgrades along the way, fight a boss at the end, and then get meta-progression rewards.

I'm liking it a lot so far. It seems way less volatile and repetitive than Realm of the Mad God. Everyone starts a map at approximately the same time, so you're not dropped into a map where everyone is level 15 while you're level 1 trying to grow on your own. And the combat and dodging mechanics are a lot more modern and feel more satisfying and skillful than just pew pew pew. A match progresses naturally from wandering around getting loot, to fulfilling joint objectives in small groups (the chambers only admit 6 players at a time, but several pop up around the map), and then there are three larger objectives on the main map, and then everyone teleports to all fight the final boss together with all 33 (or whoever is left alive).

The fact that the game is balanced around so many people forces players of vastly different meta-progression states together, which can create some balance issues. On the dps side that's mostly fine because even if you're doing twice as much damage as someone else, the tougher enemies are balanced around being hit by lots of people, and the boss expects 33 people to wail on it, so it all kind of averages together. On the survival side it's a bit of an issue. I have not died once in the regular difficult mode since unlocking a shield perk that vastly increases my effective health.

That said, there are harder difficulty modes, but they take longer, largely because enemy healths do not scale with the number of surviving players, so if it's harder and half the people die then the objectives and final boss take twice as long to kill.

The majority of meta progress is in the form of achievements. You've got achievement blocks for each weapon, location, and several subcategories of things you can do. Each achievement gives you 10 xp towards your main level which increases your maximum health, and each block of achievement gives you some major unlock like new features, powering up the relevant weapon, or more stats or perk slots, alongside unlocking the next block of achievements (which take longer than the previous block, causing the meta-progress to slow down in a smooth way).

I suspect that the game will get stale eventually if they don't continue adding new content post release. I have 18 hours in it and suspect it'll stay fun for another 30-40. But I don't think it has enough content for hundreds of hours of replayability. Without that, the player base might drop off, which would be fatal to a game balanced around requiring 33 people to all queue up at the same time. Still, in its new state I have never run into matchmaking issues even when playing late at night, and it's a lot of fun.

Sounds like fun. I played some Dark and Darker for a while, which was pretty punishing, and has the PvPvE element, instead of just PvE as you've described, but it has much of the same issues with balance and skill. This looks a little more like Diablo and a little less like an extraction shooter.

I feel like in a PvP setting the issues would be vastly worse. Being in a squad of 6 people and your teammates just stomp the enemies and carry you is kind of dissatisfying as you get rewards that it doesn't feel like you earned, but you still get the rewards. Getting killed by someone way stronger than you and you lose everything feels way worse, which is why most PvP games avoid strong meta-progression this way and only have small upgrades or let you get through them quickly and max out so the game can be balanced around a maxed out meta.

I have one mission left in Mechwarrior 5 Clans; Wolves of Tukayyid. The most recent unlock was something i'd never seen or heard of before called a Bane-1, which has ten UAC-2's. The clans fucking autocannon mogged a King Crab. So anyways, that's been fun. I also unlocked a Bane-2 which I think had 4 UAC-10's? Fucking madness.

I think I mentioned it before, but the Wolves of Tukayyid expansion is fairly underwhelming. I mean the missions are alright I guess. Tukayyid is exciting for lore nerds, but the lack of variety in the scenery hurts IMHO. They throw in a lot of classic characters if you read the novels. Phelan, Ranna, Vlad, Ulric and the Black Widow feature prominently in the cutscenes. All two of them it feels like. I hear sales of Clans and it's DLC have been underwhelming, and it shows in how they've cut corners in the production of this DLC with far less cutscenes and story generally. Still, the gameplay is there, so I'm not unhappy with it.

Is Mechwarrior still going strong after all these years? I remember staring at the PC box for a Mechwarrior game I desired a long time ago as a kid when I went to Wal-Mart with my father once. Never got a chance to play it but always wanted to.

Mechwarrior 3 was my cybercafe jam in my youth. Pity the game's not around for puchase anymore even digitally.

Also there are strategy rpg variants, like Battletech 2018 (by Harebrained Schemes) with very in-depth fan mods like Roguetech.

Pretty strong, I'd say. There was a long dry spell after MW4 came out, but we got MW5 7ish years ago, and a Clan sequel to MW5 a couple of years ago. Both are still getting DLC expansions every now and then. Honestly it's a pretty good time to be a MW fan.

I think MW5, Clans and Mercs, are likely to be the last, best MW games I'll see in my lifetime.

Started playing deadlock. It’s pretty fun for a moba but worried I’m gonna get addicted again.

Otherwise playing through baldurs gate 3 still.

I don't even watch MOBA esports anymore because of how addictive they are. Casually watching a match with a good commentator can get me thinking, hmm, that looks fun maybe I'll start playing again.

DRL, a roguelike themed after Doom. Mechanics are pleasantly simple. No metaprogression outside of recording recipes. Perfect not-quite-mindless time killer with a number of secrets to find.

Played some more Nuclear Option. It's very nice. Went so far as to dig out my old Logitech Extreme 3D Pro for it, and it even still works! It's meditative sort of game. Check the map, see what needs doing in the current situation, buy a plane you can afford, take the right munitions for the job, wait a few seconds for the engine to spin up, taxi to the runway, open up the throttle and take off, and then make your leisurely way to the frontlines. Where I then usually realize that I should have thought in advance about the angle and altitude I want to approach from, and my map knowledge is several minutes out of date, my targets have gone up in flames before my arrival (an especially egregious problem in multiplayer!) and there are all kinds of planes or ground vehicles around that can hurt me while I either brought the wrong weapons to deal with them, or I brought a multirole loadout and I'm frantically fumbling to get the right weapons on the right targets, and then my wings are gone and my engine is on fire, and I vow that this time I shall learn from my mistakes, only to repeat them the next time.

It's fun.

I've had it on a my wishlist for ages and I recently bought it and I agree it's fun. I've only played arcade flight games like Ace Combat and Project Wingman, and I really like the more in-depth targeting and radar, and how the missiles are just better than something like Ace Combat.

If you have a spare webcam, even a shitty one. I recommend getting OpenTrack with NeutralNet Tracker for Input which you can then use so that if you move your head around, like even turning to the side, it'll move the camera around, so you don't have to do it with your controller or mouse. It's super easy to install, and really immersive.

Works on a bunch of other games too, like Freespace 2 for example.

I've also been doing some Nuclear Option, and I very much enjoy it. 10/10 game, even if you're clattering away with a mouse and keyboard like myself.

Sounds like War Thunder, but better, which I had a lot of fun with about a decade ago.

Barely similar. You fly somewhat realistic combat planes in both, and there the commonalities stop, as far as I know.

War Thunder is some kind of life service MMO monstrosity with all manners of pay-to-win, a very long metaprogression, complex matchmaking and a fairly unhealthy-looking developer and community, and it tries to jam every vehicle in the history of motorized warfare into its lineup, while farcically pretending that it can also offer fair matchups.

Nuclear Option is a classic self-hosted multiplayer and singleplayer game with no metaprogression, no microtransactions, a near-future setting with a small number of vehicles that each fill a unique niche, with no attempt to balance them against each other. Instead, each faction generates vehicles over time (in factories that can actually be destroyed by enemy action), and pilots can then buy them with bounties they have earned. Or requisition them, if they have reached a high enough rank within the match. But either of them only if enough of the specific airframe remain available! Matches typically last around 1-2 hours, on the larger maps, and players can drop in and out as they like with no penalty other than starting at rank 1 on joining. As the match goes on, as vehicles, factories, ships, defences and airfields are destroyed and possibly rebuilt, both sides slowly escalate into tactical and then strategic nuclear warfare. This escalation is accompanied by a suitable musical score. Also, each plane has its own instrumental track. The music is just generally very fun, in my opinion: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL_DsG9JoXUIA63yjzxhE1qoiuVjhGWhfq .The game runs on a potato, is barely over 2 GB in size, has excellent performance. Few bells and whistles, mostly just rock solid core gameplay and atmosphere. The devs are chewing through their roadmap as planned. The community is a hive of degeneracy, but at least they have none of WT's constant drama.

War Thunder is a game that I tried exactly once, and thought it wholly miserable. Nuclear Option has absolutely no barriers to entry and brings joy.

I was never any good at War Thunder, and I got tired of doing bombing runs to get fake money to get not shitty airplanes, but I liked the missions, I liked flying bombers, because I was dogshit at dogfights, so I'll have to keep Nuclear Option on my radar.

I played and beat 1000xResist. Or rather, I watched and completed it, given it's very much a visual novel with limited interactivity or game elements. Good story though. Perhaps the most interesting thing about it from a motte point of view is that it might be the best example of a good "woke" game with a big focus on themes like motherhood, immigration + assimilation, the inevitable sad lesbians, and, as much as I hate the term, 'intergenerational trauma'.

I didn't fully buy into those themes, mostly because I have a bit too much familiarity and found it hard to believe (you're telling me a Chinese family found it hard to settle in 2030s Vancouver, really? I could have bought the high school bully angle if it were all mainlanders attacking the Hong Kong ren instead of a story 25 years out of date), but they did a good job at marrying those themes into what was a fairly classic sci-fi story and world.

If anything, the major weakness in the story was not the woke aspects, but their attempt to shoehorn in an anti-authoritarian message with Chinese characteristics in the second half, when none of it made any sense within the world they had built.

I was finally able to beat deity on the new civ 7 test of time patch. I did the Pachatuchi + Nepal combo for a culture win. The new patch makes the AI bonus on deity much stronger. They city spam really hard and playing wide seems to be the unequivocal best strategy much to my disappointing tall-playing inclinations. I've come close before but this is the first time making it over the finish line in time.

Some friends and I have put together a valheim server, I'm enjoying building viking themed castles in it lately. Really letting my creative juices flow.

I can't get into any civ after civ iv, the last civ with stackable armies. It's just so much more satisfying to walk around with a doomstack, and the map is visually simpler and easier to understand at a glance compared to later civ games.

Marathon season 2 is an ongoing interest. 007 First Light I imagine I'll be done with shortly (obviously IO knew how to make a real Bond game, they already had with the last Hitman trilogy). I started R-Type Tactics 1-2 Cosmos. It's essentially Advance Wars with a R-Type theme (which I enjoy). Having fun so far.

Is the 007 game actually good? I've seen accusations of blandness, generic linear gameplay, and "not being hitman".

So far, the story missions are indeed more linear than Hitman (though the latest mission I arrived at seems to open up); it's trying to tell a James Bond story, not your James Bond story. Within one mission, it will usually funnel you through all or most of the different "action types" of a Bond movie (social/exploration, sneaking, hand-to-hand, shooting and vehicle chases). Don't worry, though, you do "flow" between these in gameplay too through success or failure. Failing to notice an easy path or to social your way through a situation might force you to sneak, failure to sneak might force you to fistfight. In shooting sections, you can usually also sneak or firstfight, though that is often unreasonably more difficult than shooting, so the expected solution is obvious. Personally I don't find it any blander than Hitman or one of the lesser recent James Bond movies. The gameplay feels fun to me, the combat in particular flows really nicely.

Anyway, if I didn't have trust in IO from seeing how they handled the long-term support for the latest Hitman, I don't think I would recommend First Light at current full price.

Yahtzee liked it, and is usually unwilling to shill.

Tried out The Adventures of Elliot: The Millennium Tales (demo) briefly.

I'm playing through the demo myself, and it's alright? It reminds me a bit of Secret of Mana with the different weapons. But if I wanted to play a Legend of Zelda game, there are plenty on the Switch that I haven't even gotten around to, and it doesn't seem better at being The Legend of Zelda than the originals. Better than Breath of the Wild? Sure, but that game and its sequel have their own appeal.

And they call it HD-2D yet all the characters are pixel art style.

To me, there are clearly major differences in art style quality among all of the "HD-2D" games. The trailer for that "Final Fantasy: Resonance" game just looked awful, but I think the "Octopath" games look pretty amazing. "Elliot" looks okay. The designs are clear enough, but I think the ruins are a little too dark. The mix of obvious 3D world with pixel characters/enemies feels very PS1/PSP/DS? I think it reminds me a lot of some of the "Ys" game footage I've seen.

Are there any great rpgs in that isometric 2d style?

I tried Sea of Stars and Chained Echoes a few years ago but wasn't hooked for long by either. Dragon Quest 8 Reimagined doesn't seem to be good enough either.

I'm playing through the Shadowrun series. I wouldn't call it great (words like "wasted opportunity" might even come to mind), but it's pretty enjoyable.

Though now that I think about it, it's actually done with 3D graphics. You can set the camera projection to isometric, though!

I listened to @cjet79 and @urquan and went ahead and started playing Cyberpunk 2077. It's been a compelling enough game that my own tinkering has taken a backseat (and subsequently, the initial "productive" interests that drove my tinkering desires have been rendered unnecessary, so future fun will be strictly for my own nefarious purposes) and now most of my free time has been devoted to playing it. I've finished the first act and I came to love the character of Jackie enough to be sad about his death when the time came, foreshadowing notwithstanding. I've got over 24 hours into it already and I'm going to try and keep having fun with it and not get hung up on every little choice I make in the main jobs.

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