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PaperclipPerfector  19hr ago (text post)   821 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for June 26, 2026

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Video game thread

What are you playing this week, and what games are you looking forward to in the remainder of 2026?

I played a bit of Moomintroll - Winter's Warmth lately. It's very wholesome.

Thinking of starting a playthrough of either a solid CRPG or a first person RPG like the Gothic 1 Remake.

Path of exile 2, grinding up enough divs for a decent rare adorned roll, 40%+, have about 3k that I'm continually cycling through buying temple of chaos fragments for 3.9 div and selling them for 4 div. jewel is hovering around 6k div at the moment. Grinding expedition with aldur's sagas, not sure if the sagas as worth it post patch honestly, very feast or famine.

I never got around to playing the Wolfenstein sequel, so grabbed it for the low price of £3 and started the game.

I remember there being a fair bit of culture war furore around this when it released, but based off my surface impressions I always thought it was just typical blown out of proportion bullshit, particularly given the febrile atmosphere at the time.

But starting it out and... maybe the chuds had a point. God this is a terrible opening. Awfully paced, with a ton of cutscenes before you do anything, and the most eye rolling, stupid scenes as evil backstory man berates your child self for being friends with a black girl and beats your mother for being a jew. And to be clear, this is not a wolfenstein nazi character, this is just your american father.

I replayed Doom 1 with the Unseen Evil mod, which makes it look like Doom 64. It added an impressive psychological depth to the techbase levels of E1, but I felt that the slow descent into Hell in the other episodes was marred by the subdued colours. You can't really tell that the pool of blood is a pool of blood, nor can you tell the flesh textures apart from rock. It did give E2 a somewhat interesting gothic feel, but you never felt the slowly increasing spiritual fear that it invoked in me the first time I beat it. For E3, only Mt. Erebus was creepy.

In the original, the high point (or the low, depending on how you look at it) was House of Pain, with the tortured humans which may have been a Mussolini reference- effective, because up till that point the tortured sprites made one fear that it would be your fate too, but now one sees it from the outside, as witnessing someone who might have deserved his fate. In the mod, it was quite dull.

They also altered the end text, which meant that the theme of apparently eternal suffering was lost. Though I consider the end of Doom 1 to be in a strange way a good ending; once you reach Earth, it poses a question: has your soul been tormented enough that you give up just when the proof that you're not dead (ie. your continued existence on Earth, rather than the afterlife) is right in front of to you? The entire game was about wondering what you did to deserve this. If you're alive, you still have a chance to turn back...

Great mod nevertheless. It might make Doom 2 interesting, if I ever get through it.

You clearly appreciate Doom at much deeper level than me. Playing old doom with obscure new mods. What is it about doom that is so evergreen? I only played the old dooms briefly as a kid. Never really played them to death or mastery. What’s the pitch?

Still on my second Cyberpunk playthrough. I did finally get mantis blades! They aren't necessarily any better than a katana or something, but they're fun, which is what matters. I am not yet an unstoppable death machine, but I'll get there. I figure I'll pick up sandevistan for time slow down, as well as more armor because right now it's pretty easy to get shot up in the thick of things (I'm playing on hard to get a bit more challenge, so stuff hurts).

I also started a new playthrough of Coral Island, because back when the game came out I wanted to romance this one character and she wasn't an option. But they just put out an update adding her as an option, so it's time for a new playthrough. Game is much improved from when it first came out, I have to say. I left a negative review back then because even though it was 1.0 the game was a buggy mess, but they seem to have fixed most of the bugs, as well as added some more content and QOL improvements.

Mina the Hollower, little by little.

Absolutely brilliant progression design and exploration. Lots of built in mods to drive the difficulty in either direction; I’m awful at it (bad reflexes, some Souls experience, next to none with platforming) and find the default difficulty just about on the border between frustration and joy.

Great game!

If you are struggling it's easy to make the game easier by gear hunting, the difficulty is very front loaded - once you have more options it's easy to break the game if you want to (without touching modifiers).

I’m 100 hours in to Trails of Cold Steel III with SoftBrilliants Difficulty Mod. Probably another 400 hours to go to finish Cold Steel IV.

One of my all time fav genres is turn based command battle in jrpg. People usually dunk on this gameplay as being retardedly simple and boring. The issue is that almost all developers fail to tune their difficulty high enough - often or requires a mod or romhack to fully shine.

On max hacked difficulty. Every single battle is a puzzle. An inexperienced player will probably wipe on the first 2 turns of any given fight. There is always a certain combination of builds and commands that can clear the fight, sometimes in an extremely elegant manner. Finding that sequence is the fun.

Another great series/run like this is Xenoblade 2 on Max Custom Difficulty. That game has DLC that gives you difficulty sliders. Put them all to max. I reckon most people will find the first boss 5 min into the game unwinnable. But it’s not.

When there are actual stakes in these fights, it’s quite fun. And makes the narrative shine.

Honestly, the only thing I've played for a while is online Scrabble, which I have become very good at for no particular reason. There is literally no practical use to knowing things like "what are all the admissible two letter words in the American Scrabble dictionary" and yet I continue.

Still playing, and enjoying, Cyberpunk 2077, and I don't see that changing anytime soon.

Do you know whether I can go straight into (or close to it) the Phantom Liberty expansion? I hear it's really good. I've yet to really play Cyberpunk, only put a few hours in.

edit: nvm, was answered.

You can, but if you haven't really played before I recommend playing the beginning of the game.

How many hours approx is what you have in mind for 'beginning of the game'?

It's based on the progression of one of the main story quests. If you beeline just that stuff, I would guess somewhere between 10-15 hours. I looked it up and it's all of act 1, plus 8 missions in act 2. The reason I suggest starting the game normally is because IMO, act 1 is one of the strongest parts of the game and worth playing if you haven't before.

Darktide has a new DLC character, so I've been killing in the name of the machine God for the last couple of nights.

Just had to point this out:

I looked through alternatives to my fav strategy game Civ V, and thought back to Humankind which I played for a bit a few years ago. The promo pic/logo is so on the nose. So woke. Ferocious white woman leading a male black doctor by the hand into the future. Female flintlock wielding revolutionary. Common.

Do you play Vox Populi? I find it really is necessary and is the only civ game that is sufficiently difficult after 30 years of playing civ. I tried to get back into IV but struggled to find a good balanced difficulty. And relearning the systems wasn’t easy after being away so long.

All this is to say, i think modded civ is the only real alternative to civ.

I played a few games in VP before tiring of it. It's too different. I don't like how they went full overhaul. Yes the AI is much better but that turns all the wars into real slogs, forever wars.

I use Lekmod now. It's different enough and balanced enough for my tastes, while sticking pretty close to what makes Civ V, Civ V. If I set the difficulty to Immortal, I can get a challenging experience without tearing my hair out.

It’s probably a me thing, but I just can’t get engaged with a video game at this point without tear your hair out difficulty.

Female flintlock wielding revolutionary.

At first glance I thought they're trying to go for WWII Italian Partisan (often portrayed as female, fair enough in my mind) by the outfit, but the badge on the hat is French colours, so I suppose it's the French Revolution?

Civ IV is the best Civ.

Does anyone know of a way to get Civ II on Windows 11?

Broke Take: Civ IV is the best civ game
Woke Take: Civ V + Vox Populi is the best civ game
Bespoke Take: Civ VII is the best civ game.

Fight me...

Civ IV has bad graphics and a doomstack problem, terrain is pretty much pointless. It requires little in the way of tactical knowledge. If I wanted to play something with randomly deep systems and a bad UX I'd play dwarf fortress. Most of the problems Civ V has also applies doubly to Civ 4.

Civ V needs a mod to make it playable. Enough said. Base game has huge problems with wonder-spamming and cities being pointlessly stacked much like Civ IV's armies. Later Civ's actually made city location and building placement meaningful beyond just "build it here for the resources it hits". The culture traditions are basic as hell and pretty much do have optimal choices leading to a massive reduction in build diversity.

"Civ VII is the best" is a nuclear hot take. I can only aspire to such heights of picking fights.

I just went and replayed Civ V this evening and it gave me a good perspective on all the things Civ 6 and Civ 7 have done better that I should be greatful for.

I think the towns and cities distinction is far more interesting than the cities only. The pointlessness of most luxury resources other than just box checking was improved upon. Weather and terrain effects were good. I think adjacency bonuses make for a more interesting settling dynamic around city planning and location, beyond the usual "find a 3 radius that doesn't overlap" or a strategic choke point. Culture is actually a bit more interesting, it's not just a collect resource-take bonus. I think 7 created the Culture Tree "tech" tree and separated it from the Science Tech Tree. I find that much more challenging, enjoyable and allows for greater complexity of play. It also helped the wonder spamming problem by splitting wonders. Actually having to place the wonders also helps not spamming them. This is getting long, but I could ramble on about how 6 and 7 are better than 5. (it's been awhile since I've played 4).

Oh, I agree that Civ 6 is better than 5 (though I still enjoy 5 and go back to it sometimes).. I just don't think Civ 7 is particularly good, let alone better than other Civ games. They made their main design objective for the game solving a problem I didn't agree was a problem (late game snowballing) using methods that I think aren't fun to play (era transitions and forced civ switching, though at least they dropped the latter). Pretty poor showing from Firaxis, IMO.

In Markdown, you have to add two space characters at the end of a line in order to create a line break.

Thanks bae.

I really wish that there was an easy way to change Civ 4 to 1upt (there is a mod I've seen, but I couldn't get it working on Linux so I'm not sure if it's good or not). It's so hard to go back to stacks of units, they're just so boring to play with. Otherwise yeah, Civ 4 is supreme.

Does the AI still carpet their territory with units on higher difficulties in 1upt? I found that as annoying, if not more annoying than the doomstack play in IV. At least it's easy to chew through a doomstack with a few sacrificial catapults or other units that do collateral damage.

Honestly not sure. I only play on King. Was going to move up to Emperor once I played all the leaders once, but that turned out to take me forever so I still haven't done it.

My nigga.

Civilization IV is the greatest strategy game since chess. Twenty years later I still play in on a regular basis.

Pfft. Not gonna bite.

Civ wasn't what I wanted to bring attention to here, and I said 'my favorite' while you claim 'best.'

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