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PaperclipPerfector  14hr ago (text post)   526 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for July 17, 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

Playing anything fun?

I'm playing Deus Ex. I've cleared out Liberty Island without killing anyone. Lots of baton, electric prod, pepper spray (surprisingly useful), and tranq dart usage. Fun, but time consuming way to play. I even had to take a few bullets in the process of keeping these wretches remain alive. I think I covered everything worth doing. Picked up all the weapon mods, used the account info for the ATM instead of hacking it (more credits this way), rescued Herman, etc.

The NSF commander has some good points about the plutocracy strengthening the governments and corporations while weakening the individuals.

If you're playing it for the first time, please keep posting your takes. Very interested to see how it's aged.

Playing Factorio (again), trying out the new quality of life features they're adding in the 2.1 beta branch. 2.1 is the final planned feature update, basically only bugfixes once it's out of beta, sadly.

Already got a rocket launched, currently working on uranium enrichment and getting some space platforms set up. The 2.1 update added logistics between space platforms so I'm planning on making one (or a few) around each planet to save myself a ton of rocket launches by crafting all that stuff up in space. This also means I'll have to Gleba first (shudder) so that I can get advanced asteroid processing.

Finished Kane and Lynch, thought I'd give Trepang2 a try. Thought I was cut out for hard mode. I was not.

My kid got me into Warframe.

Been meaning to check it out for a decade now and hey it’s pretty good!

I played free for 30 hours then spent 20$ when they were having a 50% sale and got some cool cosmetics and another Warframe - have four of them unlocked so far.

I’m @65 hours over several weeks and it’s still fun - hour to 1.5 hour sessions a few times a week with a few 3-4 hour long ones.

I’ll clear out the star chart and do some end game stuff and call it a day - I’ll probably spend another 20-40$ on it.

Scratches an itch.

Still playing EU5, mostly. Pity I'm too old and busy to make a proper mod for it, like I did for CK2. Which came out... in 2012. Yeah, I was definitely younger back then.

How are you finding it? I'm away from my desktop right now, so havn't been able to try the latest patch.

It's still rough. They have fixed the most fun exploits like -100% proximity cost and -100% diploannexation cost, but it's still full of more boring exploits like expelling everyone into your capital city, infinite trade arbitrage and battles ending in stackwipes 95% of the time.

Yes! I was going to start a similar thread. I’m not much of a gamer. Was a Nintendo kid growing up in the 90s. Played games in the early 2000s - mainly sports games. Have some older consoles but largely very behind on gaming and never had a gaming PC. Was playing Skyrim on an old laptop but now have upgraded to a true gaming PC. First, I’ve modded the hell out of Skyrim to make the world feel more alive. Also trying my hand at Baldur’s Gate 3. Any recommendations? I’m open to pretty much all genres.

Play Oblivion Remastered if you like Elder Scrolls. It looks great. So does Cyberpunk 2077 with Path Tracing. The new Indiana Jones looks pretty amazing with PT too.

You don't even need path tracing for Cyberpunk to look absolutely beautiful. My graphics card can't really handle it, but can do the ray tracing setting fine, and when playing the game I would frequently stop just to admire how pretty it is.

Isn't Oblivion Remastered considered an extremely-low-effort port, abandoned by the developers with most of the bugs left unfixed?

What. No. It's one of the best remasters I've ever seen. It's not a bad 'port' to PC either.

Yes it runs like crap on potato PCs and yes there are some bugs, but I considered it to be almost as good as you could hope for in a remaster.

abandoned by the developers with most of the bugs left unfixed?

Thus perfectly replicating the experience of the original for modern gamers.

/s I've never played either. Previous discussion here.

Fun, but time consuming way to play.

This was my issue with the Deus Ex games in general. They really seem to want you to play stealth, and it's fun, but it just kills the pacing.

I finally played the Deus Ex prequels a couple years ago, after rage-quitting the first long ago when I hit the "we subcontracted our boss fights and forgot to mention stealth options" debacle. With that fixed, they're pretty good. Not as good as the original IMHO, even if you take the ancient graphics of the original into account, but they had most of the same philosophical/semi-open-world "feel" of the original, which is more than I could ever say for the sequel.

(YMMV - I may have been the only one looking forward to the planned "They really turned those 1999 graphics into 2003 graphics" Deus Ex Remastered so much that I'd have paid $30 for what looked like a high-end fan mod)

As long as I'm replying:

Last month I finished Subnautica. IMHO there's no replay value here, because overall there are better mechanics elsewhere in the survival+base-builder genre, but the story and exploration makes a single playthrough more fun than the same number of hours spent in any such competitor I've tried.

A few months ago I played through the 2015 King's Quest. Not as good as KQ6, and probably not as much better than most of the series as you'd expect from a decades-newer game, but it wasn't disappointing. A bit of a stumble on the second chapter but a surprisingly sophisticated combination of nostalgia and maturity overall.

I contrast this to Return to Monkey Island, which I played through last year, which was trying to accomplish the same combination but utterly failed to stick the landing. The most positive thing I can say was that it wasn't as long a game as these others, so there's only 10 hours of my life I regret not spending on something else.

In between those I finished Spider-Man Remastered. For adults IMHO it's not as good as the best of the Assassin's Creed series, but it's more fun than most of that series, and on top of that it was child-friendly enough to let my kids play too.

There are already HD texture mod packs for the original Deus Ex that look a million times better than the garbage they had planned for the "remaster". The remaster looked like this meme: https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcT7KdIf21VCrWUXW6j7fEf_-I1MQCz0W9GcQYPnK8uow8qikhGeVbpohbI1&s=10 There are also mods that revamp the character models that aren't to my tastes but still dona much better job than the remaster.

"packs" plural? I think "Project HDTP" was the only decent complete one I ever looked up; did I miss anything better?

Playing Kane and Lynch: Dead Men, which I last played over a decade ago. Very much a product of its time. You rather get the impression that the Danish writers lacked confidence in their ability to write convincing Anglophone tough-guy dialogue, and compensated by just having every character (and I mean every character) curse a lot. The voice actors do what they can with the material they're given, but the results are... not entirely convincing. Comparisons to Michael Mann are unavoidable, with setpieces clearly modelled on Collateral and Heat (for most of the game Kane carries a black bag on his back much like those De Niro, Sizemore and Kilmer wore during the bank heist, and Lynch sans glasses even looks a bit like Waingro). Sound mixing is atrocious, with gunfire sounding weak and tinny and dialogue sometimes inaudible (and not, I think, as an artistic choice). When Spec Ops: The Line came out, its gameplay was so poorly received that some people suspected it might even have been made bad on purpose, but it's a mechanical masterpiece compared to this game: how on earth do you design a cover-based shooter without a dedicated "get into cover" button? Tonally, it actually has a lot in common with Spec Ops, with everything constantly going wrong for the protagonists no matter what they do. I've heard some people interpreted the game as sort of a deconstruction of Grand Theft Auto, and that makes a certain amount of sense: the decision to populate most levels with numerous civilians who will inevitably get caught in the crossfire certainly didn't happen by accident. Gritty, sloppy fun, for all its faults.

During and after playing through Spec Ops The Line, I did suspect that the mediocre drudgery of the gameplay served a meta storytelling purpose.

It certainly gelled with the tone of the story, but the developers have made it abundantly clear that they set out to design a game with fun gameplay. The resulting monotonous drudgery, it seems, was just a happy accident.

Empires of the Undergrowth - pleasant surprise, very interesting RTS. Ant colonies as factions, underground layer for nests, surface layer for resources to contest, and perhaps invade other nests. Neat campaign framing - gene stealer ant colony in lab setting as overarching story, isolated missions between main story chapters, stylized as microdocumentaries, varied ant species in scenarios highlighting their tactics, dynamics, food sources (with narrator guiding you along, in character). Main story is more light hearted, with fun voice acting (first 60 seconds here give a good impression). The slightly indirect control over the ants can be a little annoying, but ant respawns are cheap, losses expected. Challenging, "Hard" mission difficulty is really is exactly that. Highly recommended, a lot of fun.

It's also currently a steal at 70% off.

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