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PaperclipPerfector  14hr ago (text post)   526 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for July 17, 2026

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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?

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