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PaperclipPerfector  12hr ago (text post)   444 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.

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.

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