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PaperclipPerfector  11hr ago (text post)   412 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.

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.

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