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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   1557 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for July 24, 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

I haven't had much time for playing games this week, but I put a couple more hours into Deus Ex.

In a dialogue in the Hell's Kitchen bar, you run into Jock the pilot, who 'flies your brother Paul to Hong Kong.' After being bribed with a cold(!) beer, Jock talks about how Area 51 was turned into a secret base for Echelon IV, the United States' massive AI + surveillance system, when 'the government promised to stop spying on people'.

That's an interesting notion vis-à-vis what's actually happened IRL. This game was developed in the late nineties and released in year 2000. Which means there were rumors about 'Echelon' and mass surveillance even before 9/11 made it more 'necessary' and palatable to even start building such a project. And the writer assumed that when such a program was discovered by the public, the government would be forced to shut it down, at least ostensibly.

IRL, after 2011's Snowden reveal, we've seen new, enormous data centers for complete electronic surveillance of every citizen (and non-citizen) being built to expand the program. And most other developed countries have followed suit in undermining their citizens privacy and liberty.

The real world's human species is more docile and sheep-like in their surrender to government overreach than what the Deus Ex dystopia writer envisioned.

Edit: typo.

Aaaagh!!! I missed out on an augmentation canister (aqualung/env. resistance) in the second mission of game. I'm on the third mission now. Contemplating loading a save.

Edit: The canister is beneath Castle Clinton so I'd probably have to redo the entire 2nd mission to get it. Fuck it. I'll have to continue without it. Sigh. The perfectionist in me really hates this. But it's a good exercise to let good enough be good enough. I got the other aug canister and the upgrade canister.

Edit 2: Apparently the Smuggler/Ford Schick quest could only be done in the first visit to Hell's Kitchen...? When I entered Smuggler's on that occasion, Alex told me Paul's team ran into difficulties, so I figured the main quest had reached a failstate, so I loaded a save and went straight to the warehouse district, from which there was no way out. Wtf. This game is jankier than I remember.

@Corvos @KingOfTheBailey

I missed out on an augmentation canister (aqualung/env. resistance) in the second mission of game.

Pretty sure you can get that elsewhere, and pretty sure neither aug is that good.

Oh okay, cool.

Two years later Palworld has finally released from early access, once more busting top Steam player counts - with a less resounding fanfare this time around, but solidly beating out Counter-Strike, Dota and all the other big fish mainstays is IMO still an achievement in its own right. I've been playing it since the update dropped July 10, and well, this post was supposed to be written around the point of release; now I am here two weeks late with (according to Steam) ~90h sunk straight into the game over the past two weeks. My brief vacation was murdered and stuffed in a palbox fridge with no trace of its passing.

So, how does it hold up? Pretty good I would say, if the dozens of coldly murdered hours were not enough of a clue. The game is fantastic, easily worth the unchanged $30, god I wish my entire friend circle were not staunch purveyors of PVPslop. I highly recommend giving it a try. Having now beaten the game once and now on my second "challenge" run, I'd argue that the added """plot""" of gathering the 8 badges Key Spheres and endgame locations/bosses are not actually that much of an improvement, and Palworld's strongest part remains the early-mid game and the core gameplay loop of base management, pokepal catching, and (optional) minmaxing autism, now further imbued by QoL updates out the wazoo that make the game much smoother to play and invalidate most of my initial complaints about the game.

Funnily enough, much of the early jank still remains, albeit mitigated to what I imagine is the best extent the devs could muster:

  • pal pathfinding, while not as utterly atrocious as on release, is still pretty bad and base workers can still clip through or get stuck on random shit ("fixed" by pals just working on their stations telepathically over a distance if they can't reach their destination normally after a while - hey, as long as it works);

  • you still waste spheres on missed throws so git gud, I'm actually surprised there's no pal with Ball Fetch for a passive ("fixed" by a late-game homing module and a new type of collectible doodads that give your balls some % of homing strength);

  • serious investment into a pokepal requires catching a lot of dupes to fuse into it (fixed by reducing the required numbers and introducing expensive buyable Starfruits that immediately progress star ranks)

  • building is still mostly literally Fortnite for the most part (fixed by... nothing sadly, the limited pieces and overlap restrictions are still a major bitch)

  • Nintendo meddling has resulted in the unfortunate loss of the summon-from-pokeball throw, which in my opinion was crucial to the "feel" of being a pokepal trainer (fixed by mods thankfully, fuck Nintendo)

The new late/endgame is also... not incredibly good in my opinion, the only straightforwardly good things about it are the consistently good and evocative design of locations (the final area feels like something straight out of Elden Ring - maybe literally, since I haven't played Elden Ring and the devs are pretty shameless) and the unexpectedly cinematic penultimate boss fight with not-Kyogre which actually fucking slaps (again, despite the copious jank) and makes me wonder why all the other bosses, including the final, are so lackluster in comparison. Especially baffling was the designers' decision to make ocean exploration/salvaging mandatory to progression at one point, while 99% of said ocean is a completely barren expanse of blue without any landmarks or even waterborne wild pals swimming around or harassing you like on land. Not sure if blatant padding or time constraints.

But even so all this failed to make a meaningful dent in my enjoyment of the game; the evergreen exploration/pokepal catching loop lasts you a very solid while, and eventually gets tangled with base management/automation which is also unexpectedly engaging. Longer crafting times creep upward throughout the game, and at some point a good lineup of workers is almost required to progress on a decent timescale, which conveniently also nudges you to explore and scout for better workers, resources to improve your existing ones, etc., and constant alternating between base management, pal catching, and exploration/farming keeps the activities from becoming boring (or at least becoming boring quickly). 1.0 also included a big pass over pokepal passives, which significantly expanded on player "builds" and base management since now every pal brings something to the team (or to the base) - while this quickly led to sovlless metafaggotry such as stocking your work camp with Shroomers so you can crank full slavedriver work mode with your pals too high to complain, overall the flavor and variety is very nice; my girl Lunaris is now a fantastic midgame crutch that gives homing pokeballs and a fat chunk of carry weight, for example.

Since Pocketpair knows their audience and there's no laws against the Pals, you'll be happy to know you can take your pick from a roster of new and exciting (mostly anthro/furry, natch) waifus with high uh, handiwork skills to put to work on your production lines. Sexcat Sekhmet I believe has already achieved escape velocity into the normiesphere, but aside from returning favorites the assortment has expanded and now includes things such as an (adimttedly cute) octopussy, a snek, goth Gardevoir oh no wait that was already there lmao, a variation on Lopunny, several variations on Meowscarada, 2B-lite (with a passive called Untainted Maiden, natch), a fucking mushroom (whose Pokedex Palpedia entry lampshades the obvious and effective disguise), big ass panda (not to be confused with a big-ass panda), surprisingly-no-longer-Cinderace, &c, &c.

Overall the game is fantastic even with the jank and I thoroughly recommend it, especially if you like Pokemon or assorted survivalslop. I hope that the Terraria collab is a sign from the stars that this game will get the Terraria treatment and continue to receive updates years after the fact despite every assurance that this update is the last one we swear. There's definitely a lot of empty space to fill out, at least.

My interest is piqued. I'll probably check this out later this year.

In addition to first-party updates and collabs, I'd hope for good modding support: the game could do a hell of a lot if it attracts some of the ARK and Minecraft modders. The infrastructure isn't there for it in the game yet, though.

The game does have workshop support, though I don't know how easily moddable the game is. Considering there are already performance mods that fix (for example) the very glaring stutter you get when you walk over a pile of wood/ore to pick it up and the game grinds to a halt as the pile disappears piece by piece, there must be quite a bit of jank/spaghetti code under the hood, but after facing the wrath of the big N I imagine Pocketpair clearly realizes that only mods can realize things they themselves legally can't, like the above mentioned throw summoning.

The probably best and definitely funniest timeline would be Palworld somehow getting the attention of say Pixelmon or Cobblemon modders (which IIRC have also been targets of C&Ds before, not that it really stopped them). My retina can barely handle picturing the glorious future of total conversion mods, though I imagine Nintendo's legal dept is not gonna be happy.

I've been playing this game with my wife. We're only 27 hours in, but it's pretty fun.

Honestly, I think the game (and a lot of open world games) would have a bit more longevity if they slowed the player's level speed. There's so much to do, so many places to explore, and so much tech that I barely have time to grind out enough resources or do some quests before I'm overleveled for the places I'm in and the tech I was working on and either have to skip content or just be overleveled and underequipped for a while. Rather than let the player blitz to the level cap and then keep wandering around afterwards with a reduced sense of progression, they could afford to extend the mid game to be longer (maybe they do this when you get closer to the level cap, I'm not sure, I'm still level 48, but the game feels a bit too fast for something people supposedly sink hundreds of hours into.

I think that's a problem with a lot of games, some people just want to grind through the levels to level up as fast as they can and get to the endgame, while others want to explore the world and take it slower. If the game is centred around "level up as fast as possible", the lore/explorer players complain about needing to grind or else they'll be swarmed and one-shotted by mobs and bosses, and the grinders just laugh at them and tell them to git gud. If the devs make it slower and hand out fewer xp so you can look around and go off on side tracks, then the grinders complain long and loud and badmouth the game, so there's no pleasing everyone.

And it seems like the grinders are the market being catered to at the moment (PoE, I'm looking at you, because they have been around so long they have dedicated players who've played the game for years as it developed and who can now whip through all the levels fast to get to endgame maps and are then bored if their maxxed out builds with the extra-special gear don't find it enough of a challenge).

Yeah that's definitely something I've felt some hours in, it didn't use to be like this in earlier versions, they must've had fucked up somewhere when assigning and/or scaling experience rates. Many things in the game (exploring new areas, killing alphas for the first time, gathering effigies, catching shinies luckies, etc) liberally dispense fat chunks of exp, to the point that it feels there's one source too many and vanilla 1x exp rate feels excessive.

I'm playing my second "challenge" run on 0.2x exp and so far around level 50 I can confirm the game is still eminently playable and the curve feels a lot smoother, I actually have to colonize explore the desert and such while still a little ahead of most competition (and my own pals; if anything leveling pals is a problem on 0.2x, it's pretty slow) whereas in my first playthrough I plowed through desert and snow after taking my time a bit too much in the central areas. If you feel you level too fast you can safely crank it down to at least 0.4-0.5x without worrying about roadblocks.

Playing Deltarune at the moment (so far I've completed chapter 4, haven't gotten to playing 5 yet). I really wasn't going to play it; I'm time-poor and don't usually have the energy or motivation for skill-dexterity games like this one, but every friend of mine in existence wanted to see me play it and so here I am.

This game is much, much better and more enjoyable than Undertale, I have to say. Undertale was absolutely chock-full of these utterly frustrating JRPG pop-up battles where you could be subjected to an impromptu fight against an enemy at any moment, meaning you had no ability to plan any of your fights and made the simple act of walking around something you barely wanted to do lest you get ambushed by some disproportionately difficult enemy without enough health items. In contrast Deltarune foreshadows its fights adequately since its enemies can actually be seen wandering around in the overworld; they're visible from a mile away and this means encounters can either be avoided or planned for in advance, and it makes the act of walking around a lot less tense since the game won't just foist unwelcome encounters on you.

The battle system itself is a lot more refined here as well. It still sticks to the same core gameplay routine of RPG turn-based battles mixed with bullet hell components, except this time you have three characters to do battle with now instead of just one, which allows for a far greater degree of strategy and coordination in fights and really makes combat much more entertaining than in Undertale. For somebody like me who may as well be handicapped when it comes to reaction time, I find myself compensating on the strategy side very often, doling out health items and coordinating group attacks at opportune times, and this made it easier to get through fights then it otherwise would be if it were a pure bullet hell game. The increased strategy component in Deltarune means that there's a lot of flexibility in how you approach fights.

Difficulty is an aspect of game design that I've seen endless debate about and there's no easy way to "solve" difficulty in games in a way that makes every single player happy with the level of challenge offered, but at least in my subjective opinion it's well-calibrated for the most part, though chapter 4 has a hard spike in difficulty that coincides with a sudden increase in the intensity and ominousness of the narrative. I think it generally works, though I was banging my head against the wall in frustration for a while at the final boss of chapter 4 (which is very difficult) but the boss of the chapter is something that has been foreshadowed for a good portion of the game and is tremendously built up to, so the difficulty doesn't feel unearned. It really feels like an accomplishment to beat it, and almost comes off like something you really should not have been able to do.

There's also a lot more playing with format here than there was in Undertale. Deltarune really experiments with some fights, with battle mechanics calling back to many other games, and sometimes this works and sometimes it doesn't. As an example of where this really works, there is a bossfight in Chapter 2 which involves you fighting a shounen mecha version of a character with Punch-Out! gameplay, and it's legitimately a great moment. Chapter 3 has a bossfight involving a mechanic where you play minigames for points, which culminates in a Special Attack towards the end where they get thrown at you in rapid-fire succession WarioWare-style. Much of the time these gambits pay off really well, and helps innovate on the general gameplay loop such that it always feels fresh.

It's sometimes the case however that these diversions into alternative gameplay can feel underdeveloped, and also some of these gambles work less well than others. For instance Chapter 4 features a miniboss named Jackenstein whose attacks involves you collecting points in a Pac-Man-esque setting peppered full of bullets that deal damage, and the attack doesn't end until you collect a key located on the far side of the battle box and make an exit; frankly it's quite a frustrating boss to play through. The base battle system in Deltarune feels quick and keeps you on your toes, this boss on the other hand forces you to go slowly because there is no timer, no predetermined end for an attack and every time you bump into a bullet you lose a shit-ton of health, so you're incentivised to slowly wait for the correct openings where the bullets part in order to progress without losing health. When you die on this boss, you have to go through the entire laborious process all over again. I found myself getting impatient with this, just a insanely bad concept for a boss battle in my opinion. In general though, the gameplay is an all-around improvement on Undertale, and it's very fun to play.

It also looks much better than Undertale. Though I have to say the chapter-based release schedule of Deltarune does mean there's this persistent inconsistency in the production value between chapters, which makes the game feel far more uneven than it would be had it released in one go. There's a clear upward trend in polish as the game goes on, with Chapter 1 having by far the jankiest presentation, least expressiveness in the character animations and most rudimentary environments, which then steadily improves from then on. You can also clearly see ideas, character illustrations and concepts in the earlier chapters that disappeared or were replaced later on, which again adds to the feeling of a lack of cohesion. It's unavoidable with this kind of release really, but can feel jarring at points. Still, looks great and the soundtrack is a certified hood classic.

Plot- and atmosphere-wise it's noticeable just how much more ominous Deltarune is compared to its predecessor. This time the game is centred around a prophecy that looms large over the whole narrative, which slowly begins to come true as you play. There's a lot of quirky funny stuff that's typical of this type of fiction (which is often laid on too thick) but as Chapter 4 develops you begin to learn that the prophecy includes far more than you initially believed, predicts far more than you initially believed, and the chapter hints at an infohazard of the highest order at the very core of the prophecy - one that concerns the main characters - but is evidently so horrifying that everybody who knows about it denies it, refuses to talk about it, and attempts to cover it up as if it doesn't exist. There's a strong theme of fatalism and lack of agency at the core of this game that is almost antithetical to what Undertale offered up, which is that Your Choices Matter; in this game that concept appears to be thrown into question pretty heavily. The heavy-handed, almost child-like moralising that Undertale deployed in its attempts to subversively critique the gameplay loop of RPGs is noticeably absent here. At the halfway point of the game, it really is trying its hardest to foster a sense of impending calamity on the horizon, and at the final part of Chapter 4 you meet a colossus of a being that has no consciousness, can't be reasoned with, and in spite of the fact that it's an infant still in the process of hatching, it is a fight your characters barely scrape through even with help.

Overall I really like it. I think in spite of the association Toby Fox's games have with insufferable they/thems who really just like anything that looks and feels like "happy Tumblr neurodivergent shipping time" and fill the internet with unhinged gay and trans fanfictions of their favourite characters (which his games certainly cater to a lot) and Cawthon-esque lore fanatics who spend half their life poring over the smallest details and secrets in a game only to make a 30 hour video about it that ends up being completely wrong (which his games also certainly cater to a lot) there is a genuine attempt here to make a good, well balanced game that's compelling.

I have been turned off from single player recently. Several games rot in my backlog after having been launched once or twice.

For multiplayer, I'm enjoying co-op Slay the Spire 2 and... "enjoying" is probably the wrong word for Marvel Rivals.

For non-video games, I've hit the 10th session of storytelling Exalted 2.5e for my party of five. We're still on the initial scenario, and I've probably been horrible at pacing, but what the hell, we seem to all be having fun. My players have just slain a major antagonist (a BDSM-clad deathknight wielding a huge artifact scythe, and no, I didn't make her up, she was in the printed adventure) with minimal losses yet appropriate tension.

Tried playing Rollerdrome, and while it is a lot of fun, it's more challenging than I expected, and I'm not really in the mood for a twitchy game with a time limit.

Instead, I fell off the wagon, and reinstalled XCOM 2 last night (didn't have a chance to play it though). God help me, I will beat it on Commander Ironman mode.

God help me, I will beat it on Commander Ironman mode.

If you have the discipline to not savescum, I'd suggest running it in normal mode and just not reloading previous saves. People have had their IM runs bricked because the game bugs out at an inopportune time. If you absolutely must use the in-game IM feature, keep a backup save after each mission and only ever use it in the event said bug bricks your run. It may not hit you, but if it does and you're months deep, it hurts.

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