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PaperclipPerfector  7hr ago (text post)   325 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for July 31, 2026

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Video Game Thread

What are you playing? Are you having fun or just killing time?

This week I was able to sink quite a few hours into Deus Ex. I'm going to use spoiler tags because there's always someone who has not yet played the game but might want to do so.

I let Lebedev live. I used the LAM trick to kill Anna Navarre when she came for Lebedev, and now I've got an angry mech (Gunther) on my ass.

During the 'Paul's apartment' sequence I managed to electric prod stun one of the Men in Black mechs, to keep him from exploding along with his loot. Picked up the auto-shotgun and applied a couple of recoil mods to it. I let Paul do most of the killing because he seemed invulnerable, while I, being stealth based and playing on Hard difficulty, can only survive a couple of hits to the chest/head.

I surrendered to the arrest squad and let Daedalus get me out of my cell and onwards to the Armory. Most of my grenades were not kept. I think I had 7 LAMs when I was arrested and only recovered 1 or 2 in the Armory. Oh well. My weapons with their mods were intact. I'm still carrying the GEP gun from the start of Liberty Island, because it's so useful against bots (and cameras, in some situations).

Despite having played almost exclusively non-lethal up to this point, I ended up wiping out most of the MJ12 guards and doctors, because, hey, they know what they're doing is wrong. I let the Mechanic who sells you stuff live though, he seemed alright. While it would have been fun to receive the killphrase for Gunther in Paris from doctor Jaime, I elected to tell him to join me in Hong Kong for roleplaying purposes; gotta keep my bros with me. He was relieved.

Manderley got a rocket straight to the face. Walton Simmons, in the hologram, was unmoved by my lethal prejudice.

I'm now in Hong Kong and have picked up the Dragon's Tooth almost immediately, because I found my way to Maggie Chow's apartment, and then went collecting evidence from the police station, and returned to Maggie's place to find her gone and MJ12 guards swarming out of hidden doors. Turns out Miss Chow is a nasty piece of work. I'll hopefully get to chop her into pieces with the Dragon's Tooth at some point.

Bored of most games at the moment.

Have an itch to return to modding Starfield, but it'd be casting pearls before swine. The game itself is wide open for adding depth, systems, gameplay, meaning, purpose, lore.

But, if downloads and hype are anything to go by, the player base does not want meaning, or purpose, or lore. They want their character to be hotter. They want the companions to be hotter. They want their hot companion to have blonde hair and not black. They want to be able to fuck all of the hot companions at once.

Oh, and they want guns. Not cool sci-fi lasers and particle beams appropriate for the setting. They want their AR-15 lovingly ported in so they can sling lead around like the game's not set 300 years in the future.

Played the pre-release game The Crust for several hours. It's a more-or-less standard factory/exploration game, set on the Moon. I'm a Moon exploitation enthusiast, so I enjoy the fantasy.

I saw Doom Dark Ages was on sale. $32 for base game and new DLC. I know a going out of business sale when I see one.

I don't hate the first two levels. Also runs fine for me on Linux with and RTX 4070 Super. Get about 70 fps with DLSS, path tracing, and medium settings besides that.

We'll see how it goes.

You are making many of the same choices I do.

Not sure if you want advice on cheesing the skill system, but with high enough skill in rifles, you can shoot out cameras. Also with enough weapons: low-tech skill and combat strength, you can start breaking open doors even before you get the Dragon's Tooth. Both give you quite different playthroughs.

Good advice is always welcome. :)

I think you need Master in rifles to simply shoot down cameras with the sniper rifle. That's a lotta points. I may have spread my skill points too thin.

I've levelled up Computer twice, Pistol twice, and Rifle/Low-tech/lockpicking/electronics/swimming once. I only have 1150 points unspent now despite probably being past the halfway point in the game. Getting rifle to mater would require another 8400 points into it or so.

I've noticed I can break open some doors/containers with Combat Strength aug active, but they seem to have to be at 35% strength or less, and sadly the Dragon's Tooth does not do better at this than other melee weapons.

Yesterday afternoon I started yet another campaign in XCOM 2. The first few missions went impossibly well: I think I had four or five "flawless" ratings in a row, zero soldiers killed or injured. For awhile I was actually wondering if the game was taking pity on me after so many abandoned campaigns.

Needless to say, it didn't last. I've abandoned this campaign.

I've been a big fan of... is it Beta Strike? The mode where everyone has more health. I find I just like that gameplay loop a lot better than "everything is bassd around not being shot at all."

Seconding a Beta Strike recommendation. I think it works well thematically with the fatigue mechanics to help encourage a large bench while allowing you to develop rookies outside the GTS/Ring systems since they're not made of tissue paper.

Mostly Darktide. My brother only started recently, after it was mentioned on the Motte and subsequently I prompted him to. But he really took to it, and is playing at his usually very high level of time investment, ambition and skill, and I have a hard time keeping up with him! But that's for the better; I prefer being challenged over being able to cruise. Sadly this is leaving our usual gaming buddies somewhat behind; they're of the opposite disposition. I'm trying to get him to play Nuclear Option with me (even gifted him a copy!), but he refuses. His focus on Darktide is unbreakable.

I also gave Civ 5 another try, with the Vox Populi mod, and I'm finding it thoroughly disappointing. There are too many systems that are hidden away in menues, completely invisible from the main view. The main view itself is very wasteful with screen space and player attention. The UX as a whole is not to my taste. City-States are a complete miss for me; I find that they weaken the coherency of the game by introducing a completely separate class of pseudo-civilization that plays by different rules, and their quest-based interactions are straight out of the wrong genre as far as I'm concerned. I'm ambivalent on the wars: They are a slog thanks to a combination of one-unit-per-tile and short movement ranges - forcing players to either commit to wars of attrition in which units are sent into the grinder to inevitably perish and never retreat, or into maintaining a defensive posture in which units are rotated back out to recover. On the one hand, I think this is kinda neat; it slows most wars down and gives players time to actually observe, instead of just resolving in a few turns, and makes offensives a risky gamble. On the other hand, there often seems to be no real tactical solution; the only way forward is to outproduce the enemy and absorb losses. Overall I think Old World (a later successor to Civ4) has done it better, although Old World overcorrects and gives too large an advantage to the attacker. But in the end, I don't really want to play Civ5 in any case because I find it ugly. I'd rather be looking at Civ3, Civ4, Call To Power or Alpha Centauri. Civ5 has very drab, boring terrain combined with cartoonish units, an art deco UI, garish UI representations of units and buildings, and a fatal case of too damn many icons floating around in the map, many of which cannot be hidden.

Today will be the 1.0 release of Quasimorphosis. I ragequit my last mid-to-late-game campaign - a serious time investment! - when a quick trip to the asteroid belt and back gave the npc factions enough time to permanently out-tech me so that all missions became prohibitvely frustrating, effectively soft-locking me out of further progression. But the devs assured me that balancing and mechanical changes now allow players to claw their way out of such scenarios, so I'm carefully optimistic about trying it out agian, when I find the time.

Vox Populi makes the city-state wrangling, and the grindiness of the wars, much worse, FYI. I prefer Lekmod over both VP and vanilla Civ V. Though, it sounds like you just hate most things about Civ V, including the things I love about it, so trying another mod is probably useless.

you just hate most things about Civ V, including the things I love about it

Please explain your view on those things. Maybe I'm just seeing it wrong.

I don't go in for slog wars. I mostly defend. Mostly with ranged units, with melee units being blockers and functioning as the ones taking the enemy cities once they're fully bombarded down to 0.

Graphics: I love how Civ V looks. I like the UI too. Words can't convince you of this. How could they.

Quasimorphosis (no longer available)

I assume you mean Quasimorph.

Yeah they renamed it somewhere along the way. But it's too late; I've already filed it mentally.

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