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PaperclipPerfector  10hr ago (text post)   423 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for July 31, 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

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.

sci fi lasers and particle beams are boring if they don't create a more exotic experience than slugthrowers, and if they create a more exotic experience, that means they exploit different niches and so don't replace slugthrowers. Also, the AR15 is a reasonable guess at what a slugthrower will look like 300 years from now, odd as it may be to consider. The reasons are complicated and interesting, but the upshot is that there's a feedback loop running popularity > market share > stacking iterative improvements > excellence for purpose > popularity, such that the AR15 pattern is steadily outcompeting and driving to extinction all other designs, and it doesn't look like this will change so long as we're using chemical slugthrowers.

I will say, if I were doing far-future slugthrowers, I'd at least go electrothermal and try to drive design variation that way.

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