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PaperclipPerfector  12hr ago (text post)   629 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for October 16, 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 have you been playing?

Posting mine in a response to this because it's long and I don't want to derail everyone else.

CK3 has a new religion focused DLC out, the free editions show it needs some polish, but they made adventuring (playing as a landless mercenary free).

I've been role playing, not map painting, my latest exploit is king of Ireland hunted a legendary stag, it looks nice hanging in my court. My heir should have a claim on the English throne, so that'll provide some excitement then. My efforts to get a dynasty member on the Scottish throne had a setback in that they guy I married keeps claiming it for his siblings not himself, but hopefully I can bring one of his kids over to claim it later. But the current king doesnt have much to do besdides hunt and find artifacts.

Hellraiser, most fun I had in a single-player game in forever, takes me back to 2012. Gameplay isn't perfect, but it's a well-crafted experience.

I've been playing Star Wars Galactic Racer, the spiritual successor to both the Episode 1 podracer game for the n64 and the Burnout franchise (from which much of its dev team comes). I've never been a huge racing game person, but I'm a big Star Wars fan and have very fond memories of playing Episode 1 Podracer as a kid.

It's pretty great. The vehicles all feel really good to control, the maps are well designed, and the rogue-lite upgrades and abilities system allows for a lot of interesting (and surprisinglu balanced) playstyles. It's got a solid story mode that takes about 20 hours to work through. The NPCs are fairly fun and colorful from what I can tell, but I'm not really interested in story in my racing game, so I just skipped through most of the dialogue. I expect the online multiplayer will keep me coming back for another couple dozen hours or so before I get bored.

A couple major drawbacks: the podracing feels like it was kind of tacked on out of obligation. It's the best part of the game, but siloed off from both the main campaign and the main multiplayer mode, and there are no ways to customize your podracer, unlike the other vehicles. The lack of splitscreen and private multiplayer lobbies are also glaring oversights. For both issues, one can only assume they were discarded for time/budget constraints, with the intention of selling them to us later as DLCs. This sucks, and prevents me from having a fully positive impression of what is otherwise one of the best games I've played recently. It captures the feeling of extreme speed better than just about any other game I can think of.

the podracing feels like it was kind of tacked on out of obligation. It's the best part of the game, but siloed off from both the main campaign and the main multiplayer mode, and there are no ways to customize your podracer, unlike the other vehicles.

That seems like a massive own goal. I'd assume most people who hear "Star Wars" and "Racer" in a videogame would be in it for the podracing, even people who hated the prequels overall.

It really is bizarre, and makes me wonder if it started its life as a generic scifi racing game that only got a Star Wars coat of paint relatively late in development

Frosthaven digital just came out. It's a port of the coop legacy board game. I played the board game to completion with an ex-friend several years back. We were doing absolute addict shit like coming home from work to play 6 hours of it before bed, I think we averaged 40hrs a week for like a month to finish it. So I'm very excited to get a group of friends together to play the digital version which should reduce all the clunky setup mechanics that made the BG take so long.

YES!!!

My wife and I have 300 hours in Gloomhaven on Steam. We dated long distance for several years and I credit a non-negligible part of our relationship success to playing hours and hours of Gloomhaven on the internet with voice chat. I've had this on my wishlist since it entered early access, but was too busy playing other games and didn't notice it had finally come out for real.

I've never myself had the pleasure of playing Gloomhaven digital or cardboard, but I wish I did! I really wish they'd update the Gloomhaven digital to Gloomhaven 2.0 with the revised, rebalanced characters, but my understanding is that it's not in the cards, which saddens me.

I'm trying to get my friends from back home, for which who physical distance has become an insurmountable obstacle to maintain the relationship, to join with me in playing Frosthaven so we can stay connected. Just playing missions while over voice chat would be a wonderful way to stay connected.

Order of the sinking star and the new castlevania. Both look properly awesome. And don't have this AAA smell.

I got in a dozen hours of Helldivers 2 over the last week, mostly because the flood of new mods piqued my interest.

Now that I can actually enjoy the game and grind at the same time, I've built up enough in-game premium currency to buy a warbond. Maybe two. The upcoming one is sniper-themed and has a massive fuck-off anti-everything gun that interests me (and gives the existing anti-materiel rifle size anxiety).

(I also found that the highest difficulty level isn't just so brutal that you don't have the time to hunt for rewards, but that there are fewer premium currency drops than at the lowest difficulties. I can literally see that, with a mod that marks spawns on my map.)

Still, taking the same shit in a slightly refurbished toilet gets old. I'm waiting for the full release of Rimworld's 1.7 update, which comes with a complete change of game engine away from Unity to something made in-house.

Which would be impressive enough, but it also comes with massive performance improvements and is mostly backwards compatible with older mods to boot.

A Christmas miracle. And I'd bet good money on it being a mostly vibe-coded Christmas miracle. The lead dev, Tynan Sylvester, has always had a keen interest in AI, and even my superficial knowledge of game dev tells me that this would be a herculean undertaking for a studio of their size.

I'm not complaining. Now I can install more mods (I was already at 500+), and play a save for longer before TPS-death.

To digress: as recently as a few months back, you'd see people wondering aloud about how all this new-fangled AI hadn't shown obvious benefit to software actually used by consumers. Well guys...

Epic Games declared that they vibe-coded their new launcher for a significant performance boost. People are making pass-through mods that mash together completely unrelated games in schizophrenic ways. Halo 3 was modded to have 128 player lobbies and maps orders of magnitude larger.

Good times. I've always complained about never finding video games that quite hit the spot as often as I'd like, and we're not very far from any random autist auteur rolling their own large-scale product in a few months.

Not quite a videogame but I've finished DMing the Exalted scenario I've been running. Taking a break now before I continue (if I continue).

Fairly stressful as my first DMing experience, but decent. The struggle with the roll20 module and its quirks was a good part of it. If y'all use VTT, make sure it's a very good setup before you commit, or just stick to google sheets.

I can see what some people meant when they say "don't play TTRPGs with friends". As in, it's fine to include friends, but it's really not something everyone in a given circle of friends is going to be apt for. Better to fill extra slots with enthusiastic strangers.

(If Baldur's Gate is a videogame then multiplayer Baldur's Gate I have to run on my brain is still a videogame)

The Order of the Sinking Star might be the best puzzle game I have ever played. That's not a super high bar, because I don't play a lot of puzzle games, but it does a really good job and avoids most of the problems that turn me away from other puzzle games.

Created by Jonathan Blow, the creator of Braid and The Witness, it shares enough commonalities with them that it's recognizably one of his works, while being much higher quality in my opinion. Fundamentally, it's a grid-based block puzzle game. You move in one of four directions, you push blocks onto buttons, or into pits to create platforms, or to block line of sight for lasers or monsters, or to push other objects. There have been many games like this, It reminds me of Baba is You without the text rule interactions. But there is a LOT of depth and complexity here that replaces the need for those.

There are four different worlds, each having their own characters (with unique mechanics) and several puzzle elements (with unique mechanics) beyond just pushing blocks. One world has monsters that kill you if you get too close, or kill each other, and has a bunch of heroes that do stuff like teleport or transform objects. Another world has mirrors that reflect characters or objects and lots of water. Another world has laser beams with different effects.

But, after doing the initial levels for each world, you unlock the intersections between them. To the North is Hero world where you learn about those mechanics, and to the East is Mirror world where you learn about those mechanics. Then all the levels to the Northeast are at the dimensional boundary, where levels have mechanics and characters from both of these two worlds. Now you have monsters with mirrors, and the teleporting guy interacting with mirrors. Also it turns out there person who has an invincibility field against monsters can float on top of water, but only while being threatened by monsters. Every pair of worlds has levels dedicated to that combination, and involves cool and different interactions between the mechanics in each of the other worlds. This allows for a LOT of puzzles that don't feel repetitive. The game does a good job of introducing new mechanics naturally with simple puzzles where there's not very much to do other than mess around until you discover the new mechanic, followed immediately by more complicated puzzles that involve using that mechanic in various less trivial circumstances.

I'm still only partway through the game, so I don't yet know for sure, but I suspect the end levels might involve mechanics from all four worlds simultaneously.

The game is not perfect. The story, as far as it exists, is mostly just lore dumps from characters about the background of their world. A lot of the dialogue and voice acting is kind of lefty artsy cringe. It's not really political so much as, quirky girl is respectful and affirming of the culture of these people from another world she just met, while girlboss explains how her sentient boat is a "spirit" which are respected members of society, not a "ghost". And on the overworld there is some guy anthropologically talking about how he's watching the people in these worlds and has a suspicion that some greater being might be watching him (oooooh, it's yoooou, it's threatening the fourth waaaaall). Nothing unexpected if you've played Braid or The Witness. Jonathan Blow is really good at making puzzles, but he's got a bit of a pretentious artsy streak.

...I just checked and apparently he got a lot of leftists mad at him for supporting Donald Trump, being against DEI, and stuff like that. Which confuses me, because there are a lot of what I would consider cringe lefty cultural characters in this game. I think it's just from being born and raised in California, he absorbed enough of the culture around him even as he rejected their politics.

Anyway, all that said, the story and characters are less than 1% of the game. This is a mechanics based puzzle game, not a narrative puzzle game. And the mechanical puzzles are really really good. They're difficult enough not to just trivially blow through, while not too complicated to be frustrating or obscure. The ability to rewind any of your steps allows easy experimentation without having to redo parts you already understand after every mistake. And the grid base prevents a lot of the stupid meta puzzles in The Witness where something is just hidden behind a rock in the overworld. There are finitely many actions you can do at any time, and the rules are well-defined, you just have to figure them out and put them together.

I'm about 20 hours in and it feels like I'm maybe halfway through the content. Maybe a little more, it's hard to tell how much secret end game stuff there will be. But it's long and it's good. I highly recommend it.

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