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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2930 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for March 15, 2024

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

Often happens anyways. Share what you have been playing.

For me I've been hooked on Nightingale recently. A survival crafting game. Their twist on the genre is to have different "realms" or maps where you can explore and collect stuff. The realms can be upgraded to be more difficult and thus provide more resources.

The game feels like a bit of a slog at times, but that is also what I was sorta looking for. A game I could play semi-mindlessly while listening to podcasts. The main frustration has not been gameplay, but a developer decision to make the game always online. Most of the bugs I have encountered are server related. Which is an extreme frustration since I'm basically playing the game like its singleplayer. I am confused why they made the server requirement a thing at all. It just seems like extra crap to maintain.

I've been playing Resident Evil 7 on and off for a few weeks. I like it and think it lives up to the hype.

As a child, my favourite video game was Oni, an unofficial Western adaptation of Ghost in the Shell from the studio behind Halo. I played it from start to finish numerous times, and periodically I think to myself "you know, I should play Oni again and see if it's as good as I remember". Last night I had such an inkling, and it only took me until the end of the first mission before I was like "man, this controls like shit." I don't know if it's some kind of compatibility issue caused by playing it on Windows 11, but some of the control scheme decisions seem frankly baffling in retrospect. Whoever's idea it was to sprint by tapping W twice should have been fired on the spot. At least the soundtrack holds up, as memorably sampled in this breakbeat track.

some of the control scheme decisions seem frankly baffling in retrospect

That's a problem with many retro games that were released before our modern control schemes were stabilized. Fallout gets a lot of hate for its idiosyncratic controls, for example.

A lot of Oni is works better on a gamepad: the game was also available on console (bizarrely, PS2), and a lot of the weirder control decisions are downstream of then-standard behaviors there. But the console wasn't up to the render requirements later in the game, so the console version was panned near-universally. There's still some jank if you can get a gamepad running with the PC version, which is a pity because a lot of the grappling mechanics were surprisingly well-thought-out for the time.

Good fucking luck getting a gamepad to work, though.

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