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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   2198 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for May 31, 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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Thanks for the warning. Homeworld 2 had turned me off enough, I guess I'll put this along with the X series as having jumped the shark.

Anyway, I've tarried long enough (without even mentioning the reportedly excellent Cataclysm, which I haven't played!).

It's an excellent (though probably no-longer canon) piece, mixing a bit of cosmic horror with some fun new mechanics and giving the Bentusi a lot better a characterization and sendoff than Cataclysm 2 did, imo, avoiding a lot of the weird chosen-oneisms in favor of Alien-style truckers in deep shit. The Beast is a shocking and chilling monster, and the fight against it never feels either unfair or canned.

The shield mechanics in particular were a blast: Sentinel fighters could link into powerful geometric shields that, when fully upgraded, can block everything but fightercraft... at the cost of the Sentinel itself becoming a sitting duck, and individual panels of the shield being vulnerable to sustained fire even from attacks it can block. They were seldom things that turned the tide of battle, especially in multiplayer, but the possibility an opponent might have picked up enough of them made a lot of other mechanics work very well, without mandating annoying micromanagement.

(The last boss of the campaign missions do end up being a bit of a gimmick, as a downside, though it was still pretty fun the first time, imo.)

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