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Friday Fun Thread for August 9, 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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You didn't ask me but I have some recs too.

  1. Oxygen Not Included (2019). Probably my favorite game of all time. Don't let the cutesy art fool you; under the survival / colony sim surface this is an incredibly addictive engineering sandbox game. Tame a volcano for a steady supply of aluminum! Build a geothermal plant powered by the magma in your planetoid's core! Construct a giant counterflow heat exchanger to boil crude oil into petroleum for your power generators... which produce water as a byproduct... which can be purified and fed into oil wells for more crude oil. Build little rockets to colonize other planetoids, and figure out logistics to ship resources around for your megaprojects. Exploit the hell out of the game's physics. Or, you know, just tame the magic critters that eat weird magic plants and grow shearable plastic scales. The expansions add a lot and are well worth the price.
  2. Anything from the (now defunct) Zachtronics. Engineering / automation / programming puzzle games of many flavors. My favorite is still probably their first title, SpaceChem (2011), despite its lack of polish, because of how insanely hard (and rewarding) some of the levels are. If you want something more forgiving, there's Opus Magnum (2017); for silly assembly programming fun there's TIS-100 (2015) and Shenzhen I/O (2016). I have heard good things about Exapunks (2018) but never got around to it because of the titles above and below.
  3. Obligatory Rimworld (2018). You probably know this one. Colony sim. It's good. I haven't played with the latest expansion though.
  4. Seconding Baba is You; best non-Zachtronics puzzle game I've played (and probably better than half of the Zachtronics ones too).
  5. Also Obligatory Terraria (2011 but somehow still getting free updates) If you played many years ago but not in the last few, it's worth trying it out again.
  6. Slay the Spire (2019), despite being way too popular, is also Actually Good, but it is even more Actually Addicting so I'm not sure I'd recommend it.
  7. Noita (2020) is a roguelike platformer spell programming sort of thing and I am so bad at it (mostly because I am bad at the roguelike platformer part). It has an enormous world full of zany secrets too.
  8. Understand (2020). Another puzzle game, but this one is like doing IQ test pattern finding questions. Except actually fun? If you like this sort of thing, you will love it; if you don't, then you will be incredibly bored but at least it's only 4 bucks.