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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   3063 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for January 17, 2025

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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Anyone have a video game or a movie or a book or anything else like that that you want to get into, but you just can't every time you try?

For me it's Red Dead Redemption 2. I just can't get through the winter prologue. It has idiosyncratic controls that I can't remember and the fucking lasso just doesn't work after I rebind 200 different buttons to adjust the controls to ESDF. And there's no quicksave, so every time I watch people enjoy the open stage of RDR2 it wants me to replay a long enough segment before I even can try and fail to lasso a dude again. I guess I should just mod the game to skip it and try again.

I got filtered by the swordfighting in KCD several times so still haven't finished it. I'm pretty good with shooters and various nerdy math-based RPG systems but this is hard.

Bows aren't strong enough in the game so the shooter approach doesn't work.

Opening games with a boring tutorial and giant infodump is unfortunately very common. I think it is so common because reviewers and people who paid full price will give it at least five hours before they decide they don't like it. Crippling you character for the intro is also weirdly common. RDR2 had you wading through snow slowly, MGSV had you limping around a hospital.

I don't really understand where it comes from. I think the art directors are trying to be "cinematic" while not grasping that movies don't make you hold up for ten minutes while the intro credits play.

Any game My boys play some in the PS5 and sometimes I think "That would be fun to play." I used to play WoW probably oh 15 years or so ago until I realized it was making my wife hate me. Also I believe suddenly pandas became part of gameplay and that really brought me out of it. These days I don't have the time to devote to a proper game where you learn kits and builds and lore and all that. Sometimes we all play Catan but not really since COVID, when had many game nights.

Every game today has a skill tree, a detailed crafting system that requires you to gather rocks and twigs, a room/house/town/level design system, cosmetic DLC, online multiplayer with a parallel PvP meta, a perk system, premium currency, an achievement system, an unskippable 45 minute tutorial with forced cutscenes, and more. I wish more games picked one or two things and did them very well. I try out maybe a dozen new games each year now, and I turn them off in the first 5 minutes if any of the above crap is shoved into my face to distract me from doing whatever the game's box/title said I would be doing.

It would be nice to sit down and enjoy a AAA game for a couple of days without feeling like it was trying to surgically attach itself to me. I quite liked Helldivers: the equipment tree is a premium currency hellscape but it gets straight to the gameplay loop and the loop is fun.

Every game today has a

This really isn't close to true, unless all you play are AAA games.

You're right, I'm mostly just shaking my cane and telling AAA games to get off my lawn.

I still haven't touched the factorio expansion since the week I bought it. Partly having so many other projects, partly just... Don't feel that into going through all the scripted content.

..scripted content? What scripted content?

A lot of the extra content feels like being led by the nose to a specific workflow, whereas the original game was much more open. Compare all the options for handling ore vs being railroaded into one method for promethium harvesting

Prometheum is only a very tiny part of the game, really a taste of a somewhat different mechanic. Literally, you only ever see it after you get the "well done, you've beaten the game" screen.

The game isn't any less or any more open than the original Factorio.

I'd tentatively disagree with that.

I recently dipped my toes into the expansion (thanks to @Cjet for gifting it to me for a multiplayer campaign that I never really managed to join; I still feel bad about it!) and came away with the impression that its content is indeed less open-ended than what one would expect from the base game. The space layer and each of the new planets offer intentionally self-contained puzzles that each have fairly specific solutions and don't really interact a lot with each other. You can try to do it in a more interconnected fashion, but that seems more like a self-imposed challenge and doesn't seem to have any practical justification.

Or maybe the base game was never as open as I thought. Or maybe I was just led into completely incorrect expectations by the Space Exploration mod.

The mod is definitely simpler than SE, but in essence doesn't seem really dissimilar to SE, no?

I disagree thoroughly, with the caveat that I am no expert player.

SE encourages complex logistical networks between planets, and space platforms can fulfill a variety of purposes. Exploiting different planets is a matter of strategy and economics, all the time. SA encourages you to ship nothing but science, and space platforms are either just trains with one extra step, or straight-up infinite resource printers, and you only need to figure them out once to then produce them infinitely. Exploiting different planets just means solving four different puzzles, but again you only need to solve them once and it's very straightforward and that's it.

Calling SA a simpler version of SE would be much like calling four brisk 30-minute walks along a well-paved paths a simpler version of a triathlon.

SA does have more varied environments, mechanics and more interesting sights to see, and it is more polished, but it's not challenging, not complex, and its constituent parts are barely connected to each other.

...Okay, maybe partly. But every planet has several resources that need shipping around. Just to get the last science pack requires shipping something from every planet but Nauvis, .

but it's not challenging,

It seems essentially the same. SE just has more and more and more of it. More recipes, more etc. But it's repeating the same problem solving loop over and over. I played SE some but the only really, really challenging part was putting together combinators to automatically load the rockets. And I think I'd figure it now since I put together a logistic network / item chest balancer.

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Are you playing kb/m? You should go on nexus mods and grab a chapter 2 save, it puts you where the game finally opens up.

Anyway some of my favourite games were originally like that. I bounced off breath of the wild half a dozen times on wii u, and it's in no way the kind of game my friend group plays usually, but I intuitively knew there was something in it for me, I just couldn't see it yet. So when it came out on switch I gave it another shot (with gyro controls turned off) and now I like that game so much I went through the painfully obtuse process of nodding second wind into my switch copy. I sent so many fledging hunters to die to the blood starved beast in Bloodborne I probably outpaced the population of yarnham, every time I'd read about the influences or design choices I'd try again only to reach the BSB (or one time father gascione, I was so proud of myself for a day) and rage quit fifteen deaths in. Now I know Yarnham inside and out and have become a true frombro. Morimens is a recent opposite example - it's got gacha elements, chatgpt translated English and it's a card based roguelite, it should be the last thing in the world for me to play, but I'm completely hooked on it.

I definitely have books like that though. I've read the first part of House of Leaves at least a dozen times over the years, I can't go further. This will probably get me crucified, but I will never find out how frodo deals with that ring he has, since I can't finish either the books or the movies (I loved the silmarillion though).

I had the same experience with RDR2 for what it's worth. I chalk some of that to being excessively immersive to the point that I wished I could just get around and do things easier.

Hmm.. Definitely EVE Online. I'd much rather read stories about the game than play it. Debatable Factorio, because I feel like I'd need to be on stimulants to enjoy it.

I've recently been playing Arma Reforger, and it's this close to being too boring and slow for me. In Arma 3, I have the majority of my 3500 hours in the Zeus mode, where I'm managing a mission for anywhere from a handful to dozens of players, and there's always something to do. Setting up the next objective, micromanaging AI, listening to the players chat. It beats driving for half an hour or standing on guard for ages not to see anything, which is both a realistic depiction of warfare, but also boring (I do my best to have my players not end up there).

The map in Reforger feels too large even for 128 players, it's less restrictive than something like Squad, where the game mode channels you into lanes (even if you are technically free to faff around anywhere). The spawn points can easily be tens of minutes from the action, and God help you if you forget where you parked the car. I still play Reforger because I enjoy the novelty of an Arma game that doesn't look like it was made in 2013 and also runs way better, but sadly the Zeus/Game Master mode is atrociously half-baked. Bohemia learned nothing from the mods that made Zeusing in Arma 3 a million times more fun and useful.

I'd say RDR2 is worth sticking with. The snow section isn't very long dude. 90 minutes or so? The controls and obligatory walking through base camp etc is a pain, but overall I really enjoyed my time in that world. Hunting and fishing with those great graphics almost felt like a nature experience. :P

I thought I wanted to play Ghost of Tsushima. It has released on PC and I've got it installed. But something about these mass-market, third person, action-rpg, open world games that 'play it safe' (politically and creatively) and make you spend 50-100 hours grinding through the game makes me anticipate that I'll be filled with ennui while playing them. I don't know if GoT is as guilty of all this as, say, Horizon or the like...

It's way less guilty than the horizon games, although you have brought up an interesting point - I wonder if I found got more palatable because despite the playing it safe (the most obvious example being the fact that your partner Yuna is very obviously not Japanese or attractive, but it's littered with other indignities) the overall story is a fundamentally conservative one about the value of protecting your home from foreign invaders even when it comes at a terrible price.

But add in unskippable cutscenes and it's almost impossible to recommend you stick with it. I mean, if you could appreciate the pacing of rdr2 you can probably get into it - I spent a lot of time in that game just walking around playing the flute for people and things - but you have to keep playing the story at some point and then you'll get another slap in the face.

As reminded by some other discussion here, Outer Wilds. It should be satisfying, but I can't get past the boredom of the initial stage into actively solving the mysteries. In a similar vein, Pathologic 2. The original left an incredible impression on me, but I can't muster the willpower to dive into this one.

For a non-game example, Legend of the Galactic Heroes. Sounds like a show I'd really enjoy, but each time I think about its runtime, I flinch.

Sounds like a show I'd really enjoy, but each time I think about its runtime, I flinch.

To quote the incoming vice-president of the United States: do it one bite at a time. It's definitely more of a young guy's anime, though.

LoGH is amazing once you get past the poor pilot.

By "Pilot" you mean the first episode, or the movie with roughly the same plot, because I found the latter rather enjoyable.

The first episode. The portrayal of the first battle is ridiculous and at odds with the rest of the show, iirc.

Really? I thought the first season held up fairly well compared to the end, where the author was desperately scouring Chinese history for ways to keep the fights interesting (black holes, space tides, fuck it, armies crossing energy rivers and crashing into space walls!!!).
Given the scifi bullshit about low detection ranges and signalling, the concept of catching encircling forces on the march was pretty good. Especially because it helped introduce us to the problems of both the alliance and imperial militaries; one full of glory hounds trying to reenact past victories, and the other basically halfassing the war by using it to play internal politics.

I would never play the Pathologic games but I'd certainly watch Mandalore review them for hours. They can get wild.

At that point in 2020 where toilet paper and staple crops disappeared from the shelves all I could think was the moment in Pathologic where the period from Day 1 to Day 2 had inflation of 1000%.

Same, I hear the way everyone talks about it and feel like I'm missing out on one of the great gaming experiences but.....I can't.

Faust, it is just dense and I have no shame in admitting that I get lost everytime I pick it up.

War and Peace. All those French phrases aggravate me. I already have to lean on a dictionary for Russian literature, and I have too much ego to pick up a translated copy.

The Tolstoy.ru ebooks usually footnote the French phrases with translations.

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