Hammer & Sickle, a rather interesting Russian turn-based squad tactics game. It's sort of a sequel to Silent Storm, and that one seems to be decently well-known, at least among fans of the genre, but H&S is a lot more obscure.

There's some caveats, namely that the difficulty can get kind of bullshit at times, and the quest design is pretty harsh (with a lot of missions having hidden time limits), but it gets a lot of bonus points in my book for having you play as a communist agent fighting a neo-fascist conspiracy in West Germany, and actually bringing up stuff like Western countries recruiting Nazis for their intelligence services. And the gameplay's still pretty solid even with the difficulty balancing issues, although the good parts are mostly inherited from Silent Storm.

I also find it really interesting from a game-design perspective, in that it's a relatively short game (by the standards of the genre at least, it's still a lot more than, say, a CoD campaign, especially if you spend a bunch of time running around with no idea what you're supposed to do) but with a ton of reactivity and alternative paths. Yes, there's hidden failure conditions all over the place, but the game doesn't actually just end - each one of those is its whole alternate plot branch.

It's documented

The older Total War games have a ton of great mods, Medieval 2 in particular. There's a ton of amazing mods, both historical (like The Italian Wars for pike-and-shot action) and fantasy (like the LOTR mod, Third Age: Total War).

The various Paradox grand strategy games are great too.

I think this guy just made his own, judging by this other video: How to make a Balearic sling

unfortunately, with a lot of more obscure historical stuff (which slings really shouldn't be, given how important they have been historically, but alas), there isn't really a good solution for replicas other than "make your own" or "know someone who can make one"

Yeah, I don't care about having an easy mode - just give me access to the developer console (or even just some config files, I know how to use a text editor) and I'll make my own easy mode, thank you very much (or maybe I'll make a hard mode, you don't know). I can actually respect having a single difficulty mode, since balancing several is a genuinely difficult task - and the vast majority of games with multiple modes don't really do this, they just fall back on the classic solution of "give the enemies more HP and damage", and "I have to hit this enemy 100 times instead of 10" isn't a particularly compelling form of difficulty. Best case scenario would be customizable difficulty, but that's obviously more effort on the part of the dev and I can't demand that - but again, if you just give me access to some way to tweak the game, I can do some of it myself!

I think part of the problem here is that as games are a new medium, we're still in the process of developing the language we analyze and critique them with (and thanks to anti-intellectualism rampant in the community, it's going slow, people got mad about "ludonarrative dissonance" which wasn't even that fancy of a term, like "ludo"'s Latin but "narrative" and "dissonance" are perfectly normal and clear words), and as a consequence a lot of people are falling back on the existing analytical techniques we have. Except the core feature of the artform, the interactivity, kind of changes everything - people love to go on about "artistic vision", but in an interactive medium, the way you experience that artistic vision can be fundamentally different than it might be in a book or a movie.

If you're looking to provide a tightly-controlled experience, where every single moment is delivered perfectly according to your "vision"... then games just aren't the right medium, and trying to do this anyway is how we end up with cinematic AAA slop that constantly takes away control from the player for a cutscene every few minutes and fails you in missions for the slightest deviation from the script. Games actually continuing to develop as a medium requires accepting this interactivity and its consequences, and playing to its strengths rather than restricting it so you can make a mediocre movie with gameplay segments in between the scenes. And part of accepting the interactivity is changing our understanding on what's the "right" and "wrong" way to experience a game - it's significantly more difficult to actually define those concepts here than it would be for, say, a movie.

And besides - your game probably isn't some perfectly-balanced, completely coherent masterpiece, especially if it's some big AAA RPG - no work this massive, made by hundreds of people under time constraints (or dozens of people under even worse time constraints, since you're a AA developer and if you don't release this one on time you're going bankrupt) is going to be. You're going to have that one mechanic that sounded cool at the time but doesn't really fit well with the rest of the game, that one level where you ran out of time and just plopped some enemies down without much thought, that one annoying puzzle or trap that you thought was simple but turns out to be frustrating in a bunch of subtle ways that you missed because you're not Valve and you don't have the luxury of just running a gajillion playtests. Going "damn, this sequence/boss is really hard, I'm just not having a good time here" and wanting to turn the difficulty down for a moment isn't necessarily violating some great artistic vision - maybe the sequence actually just sucks, and doesn't in any way represent what the devs intended for it because they just ran out of time.

without GPS then they're just useless

Something similar seems to have happened in Ukraine with various GPS-guided artillery shells and bombs. Turns out, it's not such a good idea to make your military heavily reliant on fancy precision-guided munitions, and just assume that no one's ever going to figure out a counter-measure to the guidance systems. After all, you're the best-funded military in the world, how could anyone else innovate anything?

I guess we're heading for the CoD Black Ops 2 timeline of the entire US arsenal being disabled by electronic warfare. Game was set it 2025 too

Deus Ex has a few great ones, Nihilum, 2027 & The Nameless Mod are all pretty good if you're looking for more imsim content

Half-Life of course has a pretty massive modding community, and they've made a lot of good stuff over the years - Echoes and Field Intensity for the 1st game and Entropy Zero 2 for the 2nd are basically on the level of proper expansion packs. Minerva, Mission Improbable, Uncertainty Principle and Downfall (all for HL2) are somewhat shorter, but still really good. There's also new campaigns for the Portal games, but I haven't gotten around to playing those yet.

Mount & Blade has a ton of total conversions, for various historical periods and fantasy settings

Medieval 2 was already mentioned, so some other cool mods for it are The Italian Wars and 1648, for the pike-and-shot fans among you

The Blizzard RTS games have a ton of custom campaigns, although I haven't played many yet. StarCraft 2 in particular has recently been having a ton of new campaigns made (although mostly in the format of overhauls of the existing campaigns, rather than being entirely new missions, but they can still be pretty extensive with the new units and mechanics)

MGS V has had a decent amount of modding done to it too - nothing too massive, since the modding tools are very limited, but Infinite Heaven allows you to tweak a whole bunch of stuff (and, in combination with some other mods, significantly lighten the grinding, which I probably wouldn't have been able to stomach the game without), and allows people to add new custom side-ops

The Bundeswehr is running out of assault rifles (in German, machine-translated quotes below) archived

According to information from WirtschaftsWoche, the force only has 50,000 to 60,000 rifles. “Too few and too broken for almost 200,000 soldiers,” is what military officials say.

The G36 has been in use since 1996. After a dispute over the accuracy of the target in 2014, the federal government at the time stopped the procurement. At the same time, a successor model was a long time coming - partly because of a patent dispute between the applicants for the delivery of a new rifle. Even after the decision for the G95, also from Heckler & Koch, there were delays in the Ministry of Defense until recently, according to industry circles.

One of the problems that caused problems was an additional visor purchased from an external manufacturer whose plastic holder broke off too easily from the G95. In addition, testing is ongoing - even though the French army has been using the weapon for years. Now the government apparently wants to order 119,000 rifles in September and use them for the first time next May.

Turns out, the anti-Soviet propaganda about only every 2nd soldier having a rifle... is now true, but for a NATO country (extra irony from it being Germany specifically). In fact, it's even worse, since 60k rifles to 200k personnel is closer to a 1:3 ratio

Also, the best part is - given how much equipment they inherited from East Germany, they would have probably been just fine if they'd just kept it instead of selling it off and destroying it. Yeah, NATO countries are supposed to use 5.56, but the former Warsaw Pact countries other than Poland either took until the 2010s to start the process of adopting new rifles chambered in it, or haven't even gotten around to it like 20 years after joining (outside of select special forces units).

in authoritarian North Korea, the children's cartoons channel blasts propaganda every day

Smallswords were an evolution of rapiers optimized for ease-of-carry, so kind of. They're definitely more associated with the aristocracy though, a regular guy at this point in time would probably be carrying something more like a hanger/cutlass:

I haven't played Elden Ring, so I can't say for sure, but I don't think there's anything other than maybe showing a few bosses. It's mostly a humorous video poking fun at a certain segment of the Souls games' fanbase

I've heard good things about Dread Delusion, but haven't gotten around to playing it yet