SomTervo

Apparently at some point they mentioned that two people can be in the same place but not see each other/not be in the same instance... So rumours of multiplayer may be greatly exaggerated. I'm keen for the endless adventure, basically. Gf got me a subscription to Edge magazine for a year, and in their preview there's a small caption where they mention that planets aren't just solid lumps of rock. Like Minecraft, they will often have underground caverns, waterways, cave complexes and huge chambers. Which sounds super, damn exciting. I think the biggest worry at this stage for me is the variation in life-forms. I don't feel confident there'll be enough variation. I can picture something like 12 genus with a mediocre amount of variation between them. I could be totally wrong, however – I think Hello Games are keeping a lot of content vested at this stage. They drop very veiled hints with phrases like 'you might encounter creatures like that somewhere' or 'there may be places you can't do that in,' which are super-subtle hints that there's a lot more in the game that we're aware of, I reckon.

I made a mistake in my last post, I was asking what the place was to the far south-east of the map. Doesn't look like my memory of Vice City but it's where Miami would be. They moved Las Venturas to a much more sensible location, the central/southern desert, a while east of Los Santos. The best bit about it is that the surrounding desert ties with the small Sandy Shores desert from GTA V. I couldn't work out what the place was directly east of San Fierro either, but you must be right, it's that military base/airstrip. A bit huge, but obviously a quirk of cut/pasting at different scales. Obviously the location of most of the cities in GTA: San Andreas didn't really make much sense. San Francisco directly east into a desert and Las Vegas was crazy geography. They really fixed that with this map, Las Venturas being central/south makes loads more sense and looks great. Edit: the thing that stands out to me more about this is just very subtle details about the city planning/design. Like, Liberty City just abrupts out of nowhere after miles of empty fields. Edit edit: I can't stop looking at this map

Yeah, it looks so good. I watched it with sound off, and I really dislike how the trailer is edited. But aside from that, sign me up (not that I wasn't in from day one). If you want a hit of great open world free running and chases, hit up Dying Light and run about at night time. So intense, fast and fun (with a dose of terrifying).

hehehe. Shut it, you! Now, where's ma bucky... Yeah, and FOMO is all about self-expectation. If you just listen to yourself, son, and focus on your interests, cultural FOMO drains away. Unsure on the trip – in the long run, yeah, I'll probably have to go down there. Manchester is pretty much the perfect place to be for broadcast journalism at the moment, the opportunities are hot. Relatively there's nothing big for her to cover up here, so she'll probably build her career from there. I really don't want to leave Scotland though. What a great place and all my rootseys are here. The plus side is that there's a fairly high chance we're going to get a second PS4 so that the two of us can chat online and play game's co-op (which we do all the time anyway).

I've actually got a (slightly depressing) alternate response to this. My girlfriend just nailed a job with a prestigious news and documentary company... In a city a couple of hundred miles away. So as of this week, and possibly for the next few months, my play time is on the up and up. I recently read a couple of thoughts on other sites – life throws things at you then takes thing away and then things change again in some way you don't expect – basically you won't just keep losing time into adulthood. You might gain time again temporarily, then lose it, then gain it again, etc. My partner and I are solid and I'll probably be heading down there in due course – but I've sunk more gaming time in the last three days than I probably have in the last 2 months. Is this about backlogs or about cultural perception? If it's about cultural perception, I literally could not give less of a shit. There are plenty of things people take for granted that everyone has seen, and when you say, 'no, I haven't watched/heard/played that', people usually go, 'oh cool, well it's this'. Basically, if you're just honest about it, people never mind. Living in Glasgow, every time I meet a new person, they bring up football. In this city, people are literally murdered over whether you support Celtic or Rangers. Yet every time someone brings it up, I literally say, 'Nah I don't follow that shit,' and they're always fine with it. Cultural trends and popular culture are just facets, just aspects of culture that don't really matter to the heart of that culture. Straight up say whether you've seen something or not, and they won't mind. (Drunk typing this, if anyone can tell.)

Welp. http://www.gameinformer.com/b/news/archive/2015/08/04/destiny-the-taken-king-redesigns-leveling-from-one-to-forty-4682.aspx Couple of other nice details. It now factors in the loot you've already got when doing its RNG thing for drops, so you'll be far more likely to get new stuff with far less grinding. On the one hand, fucking yes, I'm back in ... On the other hand... It should have been like this in the first place. I'm still very bitter about how they designed the whole thing and how much time I wasted on it.

Wow, I want to play in that map. Amazing effort, even if there are a few confusing bits. What's that place just east of San Fierro, across the water? And is that Vice City in far South-west, yeah? Looks nothing like how I remember it, but it is the one I've played the least. The Housers are also on record saying this is basically where they want the games to go eventually. A whole USA mapped out and playable as a GTA game.

Speaking of Edgar Wright, I watched The World's End on Sunday night. That was after a friend and I tried watching it on Saturday night, and literally turned it off during the scene where the aliens/automatons are revealed. Seriously, who thought it was a good idea to reveal the 'villains' that way? Unlike Shaun of the Dead, and to a lesser extent Hot Fuzz, there is no foreshadowing about what is going to happen or why in this film. Up until that scene, half an hour in, where the film's plot utterly shits the bed, it could literally just be a film about five childhood friends going back to their home town, and it probably would have been pretty great. Shaun of the Dead makes sure to use parallel panning shots and classic Edgar Wright focus-cuts to show how things are gradually falling apart, and Hot Fuzz had the 'murder mystery' plot style to gradually build up the 'polite small-town killer cult' angle. That scene kills the pace and kills the plot. It is completely impossible to suspend your disbelief when it happens, because up until then there was no indication anything remotely supernatural could happen in the story. The worst thing is that the following 45 minutes is pretty good. It becomes a quirky Invasion of the Body Snatchers/The Thing sort of joke sci-fi jam, and the writing gets a bit funnier. The fight scenes are brilliantly choreographed, even if they're completely unbelievable. The concept behind the aliens is really enjoyable, too, especially in contrast with the human's nihilistic worldview. The aliens are in many ways the good guys, and we're the shit-up animals struggling agonisingly through existence. There are more plot holes than in Shaun or Fuzz combined. Quick examples: someone says at some point it all relates to their original pub crawl – but it doesn't and this is never mentioned again; how the hell did Considine's character escape the car and meet them underground; the crazy guy's crazy straw would not save him from DNA scraping; they throw down the 'automated people are recycled' jargon in one short scene but never elaborate on it and the characters barely seem bothered that half their friends are dead. The ending sequence is phenomenal in concept and I was loving the brave 'the world really is ending' message it left us with, but then to climax with a confusing, meaningless scene where Simon Pegg has become some sort of travelling BNP-killer, when he also has no reason to protect the 'Blanks' throughout the story and suddenly decides to after the apocalypse, with a terrible action-cut for the very end... I just couldn't believe it. A heinous end to the Cornetto Trilogy, made all the worse by how it clearly has a heart of gold, it's just executed like shit. I wanted to put it in the Crap Movie thread, but I couldn't. There are slightly too many redeeming features here.

Pretty good ideas. What an ending indeed. The 'reset the timeline' climax sounds possible but would be too close to The Butterfly Effect imo. That film's influence on this game is clear everywhere, and I bet they'll try to take it a different direction.

They've always been weasel worded about it. It's only clear if you are fluent in corporate double speak. "It's coming exclusively to Xbox One in Holiday 2015" can just as easily be interpreted as this is an exclusive game that will be released in November/December. Tomb Raider Xbox exclusivity deal "has a duration". "I don't know where else Tomb Raider goes," could be interpreted as Rise of the Tomb Raider is Xbone exclusive, future Tomb Raiders may not be. Whenever MS have been asked "Is it a timed exclusive?" the response has never been a direct "Yes" it's always been "All contracts have a duration" or "It's coming exclusively in Holiday 2015". Contrast with PS that have the pretty straight forward "Coming first to PS4" or "Coming exclusively to PS4". You know where you are there. Ah, lexical ambiguity. I bet I could have done a dissertation for linguistics at university about how the rhetoric employed by the three game console giants. Would have made for a great essay.

Wasn't the rumour that it would be WB Montreal rather than Rocksteady, who are going to move on to bigger, better things? Originally I remember the rumour was WBM working on a Suicide Squad game. And the fact that the most substantial easter eggs come from WBM's content makes me feel a little more assured about this. Rocksteady seemed quite clear they wanted to move on from this universe. That would be so awesome. My biggest gripe about the ending: I'm not sure that's the narrative their following.

Well holy shit. They're seriously becoming my developer of the year. I'm not interested in some aspects of this. But a whole new map? Wow.

Not sure if anyone else is aware of this, but in May or so Techland released a free update which added Hard Mode to Dying Light. I've been replaying it from scratch on Hard Mode and it's fucking glorious. Suddenly it's no longer a zombie-killing simulator. If you want to just kill zombies you're going to die a lot, and what's more, every death takes loads of Survivor Points off you, enough to ruin your chances of levelling up. Funnily enough, there are a lot of Dark Souls style aspects in the new Hard mode: - pausing/looking at inventory no longer pauses the game. You really have to make sure you're safe before you sort your shit out - med kits provide less health, but more importantly, they are now a timed-regen buff rather than instant hit. For about 15 seconds you'll get health then it'll stop. - weapons break far more easily. Once you've upgrade your backpack you'll still always have plenty, but now you need to manage your inventory and weapon repair far more closely (a huge plus in my book, Normal mode weapons could last ages and didn't promote exploration) - items are much harder to find, which puts a brilliant onus on exploration. I've already been in about 10 buildings I never entered on normal mode (I really needed to scour for Gauze for medkits). Also those free daily item packs from stockeepers become goddamn life-savers - zombies do insanely large amounts of damage now. Getting grabbed twice is probably enough to kill you. You need to play it so safe. It's amazing and often really intense. - a big one: Volatiles and Virals no longer show up on the map. Make a loud noise in the daytime and hear Virals in the distance? Well you better keep your fucking eyes peeled. You won't be able to track them easily on the minimap and prepare your strikes/position. And decide to go for a night-time tryst? You now have to use your own senses and eyes to keep track of Volatiles and avoid them. It has become a far tougher stealth game at night time. - you also can no longer use 'Survival Sense' to see nearby items or Volatiles through walls. There are some other minor changes, but seriously. Hard Mode is almost like playing a totally new game. It's so immersive and strategic now with the added difficulty.

Interested? Yes Platform? PS4 When? This is an issue for me. My schedule is too irregular really, so I might have to bow out altogether, or at least play it by ear. Format? Do not mind If we're doing this, shall we set a specific day in the week to do it? Eg Tuesday? Typically I'm busy Mondays, the middle of the week at some point, and all weekend.

What a decision. FYI, we only got upset because right now is a generally disruptive/emotional time in our lives. It was just that bit easier to empathise with someone's devastating plight!

Anybody else on this? It's a masterpiece imo. Slightly janky dialogue, lip syncing and graphics are the only blemishes on an otherwise incredible work of fiction and gaming.

The weird thing is I know people from the south of Spain who would like nothing more than to come visit Britain to enjoy the tepid and/or cold weather. I guess the grass is always 'greener'?

Some of the writing in the current season of True Detective is fucking shocking. On the whole it's a poor season. I wonder what the hell happened since the first, which could have been a masterpiece but copped out in a couple of ways. I guess the second is more ambitious than the first by far, four protagonists rather than two. And I feel the last few episodes might be way better than 3 and 4. Both of which were bad. Vince Vaughan, or more specifically how his character is written, is ruining every fucking scene he's in. Oh my god it's on my screen right now and it is just agonising. It's 100% cliché delivered with no emotion. Edit: in another poor scene with two decent characters. One of them says 'this girl's gone missing'. I skip ahead to catch up to where I was, and she says identically 'this girl's gone missing'. Wtf. And the other character in the conversation just said 'Because... my powers of influence are so meagre in this subluminar world of ours.' This guy is a straight-talking, gritty hardboiled detective. Why the fuck is he talking like a thesaurus. Has happened three or four times in this episode. Christ almighty. Edit edit: there were a couple of great scenes in there. But the ratio of good scenes to bad is probably about 1:4 at this stage. There's a hysterical moment where they see a silly-looking guy dressed as jesus walking along carrying a crucifix, with really ominous droning music over the top. It was such a fucking style clash, I actually laughed. There was a much more sinister image about ten seconds before which was pretty effective, then they had jesus guy.

Excellent. It didn't click for me until I did the training and played 2-3 matches online. Initially I played split screen with my cousins, co-op, and it was kinda nice but not great. Playing competitively is the only way to go. Such fun, such chaos, so many moments of glory packed into every 5 minutes.

Pardon my French, but how the fuck has nobody else replied to this. I'm not exaggerating here – Rocket League is a GotY contender. it's an all time classic. It's some of the most fun I've had in years. We need to get a team together. Add me up, DPH. I'm pretty sure you're online on PSN right now actually, we should match up. I'll invite you.

I've spent my last few gaming sessions doing nothing but collecting Riddler trophies. Bloody hell. It's sort of fun. Had one glitch out though, that was really scary (in a completionist sort of way). One of those awful ones when you have to follow question marks around the city in the batmobile. Those are really badly designed. Luckily it unglitched itself and just counted as complete even though I didn't finish it. Did you guys know the game keeps 2-3 backup saves for every save slot you have, so you can roll back to a slightly earlier state in case anything gets glitched? Why doesn't every game have that.

I'm seshing Batman: Arkham Knight, and whenever I'm bored/done with that I'll be moving onto cleaning up The Witcher 3. Also got the Tomb Raider Reboot Remaster, and that was pleasant. I've got a lot of backlog and I'm keen to get trucking with it before MGSV:TPP comes out. Off-topic: I also have a backlog of about 10 books half-finished, so I may take a bit of a gaming break just to get reading like hell. You should make a mod enabling people to do just that. Would go down a storm.

Absolutely loving this game. It seems insanely divisive in some corners, but for me it's far overtaking Arkham Asylum for being the Bat-game. Story seems pretty great too, except for the Arkham Knight, who ranges from okay to really shit. It's also totally obvious who he is. And I haven't even found out who he is yet.