Shorty

Yeah I've watched some videos which have 10mm spacers around the room, hope that's enough? I can borrow a cheap circular saw from someone at work, not ideal but I might be able to make it work.

Finally considering some decorating. Fitting laminate floor and a new skirting board, is it something that a noob can do?

Against everything I believe in, I ordered from GAME, so I'm hoping for delivery tomorrow but no idea if it'll happen....

It wasn't his character's role that bothered me just the acting/writing/behaviour.

Yesterday I set up my Oculus sensors onto wallmounts, cheap ones from amazon. Work really well! I followed a guide on reddit and now I have some much better 360 degree tracking. I also bought a new desk and rearranged my room a bit and now I have much more space. I had some friends over and I gave each of them the robot intro game to play, didn't really explain anything except how to "grab" with the touch controllers and they were all blown away.

I couldn't really sit through Death Note. The adaptation wasn't badly made or anything, but right from the start they were messing with the best things about the original. Didn't like L at all, either.

I definitely found out from word of mouth, same way I skated over the top of World 1-2 or learned that you could hold "down" on a white block on SMB3. I guess it probably came from a magazine originally, but mostly spread among kids by word of mouth! Maybe an older brother read it. Kinda wish I had been a twenty-something gamer in the 8-bit years sometimes. On another note, turns out Super Mario Kart was released in the USA 25 years ago today so maybe that should've been the pick of the week maybe next time.

Did anyone else use the warp zones so often that you barely played half of the worlds? Did anyone have a rare copy without Duck Hunt? This is one of my fav videos to get you back in the mood, two speed runners racing through the game side by side

Yeah they don't let you have a hyphen in the clan name much to my annoyance!

I had an idea to chat about an old Nintendo game, with a new thread every Friday morning. I'm going to take a game that came out a significant number of years ago close to this date, or something we were chatting about on N64-Europe/Cube-Europe etc. Talk about your memories of the game, waiting for it to arrive, where or when you played it. How much you anticipated it, whether it lived up to your expectations, if you ever beat it, if you've ever been back to it since. Many of these games you may have replayed on Virtual Console or remakes, but try and stick to your first experience of it. So where to start? Well I may be 12 days off a 32 year anniversary, but I couldn't think of anywhere more ideal than to go than back to the beginning with... Super Mario Bros (1985). It might not be Mario's first appearance (as Jumpman in Donkey Kong) or where he got his name (his next outing in Donkey Kong Junior). It's not even the first "Bros" game, which would be the arcade title that this is technically a sequel to. However, for me and probably many others, this was our first experience of Nintendo, and a game that changed everything for us and paved the way to where we are now as gamers. Too young to play DK at the arcade, my first experience of Mario was at the house of one of my Mum's friends, down the street. Her son Jason had a NES. Up until this point, my only video game experience had been on an old Commodore 64, so I was blown away by how smooth and colourful it all seemed. By this point the game had been available for quite a long time, but at that age it was all a bit more transient, you didn't need or even know about the newest and best games, but what was new to you could change everything. Although Sonic would come later and redefine speed, Super Mario Bros. employed an impressive running mechanic, which immediately put it streets ahead of anything I'd played to this point. Frankly, if you weren't holding B down all the time, you were doing it wrong. The tight NES controller was a million miles ahead of the clunky, clicky joystick I had been used to, and you could use it to sail through levels, bouncing with satisfying 8-bit sounds on a huge variety of fun enemies that behaved in many different ways. And the power ups! They didn't just appear, they tried to get away. Grabbing a mushroom gave you a second chance, grabbing a star made you feel like a super hero. Discovering all the secret routes and shortcuts could only be done with effort or word of mouth, as there was certainly no internet to aid me, and at this age video game magazines weren't even something I knew existed. At the time I wasn't one to appreciate a soundtrack, but that doesn't mean that the expertly crafted tunes haven't stuck with me nearly 30 years later. It was probably another couple of years before I got my own NES, a second hand gift from a family friend who was upgrading to a Mega-Drive. When I did I would sit in front of this game for hours, restarting if I failed, flying through the warp zones and bouncing over every bullet bill and lakitu with muscle memory that my older self is now envious of. I would play with my Sister, it was the game we could play without having to swap at "levels or dying", because it had a built in mechanic for multiplayer (although one that would leave you hoping your sibling would plummet to their doom, as control only swapped when you failed). And she always thought she was winning being Mario, but I always secretly kinda liked Luigi's green duds, he looked super cool in white when he picked up a fire flower. I was guilty of "thumbing" the controller which meant to press the appropriate buttons on the second pad, even when I wasn't the one playing. But this was all part of perfecting your reaction times. On the other hand, my Mum was guilty of leaning half way out the door in order to aid making a particularly difficult jump. Years later Shigeru Miyamoto would look back at comments from Mario players and worry that games were too easy. That you needed infinite lives or save points or magic golden feathers to get people through a level if they were stuck. This just breeds weak gamers. But Super Mario Bros made us strong. It was difficult, punishing, and if you got to World 8-3 and lost all your lives and continues well, you just didn't try hard enough, time to start again. But I wouldn't say it was brutal, but certainly unforgiving. Remember that one block ledge you had to land on? The first few times you did it, that was a slow precision jump. Then you realised that you were better letting instinct take over and leaping in two quick taps while never releasing B. Super Mario Bros redefined gaming in a way that I wouldn't experience again until the same frontman entered 64 bits. From this point onward I was well and truly a gamer. I coveted nothing as much as the second and third titles, getting lucky and scrounging SMB2 from a car boot and begging Santa for SMB3. The latter of which may have taken the format to its perfect form in the NES era, but it was the original that set the standard for 2D gaming for years and years to come.

The Oculus store is a bit of a shit show isn't it. You can't find half the titles you can on the web browser, and things you add through the web browser don't seem to show up right away (if at all) inside the app. Well anyway I just tried a free title called Aircar, little more than an experience, but gave me my first feeling of really confusing my body, at times felt like I was falling!

Was playing the beta on my 1080 earlier, just out of curiosity. Shouldn't have done it. Going back to console to play with friends will be a big step back in the visuals department! @ArtMediocre when you say single and multiplayer are you actually referring to PvE and PvP? Because if you think the actual campaign content will be Halo level I reckon you might be disappointed. Destiny really shone when playing co-op strikes and raids with friends, really that's where all its longevity lay. I know a few people who tried to just play it solo and they had fun, but then found there wasn't enough to keep their interest and dropped out. Of course D2 may be different but I'm willing to bet its replayability still comes from that MMO style challenge with friends, hunting loot and solving then rinsing raids. There are no "soldier" classes per se btw, they're all based around an ability, a grenade and a super ability basically. It's loosely attack, support and defense but you can pretty much take any role with any class. Remember it's a beta not a demo, the final game will walk you through your class and unlock abilities gradually.

Sonic Mania thread!

Might be my second retail Switch purchase I love these kinds of games.

It's... a bonus for coolness, not a cool bonus.

I'd say it's probably to reward you if you did well, had a lot of rings, didn't get hit much, discovered lots of secrets... but then lost all your rings? Since the levels are much bigger it's harder to get a good time score as well. I'm just theorising though, the answer is probably out there on the google.

@Charlie where was my thanks for sorting those commas out for you?

Hopefully there'll be a lot of things to build. I assume it's more about building the park than dealing with escaping dinosaurs a la the movies, in that sense it should be no more repetitive than any theme park sim etc.

Honestly I couldn't make it all the way through Luke Cage or Iron Fist but I'm not really feeling like I missed much going into The Defenders. I've only watched about 5 or 6 eps so far but I never found it slow, in fact I've been loving every minute of it. The action is so much tighter and the dialogue and acting so much better than anything since Daredevil Season 1 IMO.

I know you're joking but it's the detachment there that's really hard to get past. You see it as a meet up of "you", rather than "us". Everyone's invited but it's only the same small group that makes the effort each year, and that group is getting older and smaller all the time.

Glad I discovered bigscreen! Much better than steamvr. Not done anything special lately except watch Game of Thrones on a cinema size screen

I'm gutted that I accidentally read a spoiler about that boss. It seems to have put a smile on everyone else's head. That said 32-bit? You wanted something that looked like it was on the Playstation? An odd choice, but they do have Sonic The Hedgehog 4. That would've been great if it wasn't for some strange physics and some poor level design choices. So many 2D sonic games in the last 20 years have had a huge flaw: loads of places you could fall off the map. Actually, the 3D games had the same problem. Mania proves that that's absolutely not necessary, and in fact goes above and beyond to add layers and layers so that never really happens.

Tbf if they had released this to compete with Mario 64, how well do you think that would've gone down? How would you have convinced that approach to investors? They had to try and keep up, they took a lot of misguided attempts and IMO never really nailed it. In the end they're lucky that in the last ten years, people have embraced paying around 40% standard RRP for titles like this, and that they had some third party in touch enough to make it happen. I'm really loving the game. Not played much. I kinda suck at the new special stages and finding the giant rings.

Sometimes it feels weird telling the whole internet my personal information Last year we went to the South of France, this year it's somewhere a little cheaper but with a few more conveniences nearby. Had a staycation earlier in the year with a hot tub rental, highly recommend that!

Seriously excited for this I hope it captures some of the atmosphere of S3&K.