Zell

I played this for a couple of hours yesterday as my copy arrived early. Quick tip - I ran into control problems after I unlocked the first ability, I could not work it out and got into a pickle in the first shrine. Turns out that I had changed to the "pro" HUD which hides the control prompts. So you might want to stick to the normal HUD during the prologue area.

I'm using an Ikea Markus office chair, it is a very good chair for £150. It's comfortable, sturdy and has a professional look to it. The only negatives are that it doesn't have loads of features, for example the arm rests aren't adjustable.

I really don't know the answer, it's so hard to say what will happen. People still don't have a good idea of what kind of commuting/office commitments there will be and it's going to be different job to job, company to company. My company made an announcement about flexible working a month ago which got some positive press but so far there's no real details or any changes to our contracts. So I have no idea how often I'll be expected to work from an office. The risk is in moving to somewhere which is nicer and cheaper to live but not easily commutable to London. If it was say over a 1 hour for just the train journey, how often could you put up doing that in a week, and would you want to pay for that? Having said that, there were people before COVID who did these silly commutes 5 days a week. With places like Watford and Rickmansworth, I would guess people from the centre of London would be moving in at the same time as people are moving out to more rural areas but I'm a bit clueless really as to what will happen. Do you know what you're working situation will be like post lockdown, do you know if you'll be expected to be in the office 5 days a week?

I bought a house a year ago (first time buyer) and I admit I did worry that COVID would cause house prices to collapse but the opposite happened. I now better understand some of the reasons for this: Stamp duty holiday, record low lending rates, easily available mortgages (through a lot of government schemes) and of course demand outstripping supply all key forces at play here. If the cost of buying a house is cheaper for everyone, people will be able to afford more expensive houses at the same average salary People are reassessing where they want to live in a post-COVID/ post-commute world - people now realise they no longer need to be tethered to London so there is an exodus out of London to smaller country towns. This is where house prices are rising the most I believe. In London house prices are rising at a much lower rate It's also business that have been moving out of London (a trend that started before COVID) because places like Birmingham offer cheaper rents and workforce People have a lot of pent up cash and a lot of it is going into property. This COVID recession is different from the previous one in that there is still a lot of cash being pumped into the economy only it's being pumped from different sources in different directions. COVID job losses aren't as bad as you might think because of the furlough scheme and there'll be a post-COVID bounce. As for Brexit, the impact on jobs has been negligible so far, I think the true impact of Brexit will be felt in the coming years I can only see house prices continue to rise unless there's a big unforeseen market crash, and no-one wants that. The ideal would be for house prices to stagnate or rise by very low amounts, i.e. below inflation so the wages start to catch up and house prices go down in real terms if not in nominal terms.

For those interested in getting this on PS5, this has now been patched which looks to have resolved most of the previous issues. No need to double select things, framerate is much smoother and the game hasn't crashed on me. They've also added a quick save feature. I'm at the end of day 3 and still very much enjoying this.

I'd strongly recommend going through a broker. They will give you independent advice and you will generally get a better rate than going directly to a bank. Some brokers will even have rates/offers that are not available to customers that go direct.

Another key difference with the formation of the Premier League was that it had approval from the FA. English football was in dire straits in the late 80s. Crumbling stadiums, rampant hooliganism, poor public image, declining attendances, English clubs banned from Europe etc. It was felt that England was falling behind the likes of Italy and Spain and the big clubs advocated the new league to help rectify the situation. They also needed more money to improve stadiums following Hillsborough. At the time the Football League (different governing body to the FA) managed TV rights (ITV at the time) and distributed the income to all 92 clubs. The TV deal wasn't that lucrative and so as an independent body (the Premier League) they could negotiate a much better TV deal with Sky. The FA didn't like the Football League at the time so was happy to allow this to happen. They also felt that it would help English clubs compete in Europe and improve the game's image. So the formation of the Premier League at least had some other postulated benefits outside of enriching the bigger clubs. It was also essentially a reform of the football league system rather than a true breakaway like @killthenet has said.

"These clubs will still be part of the league's" - that remains to be seen. Very real possibility that if these clubs go ahead with it without approval from their leagues / governing bodies then they will be kicked out. It's greed because what they are essentially doing is having all of the pie to themselves and not sharing. A European Super League would usurp the Champions League as the richest and most prestigious European club competition, the big teams will prioritise it over the rest. The way it is set up is so that the founding clubs have full control and split the money between themselves. The four Champions League spots in the EPL are fiercely contested and missing out means missing out of hundreds of millions of pounds. In the ESL, there'll be no relegation or threat of not qualifying so even if they do badly there's no loss of income. The premier league was created in somewhat similar circumstances. Previously the TV income would be distributed to all 92 clubs in the football league. The breakaway to form the premier league meant the top 20 clubs were independent of the football league and could make their own TV deals and split the money between just themselves. This has lead to a growing gap between the richest clubs and the rest in the last 30 years. The ESL will do a similar thing: make the richest clubs richer and let everyone else rot. Doesn't matter how they spin it, it just smacks of greed. It's also a slap in the face to fair competition. How can my club Oxford United enter the European Super League? Do we need to be bought by the state of Qatar or something to qualify? I am a football fan, but over the last ten years my interest in premier league football has diminished substantially. I just struggle to care anymore. I still follow my local team though, football may not be as good but at least it feels like I'm supporting a real club rather than some IPL franchise.

Got this on PS5 and have played it for a few hours. Word of warning of potential console buyers: make sure you are playing on decently sized TV and/or aren't far away from the screen as the text size is very small and there is a lot of reading. The game gives you the option to increase the text size, but this only affects the dialogue text and not the menu text. Should come as no surprise but this was designed as a PC game primarily and was designed to be played on a monitor - but you will be fine playing on a large TV. Controls are also fiddly. You use the right stick to cycle through interactable objects (a cursor would have worked better here) and often have to press the X button twice to actually interact with something: once to move your character into position and once again to actually interact. You do get used to this though and it's not as big of a deal as it seems as you spend the vast majority of game time locked in dialogue. One final warning: don't forget to manually save. I once played for about an hour and then died because I had just 1 point of morale and no healing items. Have to say though, I am loving this game so far. The quality of the writing is excellent and I am becoming quickly absorbed in the world. I went with the default intellect build and have been trying to role play as a good detective so far. It will be interesting to start again as a different build and see how the experience changes.

On the subject of 3D Metroidvanias, the only game I've played recently that feels close is Bloodborne, although it doesn't fully commit to that concept. I don't really see games like Tomb Raider and God of War as being very Metroid-y at all really, they're much closer spiritually to RE4. There are a number of great 2D Metroidvanias on the market these days, although at the risk of sounding like a grumpy old man, I don't think any of them quite eclipse Super Metroid.

One of the reasons I got a PS5 was to upgrade of playing experience. I didn't get a PS4 Pro so going from a base PS4 to PS5 was a significant jump. I also bought a new TV to take advantage of 4K and HDR. I haven't actually played any "PS5" games yet apart from Astro's Playroom and Marquette. I've spent most of my time playing The Last of Us 2, RDR2 and Bloodborne. None of those of games currently have PS5 upgrades, but it was nice to play such pretty titles like The Last of Us 2 and RDR2 in (nearly) 4K, HDR (even if the HDR is broken in RDR2) and with a smooth performance. I was originally against getting a PS5 at launch if there weren't going to be any games out for it I cared about. But playing God of War last year on an original PS4 making the sound of a jet engine with those horrendous load times helped persuade me to make the jump. I figured that I will get a PS5 at some point anyway.

That is fundamental to the Persona experience though: not having enough time to do all you could/want to do. It's not like a typical JPRG or open world game where you have all the time in the world to do side stuff before you decide to progress the story. It's forcing you to prioritise and make sacrifices. While I understand that this certainly isn't to everyone's taste, I think going into Persona 5 with the wrong expectation of what the game is like can be detrimental to the experience. As a pure JRPG it can feel quite simple or limited compared to others, but the game is all part social sim and arguably visual novel. It's how all these elements interact with each other that really make the game greater than the sum of its parts. Having said that, if you are not feeling the plot or not invested in any of the characters, you're going to struggle to get much value out of the game. My advice on the first playthrough is to not worry about min-maxing everything or playing "optimally", because you just end up stressing yourself out. The game will cycle between dungeon/free time periods and plot-heavy periods and it's not always that predictable.

Always wanted to give Subnautica a go, so will definitely be grabbing that.

@Hero-of-Time I'd argue that you haven't actually beaten the game. Just getting your first ending without going for the other endings (including the true ending which has more content) means that you've missed out on a quite a bit. I admit when I was on my first playthrough of the story I didn't get what the fuss was about, but it finally clicked with me and by the time I had got the true ending I was enthralled. Can understand it's not everyone's cup of tea, but for me Undertale is one of the best indie games I've ever played and worthy of all the praise it gets.

One of things I like about Hades is that the story ties into the gameplay. It gives the rogue-like mechanics a narrative meaning.