bob

I ended up refunding the game. I tired again last night to play, but none of the fixes I tried would even get Spider-Man to show up, and playing with an invisible character just felt a bit shit. I might try buying it again in a few months when they've sorted out glitches like this, but for now I think I'll concede defeat. I'm really sad now, because that was the one game I was really looking forward to playing.

I was forced to remember last night why I stopped playing PC games and switched to consoles. Due to me not getting a PS5 (as I could not justify the cost given how much time I generally spend gaming), I was extremely excited that Spider-man 2 was finally announced for PC! I spent a while clearing out the space to download it (140GB hard drive requirement!) Last night I finished downloading it, and tried playing it. I was using my PS4 controller on my laptop (which was surprisingly easy to set-up - bonus points there). Bear in mind that my laptop has a RTX 2060 graphics card, so it's firmly in the middle of the minimum and the recommended hardware requirements. It auto-selected the medium graphics settings, which looked ok to me, so i was happy with that (i'm not a graphics whore particularly, as long as i can see what's going on, i'm happy. I don't really give a shit about frame rate either to be honest. i can't really tell the difference between 30 and 60fps, as long as it isn't turning into a powerpoint, I reckon it's playable.) The first cut-scene featured an invisible character, holding a clipboard. Bit of a weird start, but then i knew that Miles Morales can turn invisible, so not out of universe....however, the next character that turned up was also invisible...except he wasn't - he was represented by a small ball of hair floating at around head height, that buzzed everytime he spoke. The next scene featured loads of floating heads and other strange glitches. Which was when i twigged that perhaps something wasn't quite right... I read online that one way to fix it was to turn your settings to 'Very Low', save, restart your computer, and then load it up again. Once you're in, you can bump your settings back up again and Ben's your uncle. So I tried that, and sure enough, all the character models came back in (with horrendously low res hair - all the characters have dreads). I played again for a few more minutes, and actually got to web swing for a bit, until I realised that a couple of buttons on my PS4 controller weren't working, the 'jump' button being one of them. Now I don't know if anyone here has played a Spider-man game, or encountered the character before, but jumping is kind of his thing - I'm running down the streets of New York, trying to keep up with Miles, until I realise that this is silly. So it's another save, close, restart, load it up. Now my controller is working! Yay! I can jump! I can swing! I can save the city! So I'm swinging downtown, looking for Sandman, and I see a huge sandstorm. Get a bit closer, and Miles is talking about how we've managed to find Sandman, but I'm looking around trying to see him amidst all this sandstorm, but I can't see him. And then it hit me. The giant invisible hand of Sandman hit me. Damn it! The Sandman model hasn't loaded in, because I forgot to turn my graphics settings down to Very Low before I quit the last time. While it was amusing to see Spider-man clinging onto an invisible giant, I knew I couldn't play this section if I couldn't see the enemy, so it meant another save, close, restart laptop. I finally get back into the game, Very Low graphics settings (which I leave on because I can't be arsed having anything else go wrong), and I complete the opening sequence of the game. The whole thing has taken maybe an hour and a half, at which point it's time to go to bed because the kids are going to be up in 5 hours. Still, 10/10 fantastic game, no complaints.

Ooh, that's rough. What's the job market like in your sector?

I thought there was a dedicated thread for this, but the forum search did not bring anything up (on a separate note, how shit is the forum search?) Anyway, I watched through Secret Level on Amazon Prime. Originally, I thought it sounded like a cool idea, but was put off a bit when I hadn't even heard of half the games involved, let alone played them. However, I thought i'd give it a try and see, and i'm glad I did. Despite having not played any of the games the episodes were based on, i thought the series was actually really good - I don't think it mattered that I probably didn't get half the references. Some of the episodes were definitely better than others. I really enjoyed the Unreal Tournament, New World, Dungeons and Dragons, Armoured Core, and the Warhammer ones. Some were a bit boring (the Spelunky just seemed to be a slightly longer advert for the game). I'm looking forward to Season 2! Presumably they haven't released what games S2 are going to be about?

That looks good. I'm ready to be disappointed again!

Oh, i actually thought Smogon was a Pokemon, and the most powerful competitive one at that. Seems nobody is doing good reading comprehension in this thread. Edit: I mean, Smogon is a Pokemon, but i thought it was a different one from Koffing

Hang on, was Ashley not joking? Is Julius joking too? I'm so confused.

Jury duty or are you on trial?

I've got the usual arachnophobia, but I think that's pretty common. I've also gotten much better with spiders since we moved house, since this one seems to have a resident population of that we can never get rid of. Of the more unusual ones, i get pretty bad thalassophobia, which is a fear of deep water. The thought of floating in the ocean and not being able to see the bottom gives me the heebie jeebies.

Surely itvx is at the cutting edge of television? How can their offerings be old and have Paloma Faith?

Is this some sort of parody? They're so short of ideas, they're making a show about Batman's butler!? Can't wait for the follow up about Lara Crofts butler to kick off the Butler Cinematic Universe. Anyone watched it?

And you'd be right.

Why does that look like it could be the cover art for Just Cause 5?

Severance is better than a show you didn't think was that great and didn't even finish? High praise indeed.

So they finally released the PC requirements for this. My laptop is somewhere between the minimum and the recommended, so I can in theory play it. But something I had forgotten about because I haven't played PC games in years - was the storage requirements. 140GB! I'll need to delete like 50GB of stuff off my laptop just to squeeze it on there! Really sad because this is the first game I've genuinely been excited for in ages...

Shiny Pokemon are a dime a dozen in this game, i wouldn't get too excited.

Yo I heard online that Kojima was making an exclusive game for the Switch 2 - maybe Death Stranding 2?

Is Gummy bears just a codename, or are we actually getting the live-service Gummi Bears game everyone has been clamouring for?

Shame it's not out in time for you to get it for your birthday.

Ray Stevenson died?!

I cannot get spoilers working at all. The button in the post editor does nothing - no pop-up or anything, and the code I tried doesn't seem to work. Can someone who cares about the sanctity of the story in Pokemon Arceus do something?

Another slightly cheaty one, since i also played through 90% of it last year, but I had an evening all to myself and decided I would try and polish off the remainder of the main story of... Pokemon: Arceus I say story, if you can really call it that. It's just some stuff that happens in a sort of sequential order. Some waffle gets spoken. You collect some stuff. Everyone goes home. Either they ran out of time towards the end, or just ran out of interest, but the plot does seem to get worse as it goes along. Half of all dialogue just seems to be people pointing at the rift in the sky and saying how weird it is, and is it true that you also fell from the rift in the sky? Wow that's so weird. Maybe they are connected? I can't quite believe how lazy the game is with character animations. This is a game that came out in 2022, and for anything more complicated that a 'walk forward and hold out hand', they game fades to black and does a sound effect. It's astonishing that this game comes from one of the most successful game studios in the world. Comparing it to the other game I just played, Uncharted 4, which came out 6 years earlier, it's like comparing Monet to the shit my toddler brings home from nursery (sorry bob jr). I have no idea what was going on at the end of the game either. It's a pity, because there is the base of quite a good game there. I remember i quite enjoyed my time with the game right at the beginning. Going around catching Pokemon, and the research element of discovering Pokemon behaviour was a really good idea, but the rest of the game is just awful and stuck in the past. Anyway, 1/10 done!

"Oh yeah, so I totally knew about this before, obviously, I just didn't say anything"

Oh, you can play as a Sith Lord in this?

All these port rumours sound like bullshit to me. I remember hearing the same for when the Switch 1 was released, and they all turned out to be false. Who knows though, maybe I'll be proven wrong this time!