bob

It's a weird crossover of The Crown and Suits. Wasn't well received unfortunately.

This you?

Vote Jonnas

For a crazy 2 minutes (during which i happened to check the scores on my phone), both Germany and Spain were going out! Bizarrely, Germany scoring put Spain through.

I bet in the film she lifts up her wig and there's a mushroom under there.

I'm impressed at the amount of backhanded compliments you managed to cram into four paragraphs.

Didn't really got on with the gameplay in the first game, but i did enjoy the storyline and 'spectacle' as drahkon puts it. Has anyone played this on PS4? Is it worth getting it for that? Or will it just melt my console and leave me saddened?

Do the environments change at all, or is it all brown caverns and rusty metal rooms?

Had an hour or two to myself yesterday evening, and having finished AC: Unity, was digging around in my games pile for something new to start. Forgot I even had this one! I'm not sure why I own it, to be honest. I remember the reviews being good, but every screenshot or video I saw of it at release was some dude running around in some dreary looking brown cavern. I think that's why i put the unopened game in the back of the cupboard and forgot about it. Anyway, I thought, "what the heck", and opened it up. It took roughly 40 minutes to download various updates, and when I finally opened up the game, it froze on the opening cinematic (weirdly, it shows a shot of a moon in the rain, past which a starship is supposed to fly past, but that never happened, so I was left watching the rain fall against a pretty night sky for about 5 minutes before I wondered if perhaps that something else was supposed to be happening...). A console restart later, and I finally got to play. First impressions are pretty good! Very cinematic, and reasonably fun gameplay, even if the main character handles like an early PS1 platformer when he changes direction. That'll just take some getting used to though. Expect me to spam this thread with my impressions as i play through. Thought i'd post them in here rather than the Gaming Diary, because why not.

And you can ride horses, which you absolutely cannot do in Watch Dogs 2.

I think that's because you are using your definition for open world. Obviously there's no set definition, but yours is too narrow. The GTA games would be completely different games if they weren't open world. Can you imagine a GTA game that didn't have a city to explore and drive around in? If it was just a linear set of contained levels, in which you did a crime, advanced the story and then moved on? It wouldn't be the same. You might prefer those sort of games, but the open world format makes GTA what it is. Same for Skyrim. The opposite of an open world game is a linear one, but that doesn't mean every game has to be either one or the other. There are variations between the two. OOT is an open world game in some respects, in that you can explore the map, and tackle some of the dungeons in any order. But BOTW is MORE open. There are fewer restrictions and less linearity. Back to Pokemon, the mainline games have always been a bit open world, in that you can explore and choose to do side-quests independent to the main plot. But they used tools to keep you moving fairly linearly through it by blocking off routes until you reached certain parts of the game. The more recent games have just reduced the linearity even further, possibly to their detriment.

There's no blow back quite like selling 10 million copies.

So I finally finished the main story. I realised that with Christmas coming up, I can't realistically ask for any more games until I complete the ones I got for last Christmas, so I thought i'd better put some effort in. The last few missions really started to get crap though. There is one near the end where they tell you it would be impossible to get close enough to the target because he has too many guards, so you come up with a plan to discredit him, and try and turn the mob of Paris against him. In doing so, you put a potion in his drink to make him act mad.....why not just put poison in his drink?! That's not very good assassining? The final boss is very bizarre too. It suddenly goes all magical and supernatural, which in fairness is how many of the AC games end, but i've always felt it ruins a good jaunt through the various historical settings. Anyway, generally, I thought Unity was a much better AC game than many give it credit for. The setting is one of the best, and the city and map are absolutely gorgeous. The plot is a bit wobbly, and the extraneous bloat of collectables and bland side missions kind of detract from the good bits. The game could have done with streamlining and being given another 6 months in the oven. I'd give it 7/10.

Yeah, this just shows that it doesn't matter what technical mess Game Freak vomit out, it will still break sales records every single time. People still go out in their droves and buy it (in many cases TWO copies), and I don't see that changing. Therefore, I don't see the quality of the games changing either. They're just going to get worse and worse, because there's no negative consequence for doing so.

I am de facto boycotting this world cup, but I'm starting to regret it a bit - it looks like a classic! Argentina and Germany losing their opening matches. Spain destroying Costa Rica, England similarly smashing Iran. I just wish football's governing body wasn't a corrupt shitshow and this one was being held somewhere less shitty!

From what I've read on Reddit (i.e. likely complete rubbish), a lot of the issues are down to how the game loads the open world. It loads the ENTIRE world at the start, and keeps the whole thing in memory, rather than chopping it up into (le)chunks like all other open world games. Seems like something that would be very difficult to fix with an update.

Please understand, Gamefreak are just a small indie studio with a tiny budget.

It's boggling that both Nintendo and Sony use Twitter as their primary method of sharing pictures and screenshots. It's not even a primarily picture sharing website! I wonder if they'll bother setting up an alternative of Twitter folds. I'll admit to being uninformed about such things, but I don't really understand how a website like Twitter employed that many staff in the first place. Especially programmers and engineers. The basic site functionality hasn't changed that much from the beginning, do what do they all do every day?

Yeah, i thought that it would only be a matter of time.

I can't speak for how good it is, but if we handed out awards for how much people talked about games, then Call of Duty would win every year. It could be a great game that flew under many people's radar, and still deserves an award.

@Hero-of-Time right now:

After two years of struggling with one baby and a Fiat 500, we finally admitted that we needed a bigger car with a second baby on the way.

I have not. But someone more curious than I may have!

Oh my god guys, have you seen the leaks!? I can't even.

I will probably try my best to avoid it, but the likelihood is that I wouldn't have had much time to watch it anyway. If I do want to catch highlights, they'll probably be on Streamable or something that won't contribute to viewing figures or advertising revenue. Take that capitalism!