Nicktendo

Same, I almost always use cash unless it's a big purchase.

It would be absolutely glorious. Big fan of the Brucemeister General.

Stroopwafel: for me, it's absolutely Agent 64. A Goldeneye/PD-inspired FPS that is currently coming to Steam, but not confirmed for other platforms just yet. I don't care how much it is nonchalantly borrowing from those games, whether it be taking people out while they're on the pisser or the Severnaya-esque snow level, they are doing everything right for me right now. Loved the demo and cannot wait to play more. Surströmming: no doubt should be Hollow Knight: Silksong. I'm not convinced that this game is still even being worked on. Very sad situation. I'm tired of waiting now. Here's the most recent trailer. It's from 2022, but for all we know, the developers may already be dead. Soufflé: it has to be the most recent Mario & Luigi game, Brothership. I've not played a single game from this series, but the Nintendo Direct trailer positively charmed me. I was expecting a ton of remakes in that Direct, so I was pleasantly surprised by this one. I'm in love with the fact the cutscenes seem to take inspiration from the 90s TV show with Captain Lou Albano. At the very top of my pre-Switch 2 wishlist.

Books will be written in the future about Xbox circa 2012-2024. How to throw away 10 years of goodwill and alienate your core audience. Surprised that giving away product for nominal sums of money doesn't convert into a healthy base of paying customers? Don't be! Your vision isn't working? Ask your boss for more money! Just literally throw money at the problem. How to make your fiercest rival's business proposition exceed your own. A 10-step guide. Can't compete? Buy the competition! Gold & Pass - the long three-year-road from 25 million to 26 million. A how-to on merging products and changing branding to give the impression that business is booming. Respecting IP, is it really necessary? Why success can lead to failure: A guide to closing successful studios and avoiding a backlash. Foreword by IGN. Hoodwinked: A CEO's guide to speaking and acting like the customer.

Strange, I feel entirely the opposite about this. I love badminton and love the small little subtle things you can do in it to win shots. Tennis I simply cannot comprehend at all.

Lies! The Bowling jazz-a-thon is spectacular.

No, you can still get the old stuff. Once you've got all the available items for that week, you'll get a random week from the back catalogue that you can go for.

I was sceptical too, but I've managed to get a good 50 hours out of it so far. Almost all of this time has been spent on Bowling and Golf, which are both superb. Volleyball and Badminton are great too. Barely touched the other 3 sports, and Tennis is really, really bad compared to the Wii game, but maybe I just can't my head around the controls this time. The way the online is integrated is great, much better and more rewarding experience than just playing the CPU every time. It has a nice levelling system.

Five absolutely superb penalties. Amazing stuff.

I had the wife call me during the credits Thanks for the game, that was fun! First time I've ever played it.

Read an article somewhere, maybe the BBC, where they were lamenting how bad the big teams have been at this tournament, blaming it on the long and demanding elite season across Europe. I'm inclined to agree with that POV. It's only going to get worse next time with the revised bigger European club tournaments coming in this year.

Spent about 75 bones in the sale and picked up: System Shock (Nightdive Studios version - Loved their work on the Turok games & Forsaken) Dead Rising OG Sea of Stars Balatro Arzette: The Jewel of Faramore (because of my DF boy @Dark1x John's involvement) Batboy Forza Horizon 4: Ultimate Edition (Loved this on GP, but wanted to try the Lego DLC) Legend Bowl (Have a big soft spot for NFL games, especially retro-inspired ones) So far, so good. Loving Dead Rising, Balatro and Forza at 4K60. Yet to dive in to the others.

I didn't register in time. I thought I could vote in the embassy, like I have done once in the past, but apparently not these days... I applied on the gov.uk site and thought I was done in early June, but then they asked for a scan of my signature, which turned out to be a whole hassle and a ton of waiting for snail mail. Then I was away for a couple of weeks in mid-June so wouldn't have managed to do everything in time anyway. My last registration was Bolton North East, and I haven't lived there for 8 years, and didn't vote in 2019. Oh well. . It was strong Labour seat for around 20 years, but swung back to the Tories in 2019. Having looked at recent by-election results over the past ~2 years, it seems the Cons are losing 60-90% of their vote from 2019, so it will be very interesting to see how me ol' constituency goes this time and whether the threat of ZERO SEATS is actually the real deal.

I won't be able to tonight @Glen-i but if there's another game going down over the weekend (or tomorrow evening), I'll be free.

First time I've seen this used as a verb, and I approve.

I would be down for some Friday night sword swinging if there's space. Never played Four Swords and would love to give it a try the way it was intended.

I hope it passes. What does it need 11 teams to agree, or does it need support of all of them?

Matt Booty is the worst of them. Supposed to be head of Microsoft Game Studios and can't even get a team's name correct on occasion. The other two don't work for Xbox to be honest, just Twitter journos and leakers. I think this is the death knell for Xbox as a console manufacturer. Wii U was a bigger disaster, no doubt, but Nintendo had some solid games from 2014 onwards and manged to steer the ship out of troubled waters with the Switch. I don't see Xbox releasing anything of note in the next 12-18 months to turn this around, even if they do try a hail mary and release new hardware or a handheld. It's over. They have proven consistently that they couldn't organise a piss up in a brewery. The management, or lack thereof, of their games and their studios is absolutely shocking. Phil Spencer, Sarah Bond, Matt Booty and Aaron Greenberg should all have been fired long ago. They don't even have the hardcore fans on board anymore. I know these directives are all likely coming down from MS themselves, but Phil and co have had years now to just release some decent games and they have not done it outside of one or two in a sea of utter failures.

Where's he going? Newcastle?

https://www.eurogamer.net/what-is-the-point-of-xbox Really good article on the current state of affairs at team Green. The Lionhead stuff is shocking, but it's not really surprising that they have learned nothing.

I was going to post similar analysis but got distracted. 12gb of RAM is very encouraging. On the concerning side, we've got 256gb of storage with lightning speeds, which is undoubtedly great. While this probably won't be too bad with Nintendo first party games, which very rarely, if ever, are more than 15gb, it will be a problem for third party devs. I would also assume that expanding internal storage via SD card is no longer going to be an option and the reads speeds are not going to be anywhere close to the internal storage. So are we going to see a fridge situation? Or will they have a proprietary solution like Microsoft? I may be reading into this wrong, so please correct me if that is the case. Here's an old video from November 2023 which explains what the T239 chip is capable of in theory. I think it's quite promising. Edit: Rich is going off of clock speeds of ~700mhz in this video, but it seems like there have been a few rumours doing the rounds this week that it will be much higher than that (close to double!) in docked mode.

Well yeah that's true. Back in 2019/20 there was a lot of talk about a Switch Pro being released that would take advantage of DLSS, which was still in its infancy back then and wasn't around during Switch's production. Despite seeing decent results with the 1.0. release, it really came into its own with the 2.0. release which was around that time frame. Whether the rumours were true or not it doesn't matter now. Plans that may have existed were likely cancelled due to COVID anyway and Nintendo doubled down on the 2017 system and released the fantastic OLED. Iwata, remember, had spoken of a evolving console "platform" before his death, which led to a lot of speculation about more regular iterations of the Switch platform, similar to how Apple updates iPhones on a yearly basis. Not that anyone expected a new system every year, but the idea was that it would be a unified platform with more frequent updates. Perfectly feasible in 3 year cycles, for instance, to take advantage of recent hardware, machine learning, and AI developments. There were patents and documents laying out this vision. It seems they have walked back on that idea now, anyway. And rightly so, given how strongly the Switch has marched on since 2020. Being a mobile platform built on Nvidia tech, it makes an immense amount of sense to incorporate DLSS capabilities into the chip. It is far and away the best upscaling tech on the market with AMD's FSR tech hugely struggling in comparison, which Xbox and PlayStation both use. It would undoubtedly help the new Switch overcome power limitations and punch above its weight in contrast to the competition, even Steam Deck. So the idea of Nintendo using a cheaper, older chip that can support modern hardware developments like DLSS and VRR would be a perfect marriage of price and tech. Not necessarily for handheld mode (I think even the OG Switch is still fine in that regard), but those two features would help immensely with TV output. What worries me slightly about the Switch 2 rumour mill at the moment is the fact that most people seem to be convinced it'll be an 8-inch LCD screen and will render at either 900p or 1080p. I think both of these moves are bad. Going back to LCD from OLED is going to be extremely rough, and upping the resolution and size of the screen is pointless and will significantly impact the battery life for a mostly indiscernible "upgrade" in visual quality.