dwarf

Maybe it's because I didn't pay for them but the Uncharted 3 map packs are pretty darn good - especially the Graveyard map, which is unbelievable in Plunder. I didn't bother with the coop mode to be fair, remember people saying that was weak. I suppose there were too many easy reskin jobs to make the pass worth paying for.

Liked it on Facebook and thanked it here. Bonus appreciation. The driving looks so naff in WD and the car shunting is pathetic, vehicles practically teleport out of the way when you nudge them. And dumb things like that in the above video make me hate it unreservedly. URGH. I hate how it's been so successful, it looks dull as dishwater. HATE HATE HATE.

I actually only started this today, Kindle tells me I'm 10% through it. Disappointed if I'm honest - the dialogue/characters are really poor and the political stuff comes across as facile. Has pacing issues as well. Not my cup of tea bro, sorry, can't see myself persevering. Downloaded The Wasp Factory afterwards, about a quarter of the way in. Not really much of a spoiler ahead, but one line killed me - basically there's this boy who's ever so slightly fucked in the head and he kills his cousin by hiding a snake in his prosthetic leg (he also blows up rabbits and finishes them off with a flamethrower): Deliciously dark. /// Also finished Middlemarch (George Eliot) recently. Supposedly the best English novel and I can understand why it has achieved that status, even if I didn't fall in love with it myself. Was written in the late 19th century and my preconception of it was that it would be a typical stodgy marriage plot written by a demure woman, but how cripplingly wrong I was. The writing is loaded with irony throughout, subtle humour abound, and you really root for the characters to be successful, and Eliot also rather comically tells you off for judging the more latently flawed characters. She also deals in metafiction, illuminating her own novelistic processes with tidy metaphors whilst also criticising her own and others' writing. It's a fucking massive novel because it tackles a shit ton, a whole web of provincial life - the interconnectedness of people's lives and the damage and hopes born from each other's actions. It can be a bit too dense at times, due in part to being ludicrously well-researched and having a tendency to proselytise. Eliot pretty much crams the book with as many sententious remarks as possible and there's a little too much in the way of thoughts and feelings, but admittedly some of them are very beautiful and a great deal of it is done with a wry grin. The novel can be forgiven for the over-egging because it's so obvious that it's a life's work, and desperately wants to cover everything. Meta: Wisdom that reminds me of Clive James: Below is an example of the subtle humour and characterization/subtext which I would've missed had I not been privy to a close reading of this section in a seminar. Also a good example of 'free indirect discourse' (to get all pretentious for a moment) whereby the narrator's voice and character's voice converge in a way that doesn't entirely belong to either. It isn't a direct quotation, but it isn't simply the narrator speaking either, it's a sort of middle-ground indicative of internal thought. Not that this is a novel (excuse the pun) technique - the novel as a medium needed it to progress from a contrived epistolary form, and wasn't available to Shakespeare at the time but has been used by pretty much every author (and even us mere mortals probably, without knowing it) since Jane Austen nailed it - but Eliot's use of the form is especially brilliant. That said, the form has evolved, thankfully. Would elaborate but I'd either be repeating common knowledge or be irritating users by sounding like a student who isn't as wise as he purports to be (which is true), depending on who's reading. The thoughts of Sir James Chettam, who tries to woo Dorothea Brooke. He believes that her 'religious' zeal and apathy towards his advances is all just a haughty show of purity and that these can be 'fucked out' - to use my aged tutor's words - with a good shag after marriage. This sort of detail is easily skimmed over, and it can be found throughout all 700 pages or so of Middlemarch. Hopefully that gives a flavour of Eliot's staggering talent and intelligence. I'll spoiler these closing lines of the novel, which are gorgeous:

It covers all DLC 5-eva, and there will be more DLC announced.

I backed you. Having said that, I don't think the quality has been outrageously poor, especially considering the lack of AAA titles at launch generally.

Where's Nyan Cat? Would be a sure-fit for rainbow laser beamage

Or is it the full game?

Have you seen No Man's Sky dude?

Clumsy title but it sounds interesting. Is it on PS4?

This gentleman knows where its at.

The HUD makes me wonder if there's a bit more to it than that, but I guess we'll find out soon.

Nothing has screamed 'next-gen' to me yet. The Uncharted 4 trailer is beginning to show signs of the unbelievable though (even if it wasn't running in real-time, just in-engine). There are definitely some solid games and I look forward to seeing Bloodborne.

@Cube - good point. For me it's just a bit too context-sensitive and not fluid enough. Hanging and shimmying along a raised walkway feels clunky, and then having a pre-animated grab take-down or drop take-down... it takes the control away from you and there's a disconnect. Button prompts for the grapple hook are similar. At least with Infamous you could bomb down exactly where you liked, and even though it was very primitive, the melee combat did a really good job of feeling fluid and dynamic despite using a similarly magnetic lock-on system to Batman. Plus, Cole's super thrusters were awesome. The gliding in the above trailer does look juicy though.

If there were pedestrians, they'd surely have to make them invincible with a ridiculous diving dodge ability a la Driver/Crazy Taxi, or implement a morality system and allow you to kill them (neither of which I can see happening). The solution is probably to explain the problem away by means of a totalitarian curfew. That would be fine. You might occasionally see city dwellers scuttling about in scripted moments. The graphics are stunning, but I'm not a huge fan of the series. It feels a bit too robotic and clunky for me, when really assassin/ninja/stealthy characters should feel silky smooth to control. I'm in the 5% who have found it a problem to be fair.

The original was amazing so I was slightly let down when I got ToD on the PS3, but then again that might've been nostalgia infecting my judgement.

More jungle = good.

They had to talk about the PS Now stuff etc at some point but yeah, the second half dragged. No substantial exclusive this year either, if I'm not mistaken? The Order looks a bit more interesting. The winner of E3 this year was No Man's Sky in my opinion. If the footage isn't all smoke and mirrors then that team of four needs to be hired by Sony. Fantastic. Had there been gameplay footage of Blood Borne at the end, people would've been praising the conference. Alas, no such luck. Also, not keen on Sony's trend to make all these backhand DLC/content deals. That's what MS used to do, and it was infuriating back then. I'm all for their indie support, but not that. Invest in IPs guyz.

That's still better than pulling the wool over our eyes. Watch Dogs didn't deliver as promised, and who knows if The Division will. Both received serious delays.

I only saw her reaction to Rainbow Six, but it was unbelievably insincere. I gagged a little bit.

Hope the new soundtrack is as much of a belter. NOMMAGE.

Rainbow Six: Siege looks OK, seems to take some of the best things about the Terrorist missions from the other games, but make the shooting stuff a bit more casual and Cod-like (not cool). That presenter was horrendous though.

The most disappointing aspect of the conference was the fact that there was minimal piss-taking material to be had. The guy with the shit t-shirt was about the full extent of it, and that pretty much spoke for itself. Let's hope Sony bumble around inbetween their gigaton announcements (if any).

Tbh, we had a hilarious E3 last year with the new consoles, this one was always going to be a bit shit by comparison. Next year the new stuff with more protracted development schedules will show who's really cutting the mustard.

For convenience: Live Stream (with text commentary below) http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2014-06-09-live-microsofts-e3-press-conference Pre-show starts 5.00pm, proper show at 5.30pm. I don't think they'd make that mistake twice. Scarred for life one would hope.

One of the most brutal things I've seen on TV. Superb.