Fierce_LiNk

Losing has lost all effect now. My mates in work tried making a joke about the Europa league game the other night and just realised halfway through that, hmmm, technically it's just ANOTHER match we've lost. It's lost all impact now. Classic conversation with @Eenuh just a second ago. "Who? Shrewsbury Town? I don't even know where that is..." I expect us to lose every game now. Not joking. We do very little to win games and we never look convincing.

MadDog, I'm really sorry to hear that you've been through a very tough time. It's clear from the posts that people have made on here that we think you're a great guy and have been really brave and dignified throughout this situation. You are one of the regulars and one of my favourite posters in the football thread. There's nothing really we can say except that we're sorry you've had to go through this and that we hope you can enjoy what time you have left here. Take care, dude.

Wonderful player. Think West Ham may have a fight on their hands to keep him in the summer. I quite enjoy watching West Ham and I'm glad to see them doing well in the league. I could see them finishing above us.

Isn't that the same with PSNow? If I managed to get through all of Ico, finished the story for Mortal Kombat and played through one of the Uncharted games within a month, wouldn't that be worth it? It'll take you longer to play a game than it will to watch a single movie. If a tv series like Arrow (what we're watching) has about 20 odd episodes, that's 20 hours of content. Games are massive time-suckers and I could see myself easily using the service for that long. A tiered pricing system would be great. Could it work on a timed basis? So, 15 hours of gaming for £5? Or something to that effect. Maybe it could work like television where you pay for just the sports game or just the action-adventure titles. There's lots of different ways of doing it. For that to work though, the catalogue would have to be muuuuuch bigger.

It is pretty cool being able to go through this list of games and know that I've not played a single one of them. There's a lot there that I've already decided that I want to play. What will make or break it is how often they plan to add games to it. I hope that they eventually put PS1 and PS2 games on there as there's a lot that I missed out on. Sonic Generations is awesome. It's probably going to save me a bit of money in the long-term because I won't need to actually buy a PS3 and I won't need to go out and purchase these games. I'm not bothered about the whole "you don't own the game" argument because...it just doesn't bother me. I already stream my tv, film and music and it hasn't affected me one bit. I look at my CD collection and can't remember the last time I even took a disc out of its case. Maybe that's the culture we're going towards now. I agree that I think the price is a bit too high, but it does come down to perceived value for money. It's the same with Netflix and Spotify really, if you use it regularly, then it actually becomes a steal in terms of price. I'm hoping that they continue adding games to this library because that will tempt me to pay a regular subscription or not. I'm just delighted that the thing even works at all because I still find the concept a bit mind-blowing.

Barely.

Noooooo. That would be a nightmare scenario! I will admit that the Hull result yesterday has given me some confidence that we won't get destroyed now. We need Chris "Mike" Smalling to have a great game and whoever is around him to not fuck up.

I've made a few alterations to my routine and diet. Now going for 3 sets of 8 and I'm trying to throw in a bit more cardio here and there. I finally had a go at @Eenuh's cross trainer/elliptical trainer and will admit that the fucking thing almost destroyed me. Will definitely be throwing a bit more of that in. Quite happy that we bought it now as it seems like a really good machine.

I've never played Mickey's Speedway or Conker before. Really wanted both of these games back in the day! Conker especially looked great and very different to everything else I had played before then. I love those old N64 boxes. There's something very charming yet serious about them. The thickness and size of it (lawl) probably has something to do with it. Size matters, aha. Majora's Mask, Perfect Dark and WWF No Mercy had excellent box arts.

I've been craving a fighting game, so I ventured into the Mortal Kombat X and Street Fighter V threads to get some impressions and decide which one to get. In the end, I chose a different option. I took @Hero\-of\-Time's advice and signed up to the PS NOW week-long trial. I'm going to admit that I went into this with absolutely low expectations. Our internet isn't that fantastic, but we regularly go online with Battlefront, Rocket League, etc. Sometimes certain youtube videos will take forever to load. It's inconsistent more than anything. Anyway, we signed up and I thought I'd have a go at Crazy Taxi. Something that I'm already familiar with, just to see how it runs. Game ran as if I had the disc-based version. A good first impression. The next step...I thought I'd give Mortal Kombat 9 a good go. Again, game ran as smooth as butter. I played quite a few matches on this and really enjoyed what I played. Time for the acid test. Ultra Street Fighter 4 with a twist...with @Eenuh and myself both taking part in a series of versus matches. I've got to admit that the service exceeded my expectations. A third person wouldn't have been able to tell that this was not being played through a disc or downloaded to the console. It ran really well and we played for about 10 or so matches with no issues. We then spent the rest of the evening on ICO and are halfway through that. There's already a few other games that I'm eyeing up for the rest of the week. Now...my only wish was that the service was a tiny bit cheaper. If it were the same price as Netflix and Spotify and went for £8.99 or £9.99, I'd definitely sign up for now. But, based on what I played, I had a great time with it and it's quite exciting to see that this stuff is already working now...god, gaming has come a long way. Cheers for the recommendation, Hero. I'm now tempted to just play this for the week and maybe hold off on buying either SFV or MKXL for now.

The Witcher 3: Hearts of Stone I'm a massive fan of Wild Hunt and I've been anticipating this for quite some time. I bought the special edition of this that came complete with the Gwent cards, which made me hnnnnngggg all over the place. I've spent a bit of time waiting for the right moment to get back into this...which is now! Fantastic piece of DLC that offers as much content (if not more) than other whole games. I loved the storyline behind this, I loved the characters, I loved the additions that they made to the world and I loved the types of quests and moments that occurred. I couldn't put this down. I'm now eagerly awaiting the next expansion, which is my most anticipated thing that I'm looking forward to this year. 10/10, perfect, amazing, fabulous, hnnnnnnggg. Games of 2016 Flower - Finished Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception - Finished The Unfinished Swan - Finished Grim Fandango Remastered - Finished Race The Sun - Finished The Wolf Among Us - Finished Injustice: Gods Among Us - Story Finished The Witcher 3: Hearts of Stone

ZombiU is a decent game. If you put it alongside other horror or survival games, it doesn't stand out at all. Compared to the likes of Alien Isolation, The Evil Within, Dying Light, etc, the game doesn't get a look in. It gained in popularity on the WiiU because, deep down, we knew this may be the only survival horror game that would ever appear on the system.

I've been long interested in this PS NOW service and to see if the thing actually works. Will give it a try later!

We had some hilarious games yesterday. Probably some of the funniest yet. @Cookyman has developed an unhealthy obsession with the "Not this time!" emote, which can sometimes sound a bit campy. (hand on the hips movement, eyebrows raised at the end, dat voice) We were choosing moments to spam that emote, particularly when trying to capture a base in supremacy. We must have won about 6 or 7 games of Supremacy in a row within the first few minutes. It was like watching a plague of locusts. Seriously. We just all piled into the first point, then as soon as we won that we legged it to the next, before getting the final one. The teams we were playing against weren't that great and didn't even attempt to take back their bases. There was one utterly hilarious moment on the Jakku level where we were on the way to capture the last base and this guy literally ran towards us, saw that we were the enemy and then promptly turned back around! He kept running and running and in the end @Eenuh funnelled him into this one area and I bitch-slapped him as he turned a corner. A weird thing happened on the Hoth level when @Eenuh became Darth Vader. Her HUD disappeared, so she had nothing on screen apart from the game itself. No map, no score count, no health bar, it didn't even tell her which players were on her team and which were enemies. The only thing it did keep was that I was still displayed as a partner/yellow. So, we captured the middle base and I had to basically lead her to the other two to win the game. I saved the footage but have just realised that I haven't enabled chat audio in the captured footage. Gutted! It was basically, "left! Turn left here! Stop, kill the guy on the right. Turn left! Wait. We're capturing!" etc

The only thing in our favour is that we're the home team... We could be on the end of a battering. Not looking forward to the game at all!

This DLC is excellent value for money. The story/quests within it are just as high in quality as the ones in the base game. I just did a cool sidequest where:

We're losing now. Napoli beat these guys 9-1 over two games. Just worth thinking about. We're a real mid-lower table team based on how we play the game. I don't know how we're still fifth in the league.

I think @Eenuh will be gutted when the new manager eventually comes in at United. I've become so good at multi-tasking this season, it's unreal. We're currently drawing 1-1 with FC Midtjylland (I had to copy and paste that) and I can't say that the football has shown any improvement since the last game. Also, Spanish Dave got himself injured during the warm-up...the one player we don't want injured. I shit myself when I think about where we'd be without him.

Morrissey. A friend of mine is a huge fan of him and we often get into discussions about the guy. We've now come to the conclusion that his music is top, but he's a very lame human being. That's the one that springs to mind. I'll probably come up with a few others later on.

Man, those names. They were the big guns during that era. I remember looking at Rogue Leader and wondered how they had managed to create such beautiful visuals, especially that opening Death Star level...which was mostly grey and black. It just highlights how important it is to have that range. I miss old school Rare. However, I was still interested in Kameo when that moved over to 360 and Viva looks nice. Perfect Dark Zero can go suck a fuck, however. PD was one of my favourite N64 games and Zero just looked...hideous. An abomination. Way to shit on a legacy!

Bwahahahhah. In fairness, my average bed-time is about midnight on a school night anyway. Wake up at around 5:30, too. Yes, I am on dat Maggie Thatcher time.

Let's not pretend that we all didn't lose our shit when we got our GameCube's for the first time and chucked in Rogue Leader and Wave Race: Blue Storm. Or that first time riding around Drake Lake in Wave Rave 64, with the reflections appearing in the water. Nintendo handled realism absolutely fine in the past. The first time I saw those reflections in Wave Race (both Bluestorm and 64), I had never seen water look and act so realistic before. Fuark, where's my Wave Race, Nintendo?!

We had a crazy game of Heroes vs. Villains tonight where we were 4-2 down but brought it back to 4-4. We killed two out of the three villains and had all three of our heroes remaining. Then, somehow, we ended up losing two heroes in quick succession. @Eenuh was Luke and had 2 (!) health remaining. In the end, they found her hiding in a corridor somewhere and brutally took Luke down, meaning we lost a hard-fought match. Gutted. Had a crazy match in Supremacy where I put the kettle on in between getting killed. We were on the last base and I made it there using a personal shield before the sound of our whistling kettle started screaming the house down. It was midnight at this point, so I had no choice but to leave my character in the middle of the last checkpoint, armed with only the personal shield and with the majority of my team a fair way off. We somehow won the final checkpoint (and the match!) without me getting killed. So, for a period of at least 30 seconds, I was stood there defenceless and somehow didn't get killed. Miracles do happen!

Nah, I'd agree with you. If I were to give some examples, let's take Drive Club for starters. Whilst the game is loading up, I can jump into Spotify and get a playlist going. If I already had a playlist going on my laptop or phone, then I'd use that to switch it to the PS4. If I wanted to take a screen-shot or video, jumping between the capture gallery and that is dead easy. The other would be Battlefront. You'd know already from Destiny. Getting a party up and running, inviting people over or just seeing who is online at the moment and what they're playing is a piece of cake. Like you say, it's quick. @Eenuh and I must play on Battlefront daily now and getting a game up and running on separate PS4s is a simple. @Cookyman and @Tales usually jump in, too. Like with everything, there's always room for improvements. The activity log built into the OS is what I'd want most. I can live without folders quite easily and I'm a fan of how the bar actually works, where it bumps your recently played stuff to the front. I use the console for everything now, so jumping from PS store to a disc game to Spotify to NowTV and to another digital game is an everyday occurrence. Maybe a way of being able to sort out your library, where you can put folders in there, that might sort things out for people.