The Bard

Well I was waiting for Vega 64 to upgrade my GPU, but not with that 375w power draw I'm not. You could light up an entire village with that kind of TDP.

Lol absolutely fuck off. There's no conceivable way I'm paying £50 a year to occasionally play some shit online and fill my hard drive with free games I'm never going to play.

Way to take a simple observation and extend it to the most bizarre, illogical conclusion. What evidence are you providing for the idea that "acting effeminate" somehow tanks sperm count? I can maybe see an argument being presented for long term sexual selection for neoteny and effeminate traits resulting in lowered sperm counts but that should present even more in asian and east african populations where neoteny is much more obvious. It's happened over a short space of time though so it would be better to look at more obvious culprits like diet, stress levels, sources of ambient radiation etc.

I suppose that's fair enough. Regarding the app the biggest problem I've heard of is a usability issue. If you don't have the app as your open window on your phone, it disconnects you from chat. That needs to be fixed asap. Another function that would be nice is some way to stream both game and chat audio via the app so you don't need that fucked up splitter box.

I don't have Splatoon yet so I haven't had occasion to use the app, but is there any reason you'd use the Nintendo specific app rather than discord? I mean it's a massive chore to actually add friends on the Switch, and since they're having you use a phone anyway, may as well use the industry standard app that works flawlessly and that you can use for any game of your choice, right?

Couldn't stand hearing all the mad hype for Battlegrounds and not giving it a try so I'm going to give it a go tonight soon as it downloads. I feel like it'd be much more fun playing as a squad though. If anyone wants to team up, my Steam id is Audioserf

If you all can make it to Croydon you should try the Heart of Gaming arcade. Really great arcade with a buttload of cabinets and consoles. It's not pay per play either, think it's £7ish for entry and everything beyond that is free to play.

Good call. One other thing is that Ryzen CPUs consist of multiple core complexes stitched together with what's called an "infinity fabric." Inter communication between the complexes is really really improved by high speed low latency ram (much more so than Intel processors) so make sure if you're going for 8gb you get the best stuff you can afford.

Ryzen 5 is a good CPU series but there are some issues with the motherboard socket and RAM controllers on the first generation boards, so make sure you read the reviews before you commit. There should be a good, viable upgrade path with the AM4 socket though in the coming years. I'm imagining the successors to the Ryzen line will work with it. i5 7500(K) is also a good option if you want to stick to the intel side, since they have slightly better single core performance. If you already have an SSD then you're already covered for a large part of the expense. RX 580 or GTX 1060 (6GB) GPU will cover you nicely for 1080p60 at max settings on most games. You might want to wait for RX Vega release since it'll likely kick down the price of competing GPUs. 16GB 2800-3200mhz RAM should be the sweet spot for pretty much anything you'd want to do on a PC besides intensive video editing. Don't bother with an optical drive. Any good brand 550+W PSU will cover your power needs, and you're good to go.

Yeah Maximilian's been stoking a boner for that game for ages. LI Joe gave an interview where he suggests that it has a bit of a low skill ceiling, so that's partly where my fears came from. But hopefully we'll get our hands on it during the beta to check it out for ourselves. Honestly, I can't wait until the game hits the tournament circuit. The game looks better than the anime ever did, it'll be super fun to reenact some of the classic fights.

Ok so having not played it, and just going on what the director has been saying in interviews about input/execution simplification in this game, I wonder if they're going to release a completely stripped down game without a lot of serious competitive and tournament potential. I really hope that everything you can do in this game isn't just a series of canned auto-combos and flashy looking assists, and that there's actually some scope for a variety of mixups, cancels, crossups, fakeouts, parries and all the other good shit ASW are known for. Can't wait to get my hands on a demo or something. I watched a metric buttload of Dragonball growing up and it'd be so fucking good to sit down with some childhood buddies and play some versus matches where skill plays a large part and you're not just mindlessly mashing to make cool shit happen on screen.

Surely the idiom "for the players" still suggests that the platform holders want to appeal to what the players want, and if the players want cross platform play doesn't this show an attitude contrary to their own marketing slogan? It's a ridiculously bad excuse, especially since Playstation consoles have traditionally been the most geared towards cross platform play (Portal 2, Street Fighter 5 etc all having Playstation/ PC crossplay). So yeah, if you're going to be anti consumer, at least find a decent excuse for it.

Game of the show for me, for many reasons. 2014 Wolf was my GOTY that year.

Oh god this looks fucking amazing. Perfect property for Arc System Works.

Man that combat looked rough. I know AC needs new ideas but ripping a bad version of Souls combat isn't the way to go. Also very keen to see how they handle portraying a country with a deep sense of national identity but with very little known about its ethnic makeup in that era.

Cool cool. You know your Fighter ID? I'm on PC, so keen to try out this crossplay business. Edit: Found a FierceLinkle who mains Mika.

1 is absolutely gash, if you want to get up to speed on its story, just Wikipedia it. AC2 was the peak of the series (at least in its time, not sure how it holds up now), and Ezio is by far and away the best main character the series ever had. Part of those games' appeal was seeing ancient cities done in a really convincing graphical style, but again, considering we're 8 years on from AC2s release, I'm not sure that side of it will hold up. The best straight up game in the series is Black Flag, for my money. The environments aren't quite as interesting as Renaissance Italy and Constantinople, but it totally makes up for it with the naval combat, and the fact that the series has had so many iterations to polish its playstyle. I reckon if you want to go back to the legacy games, skip everything apart from Ezio + Black Flag (and even then, you only really need to play AC2 from the Ezio collection. AC Brotherhood was good, but Revelations was kind of pants.)

I think it's great. It's not the best Street Fighter (that title will forever go to 3rd Strike), and you don't have quite as many combo/defensive options as in 4, but in return it's more accessible to newcomers and different enough to make it worth playing. Capcom made a bunch of tweaks to make sure the game is actually playable online unlike SFIV, like a minimum three frame buffer between move links so you can combo even if there's a little bit of lag, whereas SFIVs 1 frame links were inhuman feats in a zero lag environment, so you could pretty much forget about being able to pull them off online. A bit feature light, but replayability in a fighter is always going to come from knowing human opponents to face off against. Might get Overwatch myself tbh.

New Fighters Network patch has pretty much fixed the shitty network issues as far as I can see. Just got 5 games in a row without any sign of lag or rollback. Anyone on here still playing this? I'm keen to dish out some beatings/ get whomped myself if anyone is up for it. Kinda would be great to set up a N-E battle lounge and have a mini double elimination tournament. N-Evo. @Fierce_LiNk you still on this joint?

Polygon are also the festering hive that employ dipshit extraordinaire Ben Kuchera, let's not take their word for it.

How do you go about angling your punches with standard controls? As in both at the same time? I found that I got used to the motion controls pretty quick, but for sure in a competitive environment I'd def want to have a more precise control set. Also, that volleyball mode is total gash.

Holy shit, playing testpunch rn, this game is legit great. Super super surprised by how deep it seems as a fighter. £50 price tag is just a massive boner killer though.

Saw Akuma, my SF main and preordered the fuck outta this. It's been a good long while since I gave Tekken a proper go. SF4 professional Akuma player Poongko's been making the rounds in Tekken tournaments using Akuma. Seems like they kept him as close to his Street Fighter version as possible.

Almost any graphics card from the last five years will get you to 1080p60 at ultra settings. Pair it with a good 4 core Ryzen 5 CPU and you're not looking at more than £550 total including a PSU, Motherboard, 8GB storage, 8gb RAM and either a 1050Ti or a AMD 560 GPU. If you want something that'll run everything pretty much perfectly at 1080p60 on ultra, maybe consider a modern i5 or a six core Ryzen 5 with an AMD 580. Should be about £120 more than what you're already looking at. Near the bottom of that table is the 7870. A midrange GPU that I bought in Feb 2012. It runs Overwatch with everything maxed out at around 70fps.

Oh man fuck that retro PSX sleeve. You can't prey on that sort of nostalgia when you've closed the phenomenally talented studio that was responsible for creating the series, and when the game you're putting out is a remaster that actually contains no tracks or vehicles from the games on the system the sleeve is referencing. But I still want it obvs.