The Bard

You are genuinely the most unintelligent person I've ever had the displeasure of having a conversation with. At this point, I'm convinced that you can't actually hold another person's argument in your head long enough to come up with a coherent response.

I have lots to say about this, but mostly that I enjoyed it greatly. I'll wait until I've completed it a second time, playing through the second timeline before I say anything, but yes; it's one of the most satisfying shooters I've played for a while, and it's totally upfront about the fact that its combination of outlandish brutality and genuinely emotive story would seem a jarring juxtaposition if it didn't present itself as completely bizarre in every element of its design as it is. It also has the best Scotsman I've ever come across in a videogame. That dialogue puts Malcolm from The Thick of It to shame.

Mario Kart reminds me of nothing as much as progressive taxation. It's reminiscent of a Bolshevik era system that not only enforces equality of opportunity, but also equality of outcome. In other words; fuck blue shells and rubber banding. Someone tell me that this is different from every game since MK64, please.

The point, as you so cleverly managed not to understand, was that people complained across the board for both series, and there were also people who loved both series. Judging the developers' current games completely on past products that came out of two completely different development situations, instead of using them as a point of departure to think about how the situation differs, once again, misrepresents the facts. The car deformation in Gran Turismo 5 was almost non existent, and where it was even visible, it had no effect on play. You present all these things in the way a PR firm would put bullet points on the back of the game box, when in reality they're completely meaningless. As for the microtransaction model in Shift; look to the salient difference between Shift and Project Cars. Maybe the fact that the former was published by EA which infamously mandates introducing ridiculous monetising attempts into all of it's published games, compared to the latter which is a fully funded, publisher free PC release? In fact, this this is one of the points I raised in multiple foregoing posts, so please, try and up your reading comprehension before you try to engage people with your witless pablum. But of course, I know nothing escapes your keen analytic mind, so let's just chalk that one down to wilful obfuscation. Yes, but you're also verbally engaging in dialogic excrement right now, so forgive me for culling the opinions I pay attention to with more care than some Sony fanboy who finds any mental behaviour besides confirmation bias a complete impossibility. Who are these "people"? Support for Shift was EA's prerogative, since they're the one's holding the license and contracting developers to make games in the series. Slightly Mad would have to do more than live up to their name, by supporting a game that the publisher was no longer paying them for. What I was getting at is that the base product was solid. Compare that to Evolution studios or Polyphony who are on Sony's bankroll, and both working on first party franchises that serve as showcases for their respective platforms with development periods that span half decades. So yeah, looks like you have this shit down pretty well. And right, I'm "selectively," looking at critic opinions. But of course, you're a paragon of intellectual honesty, and you of course, haven't spent the last few posts selectively looking at resolution, or whatever other fetishised element you can think of like "time," in isolation, instead of looking at the experience as a whole. Never mind the fact that you're completely neglecting to address the most important aspects of my argument and myopically (which is so so out of the ordinary for you) focusing on things that you can pretend to dismiss with vague, prebaked retorts. I mean, what even is this?: No, you smug infantile shite, it's not like I've spend the last few wee posts explaining this while you putz about with all the grace of a giant, throbbing member.

Not sure whether this is contentious in comparison to popular opinion, but I really enjoyed the film. There were elements that befuddle every time travelling story, and they were really obvious here, and maybe that's why they were so easy to ignore, in a Back to the Future kind of way. I also didn't understand some of the decisions that were made by the characters, especially the tendency to homogenise identity, as if a person is "essentially" the same throughout their life, and their decisions are somehow manipulable because of this. I liked how that played out though, since the characters' lack of understanding about their own, and each other's behavioural motivations was actually addressed in the way Magneto behaves. The Quicksilver scenes were great. In other words, it was totally good in all the ways you'd want from an X-Men film. Also it fixed the fucked up Last Stand continuity. Thank cuntfisting Jesus.

Right, we should dismiss critic opinion across the board, irrespective of how well it might have resonated with us in the past, and replace it with your obviously more measured perspective, which seems to favour non-sequitur over reason, because that would be convenient to your argument. What does "user approach" have to do with bugs? Surely that would be developer approach? Speaking of user reviews being plagued, GT5 reviews - both user and critic - were filled with complaints about how the game used PS2 car models, and GT6 reviewers complained about microtransactions across the board, how the pacing was broken without monetising, and the fact that sixteen years into the series, there are still no damage models or deformation, either in the cars or the tracks. If by "user approach," or how many people on your friends list are active enthusiasts for the series in question you mean we should taking the populist road, we should apply that across the board. Of course, that would have us favour Call of Duty over Battlefield or Titanfall, Jeremy Kyle over The Wire, or Britney Spears over The Dillinger Escape Plan and on until infinity. So sucks to your assmar, piggy, that argument is bullshit. Right, I suppose you're speaking of the accuracy that comes with retooling PS2 architectural models, and refusing to do good by the "simulation" aspect that your series lives and dies by, because you're not putting in car deformation? Sounds totally legit. Once again, I have no idea how Project Cars handles in comparison to Gran Turismo (and neither, I suspect, do you), but from what I've read in, for example, EDGE, its degree of simulation is not only very realistic, but also a work in progress that'll benefit from the fact that the computers it runs on (ie. the min specs) are far in excess of the eight year old hardware in the PS3. I think we can infer to the best explanation, that if they manage to not totally screw it up, it'll avail that. But let's take your argument to it's logical conclusion shall we; let me spend 20+ years developing on my Atari 2600 and apparently all that time will have magically transmogrified my second generation console into a machine that can handle photorealistic imagery, and render these cars in a more accurate way than the latest hardware, even though it can't display three dimensional objects. Good going. The PS3 is simply limited by how many triangles it can display on screen at any one time, the ability of its 256mb of vRAM to hold textures, and the compute units that can process shadows, lighting and shading to a degree that we might call accurate. All of this of course isn't mentioning Assetto Corsa which is being described as the most realistic racing sim available. Which doesn't really excite me, since it's for another audience; I don't even know why we're arguing about realism here, since the degree of simulation available in these games isn't even going to be available to anyone playing with a standard controller, in the same way that you're not going to get the full degree of simulation out of IL:Sturmovic without the trackIR and a flight stick. In honesty, I'd probably prefer to play Drive Club or Forza over any of these games, but that doesn't mean they're not interesting or worth talking about. So pipe down sonny, and think twice before posting your ludicrous, reductive opinions on a place where they can openly embarrass you.

I'm just going to pick at random things in your post that are redolent of a lack of basic reasoning skills and address them: Gran Turismo 6 is sitting at an 81 metacritic, NFS: Shift is sitting at 83. While I have problems with the way metacritic amalgamates scores based on different rubrics, it does so for both games. So there's my answer on lack of pedigree; the developers have shown that they can make an engaging sim, despite the restrictions that the NFS license and the EA constrained dev cycle imposed upon them. For Project Cars, they have all the time and funding they need. For speed. "Photorealisim" is, despite your babbling, an outcome of the combination of the detail in the architectural models, texturing, lighting, shadowing, shading and all of the other things that a GPU does and that I can't be bothered to enumerate here because it would take forever. No amount of "time" spent in development is going to make GT6 a better looking game than either Forza, Drive Club or Project Cars, because abstract effort isn't as crucial to graphical quality as the power of the hardware. I'm not keen to promote the game, I'm just interested it in the same way I'm interested in Drive Club, GRID Autosport and the rest of them. Someone asked a question, and you were embarrassingly, childishly dismissive, so I looked to rectify the representation that game got in this thread. I'm not into Driving sims enough to crowdfund one, but I have taken a look at what the community are saying about the constant alpha release updates, the car and track models that are constantly being released with developer commentary, and the rest of it. I think that allowing your main constituency to be in on every move you make is an interesting and yes, transparent, way to release a game. Finally, "namecalling." Calling you a fanboy, isn't namecalling, it's describing your style of argument. There are two aspects to an argument that are important here; the content of the argument, and the person making it. When the person making the argument has shown a tendancy again and again, to misrepresent the situation at hand because doing so would favour whatever personal interest he has in one side over another, I think it's fair to call that person a fanboy. I'm not a fanboy in this instance, because I'm being fair to all sides and not dismissing them because it would make me feel secure about my console purchase.

The cool thing with the gun sounds is that they seem to vary depending on the spaciousness of the room you're in, but yeah, they sound a little underpowered on their own - they sounds fucking fiendish when dual wielded.

Yeah man, that muscle memory'll fuck you. I remember the time I tried to send a family email about my sister's birthday bunting.

I am too enthused by this film. Something Nolan does with those montages overdubbed with ominous voiceovers like the end of Dark Knight, and the first trailer for Interstellar, gets me right in the giblets.

I pretty much only play games on PC these days, which tend to be a little bit cheaper than their console counterparts. For example, I pre-ordered Wolfenstein: The New Order for £26.99 whereas it would have been £39.99 for the console versions. I will usually pay full price for about five or six games every year, things that I'm genuinely looking forward to, or that seem enticing and review super well on release, but for everything else, there are always Steam sales. In 2013, there were very few games, for example, that I paid full price for, except Bioshock Infinite, Assassins Creed 4 and Company of Heroes 2. But when you wind the clock back to 2011, I paid full price for Dead Space 2, Portal 2, Skyrim, Crysis 2, Deus Ex; Human Revolution, Battlefield 3, Assassins Creed Revelations, Batman: Arkham City, and I'm probably still forgetting some. So it really depends, there are some years that are absolutely outstanding for videogame releases, and I couldn't really call myself much of an enthusiast if I didn't oblige my whims in those rare instances. There's also the issue, recently, of paying a slightly discounted price upfront for games that you are helping to fund, for example on Kickstarter, or on Steam early access. Occasionally I'll throw in a couple bucks towards those, because that tends to be where a lot of esoteric ideas broach the gaming landscape. Kerbal Space Program and Hyper Light Drifter and Rust being a few notable examples.

Bro you seem to eternally be peering at the tea dregs in the cup of romance [/helpful].

After 234 pages on an internet forum, I'm impressed this the first post to introduce scat fetishism. Also @MoogleViper, it's not that weird she's probably just shy and thought that was the only viable conversation opener available.

That is weird. Could be she has mad jungle fever, I've heard that the random rugrats spawned by the errant American soldiers in the early seventies were looked at like designer babies. Maybe she wants to get on that joint

You do realise, that that's, once again, a misrepresentation, right? If GT6 does run at a higher resolution than "most Xbox One games," that's entirely because the One games are banking on the trade off between resolution and a variety of other things such as better physics simulation, different ambient occlusion, tesselation, particles, lighting models etc, which GT6 couldn't ever hope to achieve on PS3 hardware? You're taking one aspect (ie. resolution) that seems to be in the foreground in forum mentality these days and using that as the gold standard against which you measure everything. I've no doubt that Drive Club has incredible terrain and road mapping; I can see that for myself. But you're not gaining anything apart from a fanboy reputation by belittling the games that exist elsewhere. I've heard literally nothing but good things about Project Cars everywhere I've looked. Lastly, your implied argument that a console manufacturer's flagship racing game is more transparently presented than a game which is funded in full entirely by a fanbase that has paid the money upfront in exchange for frequent, sometimes weekly development updates, is self evidently a little wonky.

Actually publishers are uncomfortable with the idea of next gen exclusives because there doesn't exist a broad enough user base to justify the expense on games when they're going to be hamstrung by the fact that even if half the people the own the new systems go out and buy the game, that'll still only be enough to break even. Assassins Creed 4 wasn't on the 360 and PS3 because the developers had some sort of no gamer left behind mandate, but because whatever fraction of the user base bought the game on next gen consoles was never going to result in a profit. The same thing happened with the PS2 to PS3 generational jump, except to a lesser degree just because the highest budget games cost about a fifth of the capital to make that they do now. Obviously it's a hassle for them to port their games, but evidently not enough to prevent them from bothering to do so - especially since all the assets and design work are already there, and your work is going to consist mainly of transferring the code base to another API. The benefit of a collective user base of around 170 million across 360 and PS3 can't be understated to publishers bankrolling big budget blockbusters, even if only a fraction of those people actually buy the game in question. This E3 is when we'll likely see announcements for next gen exclusives - it's a pretty safe bet at the rate the Xbone and PS4 are selling that there will be a sufficient number out there by holiday 2015, combined with the fact that people who just bought a new console are looking for new games to play amidst a small library, that your triple-a title will sell the amount you need to recoup costs. I don't really like it being this way, since it means that the versions of the games that come out on the next gen consoles and PC can't really use the power of those systems for any gameplay reasons, since those same features would be unavailable to people experiencing the game on the previous gen. So these games are going to be designed with the constraints of the previous generation of consoles in mind.

Lol, that's a little bit of a misrepresentation. Project Cars is basically Slightly Mad Studio's response to having a fixed deadline and gameplay constraints with the NFS games they developed. The degree of simulation in that game is pretty insane (as well as fully customisable), and it looks pretty good too. At the moment, it's a work in progress, as well as being crowdfunded, which just means that there's a degree of transparency to the proceedings in development that there isn't for drive club or Forza (hence the...well, bullshots, or representations of the game selected specifically for marketing purposes). The tracks have been stripped down, unfinished versions, which is expected with a game in alpha, but I've never seen anything as spectacular as the car, lighting and reflection models in that game. Looks goood man.

The Far Cry games don't tend to be "system sellers," likely because they're ubiquitous in the platforms they appear on, whereas you have to buy a Nintendo platform to play Nintendo games; they use well designed games to sell mediocre and bafflingly ill conceived hardware, and you can see with respect to how well the Wii U is doing that the law of diminishing returns is catching up with them. They didn't make a full game out of Blood Dragon because that whole add-on or whatever you want to call it was the most one note joke in the history of the medium. I really enjoyed Far Cry 2 and 3, although I played the second one in its entirety while listening to podcasts, so most of the narrative and tone was lost on me (which is what the Idle Thumbs guys love it so much for), and the third was almost offensively stupid, but still such a joy to play. I'm kind of fatigued on open world shooters for the moment though, I might give this one a pass.

I think mostly the fact that it's not out until the 20th and like literally every other game AAA game there are review embargoes until release day.

This looks fantastic

Dude, I just just was about to post the Chrono Trigger music. Twelve years after I first played it, it's still my favourite game of all time.

@Charlie, there's something to be said for transparency though, and there is a degree of backhandedness to presenting your game one way and then equivocating for why it isn't the way you'd said it was going to be, a few weeks before launch, where for most people, just the inertia of having preordered it will be enough to keep them from reconsidering. It's interesting to see your side of the argument sometimes because you often tend to advocate for the side of the businesses rather than the consumer, and I understand that PR wants to show no weaknesses, especially for a game that reportedly cost $500 million to make, but it's still fucking annoying.

Why? If there's less consumer spending, it follows that consumer electronics brands are going to suffer? Apple are different because the variety of services they provide (iTunes, Apple TV etc) are palatable to a huge range of people, and they've been building that cachet since before the recession hit. Are you going to buy a device that's made to run with the ecosystem of services that you've grown accustomed to over the last few years, or are you going to say "fuck it, I have no cash, but I'm going to take a gamble on a windows phone"? Apple products tend to be reliable, and in an austere economic environment, what better incentive do people have to buy their stuff? And I wasn't pegging everything on the recession, I meant that it was a factor that had to be taken into consideration. People were just spending less money because they had less money to spend.