The Bard

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.

Would have been tempted by this if it included CTR, since that game still hasn't been outdone in its genre, but I can get these games for about £3 each off PSN if I want my nostalgia boner stoked. The mainline Crash games are old hat.

Think this is second only to Bloodborne as my favourite Ps4 exclusives go, the only problem being that I've let it lie for a few weeks while I was playing Zelda and the command list and controls are so involved and deep that I almost feel like I should start the game again. Even a little bit of rust is really fucking with my flow right now.

Ah man really? Inklings are literally the only characters designed by Nintendo that I genuinely think are awesome.

It'd be perfect for u then wouldn't it you throbbing willy.

Yeah I went straight to 150cc. The other speed classes are a total snoozefest. I just assumed a 150cc victory would count as a victory on lower speed classes since it was that way on F-Zero GX as well as every wipeout game ever. At the same time though why would you want to complete it at the lower speed classes anyway? You don't get anything for it.

I'm traditionally fairly bad at Mario Kart, mostly because no entry in the series so far had matched up to the previous kart racing king Crash Team Racing. But I'm genuinely amazed by the level of detail, polish present here and the difference speed class and track knowledge make. Still trying to figure out my go to configuration, but I've been doing really well online with DK in the Mercedes with Triforce Wheels. Wish the Inklings were more viable in competitive races and had a speedier loadout since they're the only Nintendo designed characters that I think are genuinely cool. My switch friend code is in my profile btw, let me know if you guys are up for a few rounds online sometime.

Any of you lot played Rust? It's pretty much the quintessential one of these. Don't think it's ever coming to consoles, but it'll pretty much run on any old toaster.

The controls are absolutely horrific. Arkane have already responded and said that the acceleration curves will be "fixed" by launch, but that just begs the question, why put out an unrepresentative demo? Other than that, this game seems like totally my jam. Dishonored in a space settings.

I really want to get this right now, but I can't find anywhere doing a download code at any kind of discounted price. It's a total bummer - there is no conceivable world in which I could justify paying £50 for one game (that isn't Zelda).

If you're based in Taiwan the best place to get it from is probably Aliexpress. Just type in conductive foam in the site's search function and take your pick.

I wants. I not has spare £40.

Yeah. It's also that I just got this thing and I don't want the initial excitement on getting any piece of hardware to be squandered as a result of not having anything to play on it. My Vita lasted me a long time because even though the only launch game I bought was Wipeout, there was also a massive catalogue of PSP and PsOne games available for it that I'd never played, and it helped keep the console in my hands during the initial launch months. Shovel Knight is an outrageously good game. Haven't played it since 2014 when the first campaign came out, but anyone who hasn't played it yet but is looking for games to play on Switch should be all over it. I haven't even checked out the plague knight and spectre knight campaigns yet so my recommendation is based on just a third of the game. Worth every penny.

So I straight up pumped 110 hours into Zelda over the span of ten days while still somehow managing to work a full time job. Not sure if there's a more superlative endorsement of a game I can give than that. The silence around the console right now is just thunderous though. I kinda can't deal with paying £50 for a game like Mario Kart, especially when I got Resi 7, Nier Automata, Dishonored 2, Prey preorder etc for under £30 each at, around or before launch. The biggest problem around the console is the unwillingness for Nintendo to give the end consumer a concession when they buy a game digitally. Even though it's for obvious reasons, it just means that games are prohibitively priced for anyone who can look to competing experiences when there isn't something with the pedigree of BoTW that you absolutely have to play. Virtual Console right now would be the perfect thing to tide me over to Splatoon 2 because cheap, legitimate access to a huge well of classic experiences is something literally no platform holder can match Nintendo on, and not having it ready at launch when any old person can download a flawless Gamecube and Wii emulator on PC, is such a colossal oversight.