The Bard

I know that ranking games is a bit trite. But the last week of playing this? Top three favourite games of all time with absolute ease. Cannot believe what they achieved with this.

Thanks man, after months of ruminating about it, that's single handedly made me feel so much better about it. Have no energy right now, but I'll hit you up for a chat soon as I get a handle on things.

@jayseven I feel for you man, it isn't even that bad for me - I can get by following my index finger across a page - and it's still absolutely terrifying. I'll try to get a referral, but I went to the gp and she told me to go to the optician. They couldn't find any nystigmus so the likelihood is that it's neurological. Could be myaesthenia, or Parkinson's from what I can tell. So could mean a lifetime of acetylcholinesterase inhibitors or l-dopa, with the side order of psychosis that it usually comes with. I'm hoping it's a simple deficiency of something. I know you read a lot, how're you dealing with wanting to read but not being able to? Will take you up on the drinking offer regardless!

So something weird's been happening with my eyes for the last few months where I'm having trouble moving them from side to side. I can't read properly, and have no idea what to do with myself all day. Doctors are literally the least knowledgeable people on the planet when it's not something you can figure out from sticking someone with a needle.

I'm being a shameful little shit and reading all the books and notes I find lying around for those tasty morsels of bullshit lore. It's actually remarkably well written so I don't feel that ashamed, but like, there's only so much zoological data you can read about fictional creatures before you feel your neckbeard growing in.

I bought this when it came out and I still haven't played it. Going to buy it obvs, so it can go unplayed until it's released for 4K pocket calculators thirteen years later.

On board with you on this though, one of the best rpgs I've ever played. Does the same thing Bloodborne did for action games, totally makes you revise the strategies you'd usually use in combat situations for games like this. Need to be so methodical, and think like a scavenger luring enemies into situations where you can inflict damage safely, use all your tools available and different ones for each enemy. Going into this after the last big RPG I played being Skyrim, it feels like the world doesn't just exist as a chain of quests designed to gratify my obsessive compulsion, but like an actual world. Obviously you run into the limits of the believability of that world in places, but its still better than any other game of its type so far. Big up mang, it's dope as fuck.

I got about ten hours in doing Blood and Broken Bones, until the quest with Keira. It just gets too demanding, especially when you're half an hour into a dungeon and your swords and armour break so you're chipping shavings off the enemies and they're taking ten minutes plus each to kill. So I pussed out and stuck it on normal. Legit can't wait for you to try Fallout 4 when it comes out. You're going to lose your shit.

I've got a couple of good replays saved, one of Nurburgring and one of Watkins Glen where I absolutely slew that shit. But I can't figure out how to upload 'em

This game has taken 40 hours of my life and I've done one campaign season. It's so so good.

I don't think my knowledge is acute enough at this point to even notice what those options would do. I do love setting the weather to thunderstorm and slipsliding a McLaren P1 around the azure coast (which I think is a fictional track?) The T80 looks super high end. I got this whole monstrosity

I know man I've kept as far from the genre as possible, but sometimes you try something new just for the fuck of it and it ends up being more fun than you ever thought it would be. It's the same with you and getting a PS4, and being able to try all those gaming goodies you never had access to before . I haven't tried something genuinely new to me for a long ass time so the novelty of this is tingling my giblets.

From the looks of it there'll be new tracks and cars free every month too. Just bought a fancy steering wheel as well. Really liking this, but it's also my first sim so I'm not going to have the worlds most informed opinion on how it compares to GT or Forza.

I'm teaching abroad for a month or so starting mid June, so I might be back just before the 25th, but I might also not. I'm definitely free any time in August though so that one gets my vote.

Tremendous

If yawning when someone else yawns is called a sympathetic yawn, then the tightness in my chest and the sense of panic I feel whenever Miliband opens his mouth in a debate can only be called a sympathetic heart attack. I don't have much flair for or interest in politics since it consists of supremely untalented people pandering to positions that no sane person actually holds, but that come out of groupthink, and which almost always exist only as a means to provide a set of contrasting policies to the nearest competitor. You can never really take either of the big parties on their word, and your voting decision then just becomes a matter of figuring out what the parties general ethos is, which is all most people are really capable of basing their vote on anyway - to be an informed electorate you have to have a decent, disinterested grasp of economics and also realise that not only will any incumbent government have very little room to manoeuvre, departmental bureaucracy and hung parliaments are going to make it almost impossible to effect any meaningful change anyway. To be honest, the only reason you definitely should vote is because a greater voter turnout better reflects the political dispositions of the country. But then, that's only a good thing if you believe that the political character of the country as a whole is good for the country as a whole.

Play it man, it's the best shooter that came out last year by a long shot. Although the following might apply; I'm having mixed feelings about TOB after having bought it on PS4. It's a PC game at heart. Opens up so much on a tactical level when you have the accuracy of mouse aim. But it's still really good.

Well if anyone wants my R9 290, I'm unloading it for £180.

Wav Race - It's the mid nineties. You play a Microsoft executive in this management sim based on real life events in the cutthroat world of audio codec development.

Wolfenstein: The Old Blood is out today. I'm on that shit like a dirty great rash.

Rand Theft Auto - Terrorise congressmen at the Republican National Convention by jacking their cars and stealing copies of Atlas Shrugged from under their bedpillows. Gone 'Ome - Find and decipher a breadcrumb trail of items left in the wake of your family's disappearance from the family farmhouse in Cornwall, leading up to the inevitable revelation that your sister is also your mother. Ed Faction: Guerilla - Play as Red Ed as he leads the disenfranchised working classes into misdirecting bacon butties into their gaping maws, and inscribing inanities into stone plinths after the inevitable election victory of Dickhead Dave. One pathetic gaffe after another. Hovel Knight - Play a first year university student as he desperately tries to shovel the years worth of detritus from his dorm room so he doesn't have to forfeit his damage deposit.

Pfft guy, I finished it twice in a week

Guys, what the fuck? You don't even need to get past the first slow-mo moneyshot of these dumb fools flexing in mid air to realise that this film isn't going to stand up to the intense fucking literary scrutiny you're subjecting it to. Just turn your brain off and worry not about why maths professor from Good Will Hunting shows up for five whole seconds. The moment you try to explain any of this shit is the moment it goes completely to hell.

Same here, had some excellent times with the N-E crew. Gears 3 was a better game, but by that point the series had gotten a little stale anyway.

Oh yeah, I think we only saw you for about half an hour though, and then you disappeared. I meant mostly the people that were there for three days and stayed at the hostel, most of whom haven't been on here for years.