Dcubed

Was lots of fun! I’m sorry I did you so dirty there, but I just couldn’t resist

Woeful performance. Should’ve just stayed disconnected

Right! Room’s open @BowserBasher Passcode is 333 I’m annoyed and need to take tonight’s failure out on someone. Fancy 100cc?

Mulligan?

Yo! @BowserBasher, shall we do our SMK race after GP3?

My ward is now cohorting COVID positive patients only. Absolutely incredible response from the team in such a short space of time as we moved out every patient into nearby non-COVID wards in record time. Though the Government has been largely spinning its wheels and doing sweet fuck all for the last month or so, rest assured that NHS trusts absolutely have not. I’m enormously proud of the trust I’m working for; their response has been incredibly efficient and effective thus far. We’re overstretched, understaffed and under-equipped, but the service is really stepping up to the challenge well. I’ve just been rotated out into the community (will be working amongst the District Nursing team for the next 6 months - which was always part of my NQN development plan anyway) and I’m feeling enormously guilty leaving the hospital at the time. But I will still be doing occasional shifts there and I have full confidence that the wards are being run by some absolutely incredible people that I am incredibly proud to say that I have (and still will be) working alongside.

Should be announced tomorrow. NDs are usually announced one day in advance.

Sounds good to me

@BowserBasher I’m available every evening this week if you fancy getting beaten by me

I do have access to it. Come on mate. Good choice BTW!

That’s awesome! Great to FINALLY see Jackbox Games taking the world outside of the USA seriously!

Yo yo yo yo yooooo! Friend Code: 0401-9926-5412

Even ignoring the whole COVID 19 thingy, if there's any game you'd want a digital version of in particular? It's Animal Crossing.

OMG! That's HUGE!! First time that the arcade version has EVER been re-released! We really needed some good news! Will be copping that fo sho!

I haven't played Hellblade, but I've always been keen to try out its binaural audio. I've heard some binaural tech demos with headphones before though and have always walked away very impressed; its really good tech that should be standardised at a hardware SDK level on all platforms, especially considering that most people don't have and can't accomodate full surround sound setups. If Sony are smart, this is what they should be focusing on with their DSP chip. Binaural audio is proven tech that works and works very well.

Sony have really fucked it with the lack of full BC; there's no reason why they shouldn't be able to make it work other than a simple lack of focus and care on BC. And that is, unfortunately, simply down to Sony's company culture ever since they booted Krazy Ken. The company just doesn't care about its legacy and it really really shows in the lack of BC here. They could've made it work reletively easily if they gave a shit, but they don't. Microsoft pulled off 100% Xbone BC because they gave a shit, there's no reason why Sony couldn't have done the same. This is gonna be costly for Sony; especially when their audience suddenly realise that their digital purchases have been disavowed by Sony (again!!) and its easily the biggest disadvantage they have going into next gen now. As far as specs go? Honestly? I don't blame Sony for being behind here. They were designing a console, while Microsoft were designing an ITX PC and Sony simply weren't expecting Microsoft to zig while Sony zagged. This whole thing with variable frequency is clearly a panic move, once they realised that there was simply no way that they could hope to match the Series X's specs; this thing was obviously designed to have a 9TF GPU that they are now trying to squeeze every last drop out of now (as per all of the previous hardware spec rumours which all turned out to be true). There's no way that Sony seriously intended to originally design a console that throttles itself dynamically like a smartphone; developers are going to absolutely hate this. Consoles are supposed to have fixed, defined specs that developers know that they are guaranteed to be able to work with; that's the whole point of a console! (And indeed, Microsoft made a point to go out of their way to state that their clock speeds were fixed; something that is a given for a console and something that they would only have bothered to do if they already knew that Sony were planning on allowing their system to throttle itself...). Sony are now clearly trying to push the limits of thermals within the chasis that they've now anchored themselves to; the fact that they're touting higher clock speeds than the Series X (and significantly so) is a clear indicator that this is a last minute move to bump up their TF number to make themselves look better on paper and less inferior to the Series X than they otherwise would've. But this is basically just a PR move, the system won't be able to maintain those clock speeds (it would explode and catch fire if it tried to) and this is going to really frustrate developers because they can't guarantee performance like they can in basically every single other console ever made (and now they need to test for thermal performance during QA too, to make sure that they're not setting PS5s on fire! Imagine how developers like Bethesda are gonna cope with that!). It also basically guarantees that the PS5 will sound like an exploding jet engine as well... The SSD solution does seem pretty remarkable, but also very expensive... The real world application is that loading times will be almost 2x faster than Series X, which is nice, but unlikely to be the tremendous advantage that Sony are touting it to be (especially for multiplatform games that will be designed for PC and Series X too). It also limits their options for external drives (which will be a big problem, considering the PS5's very limited storage). Microsoft have disrupted the console hardware game and Sony are clearly on the backfoot here. No wonder Sony have been so quiet, while Microsoft have been all guns blazing. Microsoft knew that they had the winning poker hand this time and weren't afraid to put all of their cards right on the table for all to see. This is a really bad showing for Sony, especially with this being their first real public showcase of the system (intentional or not, this is their first real public impression; like it or lump it, Sony really needed to come out swinging and they kinda swung and missed here). Sony might not even have as big of a price advantage as we were all expecting either if their custom SSD tech ends up jacking the price up even more... This is certainly a very interesting part of the system, with some nice potential. However, from my personal experience with Sony's headphone ear measurement tech (I have a set of Sony headphones that uses this same tech), I haven't really been impressed with it really. And the fact that it's only going to work with headphones (presumably Sony ones) at launch? With crappy TV speakers next and then proper surround systems godknowswhen in the future? I'm not convinced that this HRT tech gonna really live up to their hype, their current solution just isn't very good (and Sony's virtual surround tech with their soundbars and speakers generally isn't all that great). What does make me happy though is that they have a dedicated DSP chip again for audio. Throughout all of gaming history, time and time again, the decision to have a seperate DSP chip for audio has always paid dividends, so I'm expecting good things from Sony's first party developers in that regard. Sound mixing in PS4 and Xbone games has generally been fairly disappointing really; especially coming off of PS3, which had some real standout experiences like MGS4 and God of War 3. However, I get the feeling that we'll only really see first party exclusives and Capcom games end up taking advantage of the tech; going by what we're seeing with games on Switch, where most developers and publishers are cutting corners with sound whenever they get the chance (despite the fact that Switch has a dedicated DSP sound chip that is capable of some amazing surround sound mixing, like what we see in Monster Hunter Generations Ultimate and Luigi's Mansion 3 - if a game isn't made by Nintendo EPD, Next Level Games or Capcom? You'll be lucky if it has surround sound at all, let alone a good surround sound mix). Unfortunately, the truth is that only a tiny fraction of a console's audience actually has a dedicated surround sound setup, with the majority of people playing games on their crappy TV speakers; as such, sound mixing is often just not given much attention by developers (and is commonly not done well at all), because there isn't all that much incentive to do so. If you're excited for Sony's exclusives though? I'd be very excited for the sound mixing in their exclusive titles (and I suspect that they'll be putting a lot of attention into it too, which is great!). But apart from them and Capcom (Capcom always put a lot of effort into their sound mixing and almost always end up knocking their surround sound mixing out of the park), I suspect that the tech will end up going largely underutilised.

Pokemon Typing Adventure is good fun. If you like Typing of The Dead, you’ll likely enjoy it. The keyboard itself is also great and is one of the best portable Bluetooth keyboards you can buy. Also has some of the absolute BEST and most UTTERLY HYPE boss battle music of all time

Time for Sony to come out swinging. It's now or... well, maybe some time next year.

That confirms the rumour then. Next main Nintendo Direct is on March 26th. It's actually pretty late. Nintendo normally don't allow their schedule to be left with no announced release dates whatsoever; so it's possible that they might actually announce a release date for Xenoblade Definitive Edition this week, before Animal Crossing New Horizons launches.

Right in line with the rumour... So March 26th for the main Nintendo Direct then.

Nada. Zilch. None.

There's a new version of Smash Remix N64 out now; just added Wario as a playable character, amongst MANY new additions! It's bonkers how well it's all done! This definitely feels like the new Project M/Legacy XP!

Oh wow! That's so awesome! I was always a bit upset that the NEShow never got the big audience we were hoping for (full disclaimer; I was the person who edited and put the series together behind the scenes - I'm also the same doofus that appears in the Star Fox Zero segment). So awesome to see that we got someone new in because of it; it was clearly well worth the effort! Sadly we had to stop making them because of various life circumstances that got in the way (I went back to uni to become a nurse and Kaepora became a daddo) and I don't have the same time to dedicate towards making the show anymore, but it's nice to know that there are people out there that enjoyed it! Would love to go back and make more episodes at some point if time allowed for it and we could somehow get a team together again. Was a lot of fun making episodes, but I can't take on that kind of workload alone again right now. That's why I've been trying to equip the guys working on A Smashing Cast to be able to put together episodes, edit and upload them to Youtube without needing me there all the time to get them going (I handled the current set of episodes up there myself, since they were having a lot of technical troubles); and now it looks like Ryan and Co are just about ready to start getting it up there without me having to step in! So I'm well chuffed Really looking forward to seeing more episodes appear, with me being able to step back and just be a viewer this time!

I'm going for the same name I always go for in Animal Crossing... Craphole

Aaand, finished! All 120 stars collected and Bowser defeated. Absolutely amazing all the way through! It's bonkers how well it works! They've even gone so far as to redub the intro and ending to reflect Luigi's presence! Despite a bit of jank here and there, it works shockingly well! And on real N64 hardware to boot! Absolute riot from start to finish