Will

Well done to you both! Nice to hear some good news at the moment.

There’s no reason to expect digital pricing strategies to be any different to how they are now. I would expect launch pricing on PSN to be at RRP as opposed to a small discount you get ordering a physical copy online. You’ll be able to buy top up cards with pretty much the same situation as you have now. I’d say if you’d have been OK with digital only on PS4 you’ll be fine with it on PS5, if not, you won’t be.

I pre-ordered a Series X on the off chance I want it by the time launch comes around. More than likely I’ll cancel it. Pre-ordering here was super easy, not sure if that’s because they have allocated a lot of stock or because Xbox is completely unpopular here. Probably a mix of the two.

Honestly, @Rummy, I’m not even sure I understand what points you’re making with a lot of this stuff. I like having this conversation with you but I think we’ll just keep bouncing back the same stuff at each other if I go into what you’re saying directly. Do you really think that changing the name of our stately awards is akin to erasing history? As far as I can tell nobody is suggesting we should forget the past, just that the naming of them might not be fully appropriate as things stand. Even if you take ignore any offense that could be caused, it is kind of weird to have “x of the British Empire” when there isn’t a British Empire anymore. I’d see it like pulling down the statues of slavers, we don’t have to forget it - it just doesn’t belong as part of public ceremony anymore. Your point with the Lions is what exactly? That because we have a coat of arms from 800 years ago that features animals that aren’t native to the country we can’t move on with anything else? I don’t get how it’s relevant to this discussion at all.

Seriously tempted by that! Looks awesome.

I don't think this counts as tit-for-tat erasure, nobody is saying we should forget the past, just that there might be better ways to move forward into the future. Absolutely we should keep the traditions and symbols where is makes sense to do so, but we can pick and choose how and when we use it. Personally I'm of the opinion we should continue with the good and the positive, and leave the rest for the history books. I found it quite interesting, and yeah I had seen that quote before. For me it's not about whether people care or not about the particular item, it's the attitude that people take to it. It seems all that discussion did was create outrage on both sides. Outrage because your traditions are under attack, or outrage because your heritage is under attack, no middle ground and nobody wants to listen to the other side. I kind of see it in the same way as the other talk, make some positive changes and let's move to the future without the bad side of it all. We do, but we don't have to be chained to it. Like I said, I don't think it's about changing history, it's about the path we're on to the future. I'd be down for this too, I don't think the specifics of how it eventually changes are important, it's the act of moving on from the bad and maintaining the good that's important. The Three Lions are hundreds of years old and I really don't have a clue how the original individual crests came to be lions or what contact people back then had with them. My (very) limited understanding is that they may have originally been intended as European leopards and only later become lions. I don't particularly see the relevance though, do the three lions cause controversy or anything like that?

The caller after you had a good idea to reform it: CC - Contributor to the Community CS - Contributor to Society CN - Contributor to the Nation The top two would be voted on and the Nation level would be those people who sit in the House of Lords (or whatever new name you might give it). I quite like this concept, think it would work rather well.

Nice! funnily I've started listening to some of the clips from these shows as they come up as recommendations via YouTube. Really quite shocking how insane some people are that call in, glad you weren't one of that group. I agree with your general point completely, but I do think they should scrap the "empire" part of the titles. We don't have an empire anymore and I think people need to move on from the notion that we do, that it makes us special and that we can hold it as something of a good thing. I think having these honours is great, and they mean a lot to a lot of people, like you say let's be proud of the country and what people do within it, but times change and things need to move on. It doesn't take away from it in any way but does show we're making an effort to move on and be better people. Going to give the whole hour a listen to now, as I think it's a really interesting topic. Maybe not your thing @Rummy, but did you have any opinion on the controversy surrounding the last night of the proms use of certain music? Feel like it's kind of similar to this.

Unfortunately they’re not offering All Access here so I’m not going to bother with one, with the games lineup I don’t see much point in getting one. Quite surprising they’re not pushing it here as people LOVE credit deals and it would seem to fit the market well.

There’s definitely something of a shortage at the moment as tons of companies are trying to buy laptops for their newly working from home employees. We’re having huge issues trying to buy them. I’m sure it’s having huge knock-on impacts on consumer devices too. Personally I’m always of the opinion to go for the best thing you possibly can and it will last you longer than equivalent lower cost options, pay half as much and you won’t get half the use from it. My previous MacBook Air lasted me about 8 years and I upgraded to a maxed out MacBook Pro which I expect will last longer than that. My Dad on the other hand seems to be always buying some crappy laptop that never solves the problems he has, but refuses to buy anything of higher quality.

I definitely agree it works better for some games but I think when your a fan of a particular game type it still adds some nice longevity to a game when done the right way. I’d also love to have the option in the F1 games, if I could do a season where it would randomize the tracks and driver/teams I’d absolutely love it!

Noticed a few other forums I visit have upgraded the software to the latest version and it seems like a big improvement (more so than other updates) - any plans to upgrade us soon?

A full 2GB smaller than the PS4 version! After all their talk on asset duplication savings talk I thought they would get a bit more of an improvement than that.

These things are really cool, though I don’t keep up to date with what’s going on with them. I wish companies would include things like this in retro collections and remasters to add something new to the experience for those of us that have played them before. It would really add something to things like Mario 3D All Stars if you ask me.

Yeah I don’t really know enough to comment on it. Generally I would say highlighting an issue should be allowed and encouraged, using race/religion/others as fuel to attack someone should be stamped out as fast and as harshly as possible.

UFC is not something I follow at all but good on him I say. Bring attention to the cause without any of the negative stuff that is all too often picked up on this kind of thing and is making people talk about it. I hope more sports people continue to push these things where they can, the more people that are aware this is an ongoing battle the better.

Amazon orders were open for about 30 seconds here... I GOT ONE! Time to start getting excited.

I’d totally forgotten about these guys. Got my GameCube from them back in the day.

That’s the big problem really. I guess I’ll have to decide between now and launch on whether to become a world famous streamer or not, can’t risk leaving it to chance like that.

I think I’ll get an extra controller and the charger but none of the other stuff. Will only use it for games so the remote seems pointless and I never game with headphones or have any use for the camera other than VR. Not even sure about the extra controller to be honest.

To me it just means that the games that are on both PS4 and PS5 are not truly “next-gen” and so it makes sense for them to be on both machines. I’m sure Sony titles will move away from this pretty much straight away, and third parties will follow suit as soon as it financially makes sense to do so as they always are. I get it if people are disappointed that the games are not at the standard we were expecting, it does take the shine off the new console a little and suggests it not as essential to upgrade so quickly if one of these games was what you were specifically waiting for. I don’t think there’s any reason to see Sony as the worst company ever and feel like they’ve lied to you and stolen all your money. The games are still going to be better on PS5, and you don’t have to upgrade if you don’t want to.

No idea on specifics but I know some of the people that do this for Sony, I'd expect there will be a decent amount of smaller titles available at launch in addition to the PS+ Collection. Anything that launched or was updated on PS4 after July 13th will definitely work as PS5 compatibility became a requirement for approval from then. I'd be pretty confident on anything worth buying will also work, but wouldn't be assured.

There is a lot of very cool things you can do, especially when you’re putting good money into it and own the originals. Modern systems are so much more powerful the emulators can read what is happening as it happens and inject different things at the right time or pull in new code for a while then go back to the emulator. You could pretty much do anything you could think of given enough time to code it. My copy shipped! Had to order it from the UK so quite expensive, but I’m really looking forward to playing all three of these.

I've never been a huge fan of the Final Fantasy games, just not really my thing. I really liked the look of this though, they're doing some great work on the title. Will keep up with what they're able to achieve as these titles usually give a good indication of what the hardware is capable of. Looking forward to seeing more.