Thrik

god yes

The whole independence thing has been quite interesting. I can honestly say that I never realised until this year that it's something a substantial number of Scottish people are interested in, nor did I realise that there's such a perceived divide between our states — I guess I naively thought that we are all one happy family and that any divides are ancient history. There seems to be a great degree of apathy concerning the subject from virtually every English person I've spoken to about it, in that nobody really seems to care a great deal which way it goes. Not to be condescending, but the seriousness with which it's being taken within Scotland is seen as amusing by a fair number of people I've chatted with, including two who are Scottish and moved across some years ago. Not so much because it's silly, but more because I think that most of us never realised it was such a thing. I just hope that if we do end up going with the status quo, there isn't some kind of weird grudge held by those who were in favour of independence.

I hope that there's some kind of cut-off on that, and that I don't look back on my whole life when clinging onto my final years and think 'WHAT A MORON'.

I'm still not sure what exactly this damn game is. I gather that it's essentially an FPS RPG with co-op baked in, but is there a central quest (like in Skyrim) with lots of side-quests? Or is it just side-quests without any real central pillar of story? And do you roam around this world or choose missions from some kind of menu? Just listening to people talk about it makes it so hard to figure out, but I don't want to ruin it by watching loads of gameplay.

I don't have an issue with them in principle, but of course the exact depictions of these things is important. I've played a lot of Battlefield games and I've found the series to be quite hands-off in terms of trying to make statements about which countries are 'good' or 'bad', and indeed the whole concept of Battlefield is that you play as either side — neither is depicted as stronger or weaker, the varying countries speak their own languages, and maps have taken place in virtually every part of the world including the US. While you could argue that perhaps entirely fictional countries should be used, a lot of the series' appeal is its relatively accurate depictions of countless vehicles, weapons, and equipment from all kinds of countries. In some ways the series has tread very close to the realm of simulation, and part of that is using actual countries and actual locations within those countries (albeit only very loosely recreated). I personally find the depiction of everything to be done in quite a neutral and unbiased fashion, which is why I find criticism of it being glorified propaganda and such — often from those who've never played the series — difficult to agree with. Essentially, a particular wartime scenario is created for each Battlefield game and all of that game's maps, countries, etc are based around that narrative. This has ranged from entirely real-life backstory such as World War 2, to Battlefield 2142's . And of course Battlefield 3 and 4 are near-future. I'll concede that the single-player stories for Battlefield are garbage, but out of over a dozen Battlefield games only a few have featured single-player campaigns — and they're really just token inclusions for the console crowd, pretty much just taking what was created for the multiplayer and spinning a story out of it. As for Hardline, from what I've seen the game isn't following the regular Battlefield formula and depicting all-out military action between two factions. Instead it seems to be more along the lines of things like Payday and Counter-Strike, and in typical Battlefield fashion I expect whatever is depicted to be somewhat faithful to what exists in real life. Even if there are valid real-life issues with police militarisation, I don't see a game being based upon the current state of affairs inherently wrong. The timing is terrible, but then the game isn't out until next year and obviously Ferguson had no bearing on its concept. I really don't know what to expect from Hardline though, because unlike all of the previous Battlefield games which were developed by Swedish developer DICE, this one is coming from the US-based developers of Dead Space? Weird. Hopefully DICE's involvement will keep them on a neutral track because I'll be deeply disappointed if I see any notion of championing police militarisation in the game.

We're running a challenge on my forum this month to create whitebox levels in Unreal Engine 4. If you have any mapping or modelling interest it's fun because you don't have to worry about the amount of time required to detail a modern environment and can just focus on pure composition, gameplay, etc. It's been featured on the official Unreal Tournament website which is great of them (Epic is really into supporting the community nowadays). http://www.mapcore.org/topic/17611-mapcore-ue4-whitebox-challenge/

How utterly absurd for British accents to be used for anything other than hardnuts, villains, and fantasy characters!

I guess you were expecting something that looked even remotely like this:

Did I ever mention that I fucking hate jets in Battlefield games?

That's right. I've never had a problem with equivalent actions on the PS3, but with 360 games I have frequently found myself trying to press one direction and somehow ending up accidentally hitting another.

I kind of wonder how many people are actually using/hosting the DLC. It's basically the price of the game again so I'd be pretty pissed off to get it and find that there are hardly any servers running it. I guess at least the weapons carry over into the regular game. The PS4 version should be a big step up for you. As someone who's played all the PC Battlefield games, I have to say that this feels remarkably authentic to that experience. Comparatively, I think the last-gen console renditions were good but very different games due to the smaller numbers of players and such. This shit is basically 99% 64-man servers and they're always full — the chaos is fantastic, and what has always separated Battlefield from other military shooters for me. I think the quality of the PS4 graphics and frame rate is commendable too. After struggling with the PC version of Battlefield 3 on practically minimum graphics and sub-30 FPS, this is like a dream.

I don't have any of the DLC yet and I've been playing just fine. I don't know what happens if I'm on a server where DLC maps come up though, I guess I'll just get kicked. I'll be getting it once I feel that the standard stuff is wearing thin, but in all honesty there's a shitload of stuff there in the base game. I should look into what the DLC actually contains I guess. I was delighted to see how active the PS4 scene is for Battlefield 4. I was worried that coming in quite late things would be getting quiet, but it's absolutely packed with servers and players at all times. I saw something last week saying that the PS4 version is maintaining higher player counts than even the PC version.

Wow, I was under the impression that this was basically the archetypical fad and everybody in the whole world stopped playing it after those few weeks last year.

Generally speaking, games make use of the combination of two directions being pressed at once to produce the diagonal action. In practice this is trivial to do and avoids the 360's weakness of it's stick-like d-pad allowing for ambiguous input where it's not entirely clear what the user was going for.

It's the diagonals for me too. I consider myself pretty accurate with my fingers and they're not particularly big either, but with the 360 I frequently find myself very frustrated with games where the d-pad is used for actions (i.e. not directional movement) and diagonal movement is rounded to the closest direction. Maybe there's a software factor at play too, but whatever the case it's shit and annoying. Really, to me it's quite a straightforward concept that a d-pad should emphasise a lack of directional ambiguity, and indeed virtually every d-pad ever designed has adhered to this four-direction approach. In fact, I have no idea what the mechanics are but the 360's d-pad does feel an awful lot like an analogue stick with a flat, wide top so you can't move it as far. It just doesn't do what d-pads are specifically good at very well.

Let's bring the tone back down.

I can't deny it, this game is absolutely brilliant. I'm glad I waited for the technical issues, extra content, etc to be sorted out because this is just taking me right back to the fun days of discovering Battlefield 2 for the first time. I'm surprised by how well everything works on the PS4 pad too, helicopters in particular were clearly destined for this kind of control. I'm still getting used to aiming with the stick but it's not as much of a departure as I expected from the mouse that I've always used in Battlefield games — I just need to master adjusting the stick with softer and varying touch rather than always mashing it in a certain direction when I'm getting shot at and panic. I guess my PSN ID is RyanJW seeing as that's what comes up in multiplayer.

Mario Kart's gameplay is pretty much built around cups so I think that it's a safe bet that there'll be new cups. Eight courses per DLC would be two cups per DLC, giving us a a neat and tidy total of one extra row of cups.

Close enough:

16 new courses?! That's a whole extra row of cups! Shame they're going to take their sweet time to come out, but I guess it's better than waiting years on end like with previous home console Mario Karts.

Can't complain. More cups though plzzzzz.

Stumbled upon The Universim while seeing if anything else is on the god game horizon. What a sensational trailer:

The soundtrack is definitely nice. I have to say though, the art style doesn't do anything for me. I guess they were going for something similar to the highly stylised abstraction of Journey, but it just goes a bit too far in my opinion. I'd much sooner that the buildings weren't all scaffolding and the lighting weren't so muted and flat. I suppose that if we were to think of it in terms of paintings, every screenshot from Journey is something I'd hang on my wall whereas I couldn't really say the same about Eidolon. This is exactly the kind of game where the aesthetics are a vital component of the experience, so if you flat-out don't like them then it's hard to really get into it.

Haha. Ah man, it just won't be the same with Kiefer.

I have no tips here I'm afraid. In the GameCube remake you can rob rations off soldiers. With that said, it should be possible to make that journey without being spotted or injured if you know where you're going (which hopefully you now do).