Thrik

I disagree and think it looks lovely. Of course, bear in mind that this is extremely early footage of a game that's barely begun development and isn't due to come out until the end of 2016. I think that the characters are already looking great, but the environments clearly have a long way to go — but I still like the aesthetic, which I guess maybe you just don't. Hopefully they'll be innovating and not just retreading what they did with their 90s platformers, but the tone of the Kickstarter and surrounding media seems to imply that they're carving a new path this time rather than reusing that old collection-heavy formula. Additionally, these guys are pretty much the creme of the Rare crop so I'm quite optimistic that there'll be some splendid quality oozing into this. One thing that I'm really happy about is that because it broke its £1.5m stretch goal, we get live instruments and orchestra in the soundtrack. It's being put together by not just one but three of Rare's best composers, which will hopefully be a wonderful collaboration. David Wise is my favourite and he's put together an early demo track: http://davidwise.bandcamp.com/track/yooka-laylee-jungle-challenge But there's also these guys on the job: I can see how this is all probably lost on those who weren't total Rare/Banjo addicts in the 90s.

Rocking a 'muscle' top and someone else's glasses... for some reason.

Oh... I thought it was something like that but when I followed it back to the beer thing I just got confused. If that's what happened then I'm sorry to hear that. Dates... pain in the arse sometimes!

I tried to figure out what the heck you were talking about with this trio of posts but couldn't. You should be less cryptic!

Adjustable difficulty has been a mainstay in most genres for many years, because what one person considers a horribly designed frustrating mess is an absolute blast for someone else. It's a tricky issue in adventure games, how do you scale logical puzzles? Monkey Island 2 and 3 tried but it felt a bit shit missing bits of the game altogether. Also, peoples' ability to figure out puzzles varies dramatically and for some it doesn't matter how many contextual hints you throw in there unless you practically spell it out — not even taking into consideration the highly common phenomenon of somebody just completely overlooking an obvious logical solution that's within their grasp to deduce and never, ever figuring it out without help. I like that Nintendo has started basically giving players an on-demand cheat mode, such as the game playing itself or providing a ridiculously effective power-up. Casual players and children love it. This isn't really mechanically possible with adventure games, but an in-game hint/walkthrough system is and caters perfectly to that very popular demand for 'just get me past this bit'.

Sounds like an average night out in Nottingham.

Well, at least in your retirement years you have a good reminisce about those days spent tracking down elusive collectable shits.

What's really weird is that even Assassin's Creed 2 wasn't this bad, which remains the last AC I truly got into. At the very least, you'd have the civilian NPCs saying something reactionary as you leap around rather than just standing there as if you're a pigeon that just landed to eat some crumbs and have a shit.

Well, I'm going to be honest, it looks pretty rough to me. The visuals seem like a step down from Unity, although that might be compounded by the fact that I find the architecture pretty unappealing in the first place. The wide-open roads don't do it any favours either, producing swathes of lifeless empty space that is basically only ever going to be a pain in the ass to traverse across on foot. The gameplay also looks like yet more of the same old shit, and I definitely wasn't seeing any super-exciting storyline that people will be talking about for generations to come. Do Ass Creed games even bother with story now, aside from 'these assholes hate those assholes so take them down before they ruin the world'?

Our Conservatives in the UK just got elected in and all of the other significant party leaders resigned on the spot. My Facebook has been an inferno of people dissing those who voted them in and people dissing those who didn't vote at all. Also, the Scottish National Party just decimated Scotland's political seats by taking something like 80% of the region. My feelings about the parties aren't particularly strong, but one thing I don't like about the Conservatives is their intention to do away with the EU-wide human rights law and also increase the jurisdiction of government web monitoring and control — under the guise of defeating terrorism, of course. Sounds eerily similar to your Canadian counterparts. I hope it doesn't come to fruition.

Watched it. For fuck's sake.

Bloody hell, isn't there an article somewhere? I can't get my fix of hot Kojima gossip while I'm at work!

Twinings English Breakfast is splendid and the only tea I will drink, which is pretty much the end of that matter.

The movie industry realised the demand for that quite some years ago, I too hope the games industry follows suit.

Some details might net some good advice, although my initial thinking would be to accept and get the hell out ASAP, because if they're willing to do that then they're obviously bastards you don't want to be entrusting any kind of long-term future to. I might be making mistaken assumptions about the situation though. I assume your terminology means that they offered a permanent salary considerably lower than what they initially implied and therefore you expected.

Spring outage? Elabor8 m8.

Lol. I did have a look at a bunch of pages in that thread, and while it definitely took me back to my days of observing obsessive threads on forums about Lost I think that we're looking at coincidences. Some of it seems odd, but the scale of what's being suggested seems far-fetched even for a Kojima prank. Also I'd say that a lot of steam was taken out of it by the revelation that the doctor in MGS5 was modelled after some Japan-based actor who looks much closer to the virtual incarnation. It is all quite funny though, and I'll probably look again in a week or two once they've finished going crazy over the possibilities.

Looking for action? Unless it's an unnecessarily elaborate made-up excuse for breaking things off.

I think people really just mean keyboard controls. The camera-relative mode was even worse than the tank controls due to them not elegantly handling camera switches and more fiddly bits of the environment; it was playable, but it was far from a great implementation. I mean I actually grew to like the tank controls and now use them over the mouse-based alternative, but I think that what people really wanted all along was the ability to point and click. As for obsoletion, I'd say that the Metal Gear Solid 2 (Substance) and 3 (Subsistence) re-releases definitely render the originals pointless because they really are pretty much exactly the same games but in higher resolution and with some frame rate improvements. While I do enjoy more extensive remasters, my favourite ones are actually those that preserve the game apart from those universal technical limitations of the time — a bit like remastering a film for Blu-ray for the higher fidelity, but not messing around with the colour grading, special effects, etc.

Having also been bullied, while I agree that it has almost certainly made me a much stronger person with skills in various areas far more developed than many of my peers due to my time spent working on them as a kid and teenager, it's also had lasting effects on my confidence and ability to truly connect with people. I also most definitely did not enjoy feeling ostracised and victimised for 5-10 years. So while to a certain extent we must accept that bullying has been around throughout history and isn't going away any time soon, that doesn't mean that we should basically just leave victims to it and expect them to get through those years. They need support, love, kindness, and reassurance that one day things will be better. Sadly, many young people don't receive this, and as a result they end up either extremely psychologically damaged or dead.

That's the thing though, you can't really say that the ending you initially experienced is more canonical or should be considered the default. It never even occurred to me until I was talking to someone else about the game that things could go the way they did for you, and so if I'd never found out then I would have been wondering why they never brought back such a great character. It's a good job Human Revolution didn't have more choices like that, because it would have made doing a cohesive-feeling sequel even harder. I guess that like you say, the Mass Effect approach would be the only sensible solution.

That was one of the most exciting parts of the game for me. I realised quite quickly that a life was probably going to be lost if I didn't act fast, so I went into this super-aggressive sequence of attacks that was completely unlike the stealth-heavy way I'd played the game previously. I was victorious on my first try, but it was a very tense and seat-of-my-pants moment.

That's a pretty weird video, mostly because of the insight it gives into who is probably quite a messed-up individual. But really, it's no worse than any number of other things you can do in that game, nor is it as bad as something that one of the protagonists does pretty much the moment he's introduced to a guy's head.

So after a month or so of my ex now working in the same company and building as me, we crossed paths in the corridor today. As I would with anybody, I looked at her and smiled, but she just walked on by in that awkward 'blatantly avoiding looking at you' kind of way. I'd kind of been dreading running into her and ending up in some kind of conversation, and had been OCDing about what I might say to her. While we ended things peacefully last year, it was a bit odd when she moved out because she just walked out without saying goodbye while I was in another room, despite us chatting normally earlier that same day and for like two months living together post-split — and that was the last time we spoke. I guess that her preference was to sever things weirdly for whatever reason. It's actually a relief that she doubled down on the rude/whatever treatment, because now I feel OK about just going ahead and ignoring her back, as childish as all of this might be. It's stress neither of us need I guess, but after years of being together it's strange stuff.