PWB April 2023

Happy April, fools.

Play

Persona 5 Royal - now, I really like this. The characters are great. The story is great. The music is amazing. It has neither the slightly cringeworthy edginess of Persona 3, nor the underlying current of homophobia that marred 4.

But - it's very, very easy, isn't it? To the extent that it's basically playing itself. There are whole layers of stuff here that I'm not needing to engage with because I'm just steamrolling my way through with minimum effort. I'm not needing to pay any real attention to my Persona evolutions, I'm just evolving whatever I can and rolling with it. I never need to use support items. I can unga-bunga my way through most dungeons in a day or two. All the battles come down to using random attacks until I trigger an enemy's weakness, then hitting them with that until they die. I'm not even using the bonus Personas/items that the Royal edition gives you because they would unbalance things still further.

I mean, as a visual novel it's still superb; but I can't help feeling the balance is out of whack.

Far Cry 5 - peak open world nonsense that's just had a nice next-gen upgrade so it looks and runs really nicely on Series X now. I like this game's dedication to freeform chaos - your aim in each area is to raise Resistance Points, and you can do that however you like, whether that's story missions, side missions, collectibles or just wandering around blowing shit up. The setting (right-wing religious nutcases have taken over Montana) is significantly more subversive than any American company would dare come up with, and it's got a great soundtrack. Just really fun stuff.

The Lord of the Rings Online - glad to see a couple of folks here playing this, it's still the best MMO on the market for my money.

Want

I am currently going through the Garwoofoo Street Fighter cycle, with the upcoming release of Street Fighter 6:

. ooh, that looks good
. watching videos of this is fun <== I AM CURRENTLY HERE
. I should buy this on release
. Now I remember, I'm not very good at these games
. It's the controller's fault!
. Oh, this expensive new controller isn't actually helping
. Still getting destroyed online and not really having any fun
. Oooh, DLC!
(repeat)

I'd quite like Resident Evil 4 Remake but not at full price so like most of my friends list it seems I am currently dipping back into the Resi 2 remake from a couple of years ago. Still great.

Bin

The new Remastered version of Cities Skylines on Xbox has a huge bug which means you can't save once your save file gets past 16.32 MB (which isn't that big). Over a month since release and it hasn't been fixed yet. Very poor show.

I'm really really angry with the Labour Party at the moment, who seem determined to occupy exactly the same right-of-centre ground as the Conservatives. This week alone they have thrown both migrants and transgender people under the bus, and appear to be enthusiastically supporting all the government's bullshit crackdowns on stuff too. They are rapidly becoming a party I can't see myself voting for, however much they think they are the only alternative. I don't actually want these goons in office.

I'm fairly sure we had a healthy dollop of no Corbyns in the forum for a bit, with a yearning for Blairite cargo cult bullshit delivered by a man with a drinking problem obsessed with triangulating the votes of racist people in the red wall areas.

Well, you got what you wanted.

Its the Easter Hols now so let the gaming commence.

Play

Skywalker Saga - back on this with the little one, we only have one chapter/film left and the main game is complete, but we also still have less than 450 of the 1200 pieces to find and loads of characters to unlock so once it's complete the real endgame (main game) begins

Dragon Age Inquisition - This is my evening Solo experience. Actually really enjoying it even though I ain't that taken by any of the companions, especially the Elf Archer I just unlocked who I would say was outright annoying any time I have spoken to her.

Kirbys Forgotten Lands - Another of our co-op experiences, I told my kid she could have this as an Easter present sometime after Xmas, and she has reminded me every week about it until today. Never played a Kirby game but it's a charming delight what I have played and watched so far.

Bin

Console boxes. Got a load I am giving to my local indie as he has said he will give me some nominal in store credit for them, as sick of having them around the house. Finally trying to have a serious declutter, a place in the city centre has said they will give me store credit for my comics too so going to take them up on that as tried unsuccessful to sell some on ebay.

Want

Advance Wars - actually thinking I am going to go digital on this as feels like a perfect game to have readily available.

Retroid Pocket 2+ or 3+

Still really keen on the idea of getting one of these and they have money off again, although it's my cars MOT tomorrow and it's the first month of no energy payment help plus got multiple visits to each parent so not sure if it's a good idea, I do have a stack of Amazon credit left hence why I am thinking the 2+ as that will mostly cover that one.

Play
I've kept Elite Dangerous installed and updated since I bought it, though it's been out of rotation for a long, long time; but the kids (particularly E) are into space in a big way right now, so I figured I'd hop back in and see how much work would be required to get to Sol. Not as much as I expected, to be honest; I got the permit last night, and took them for a little tour of the solar system this morning.

Sea of Thieves is still seeing semi-regular visits, though scheduling conflicts meant a couple-week gap until last night, when we emissaried up for the Gold Hoarders and bumbled about raiding vaults and killing skeleton sloops & megalodons. As long as we manage to avoid PvP, this is one of my favourite games to just hang out in.

I've made it to St. Francis' Folly in Tomb Raider Anniversary. So far, it's all much less grand than I remember; my memory of Peru from Back In The Day is of scale and isolation, but each of the individual levels isn't significantly bigger or more complicated than one of the challenge tombs in the latest reboot trilogy. As I'm sure is well-known by now, they fucking ruined the T-Rex; I'm still mad about it.

Finally, I'm also occasionally hopping into Prince of Persia (2008) which I got for next to nothing in a GOG sale. It's horrifically poorly-optimised for PC, and the Epilogue DLC was never made available for it, but the rhythm and pace of the gameplay in this is just excellent. I'd love to see a decent update/sequel to this, I don't know why it was overlooked at the time.

Want
My Steam and GOG Wishlists are quite long, but there's nothing there that I'm really desperate to get - I use them more to bookmark stuff that might come up in a sale - and my pile of stuff I already own is just too big.

Bin
This horrible cold I've gotten. You always think you've got a decent immune system until a five-year-old spends the best part of a week coughing directly into your face…

Play
God of War - The 2018 one now. I'm playing on PS4, and there's no sense of it being "last gen" in any way. It looks incredible. Sometimes I just stop and look at these woodland vistas. And into this beauty stomps Kratos. Coming straight from GoW3 to this is interesting. Kratos is no longer a force of focussed, self-serving rage. Now he's mainly grumpy and a bit of a mean-spirited jerk. This was released at the height of the Sad Dad Fad that gripped gaming at the time, so he's a Sad Dad to Atreus, aka BOY, who becomes the focus of Kartos' grumpiness. I dunno, my relationship to my son is very different to Kratos' to Atreus. I try not to be so judgy and unreasonable, or to treat every mistake as an Earth-shattering disappointment, or every attempt he makes to connect as an insult.

Spoiler, but it is pretty early in the game -
Spoiler - click to showThe game really comes alive during the first hour or so when a man knocks on your cabin door and proceeds to punch you into a mountain. That becomes the first boss fight, and it's absolutely spectacular. It's as over-the-top as anything in GoW3, but the fact that it takes place in this much more grounded, realistic world, and with the more personal over-the-shoulder camera only heightens the impact.

The combat is very good, although I feel pretty under-powered for some of them, and there have been a few difficulty spikes, but those spikes are a part of the GoW series, so I can't complain. The challenge is part of the point. I don't think I have any way of playing Ragnarok as I don't have a PS5, so this might be the last step on my God Of War journey, unless I start going backwards or play that Ascension one that is supposed to be terrible.

Persona 5 Royal - I'm dabbling with this on the occasional free evening. It's really good and very stylish (it is manditory to always say that Persona games are stylish) and I'm enjoying it. I think I might have made a terrible mistake though. How Long To Beat has it at 101 hours for the story alone, and they always underestimate. GoW3 was supposed to be 10 hours, and that took me months.

Stardew Valley - More dabbling, as something inoffensive to play in the presence of my kid that doesn't involve brutal decapitations or sex dungeons. As far as I'm aware anyway. I don't know how the game progresses. I do like Stardew Valley, but I'm starting to see through it, and see what it's doing. It's one of those games that gives you a to-do list and lets you get on with it, similar to an MMO. The hook of the game only saving at the end of the day only makes it more compulsive, so the point at which you can stop coincides with the peak "I must water my crops" moment. There's a real "one more day" thing to it. The game is dominated by this to-do list. It's not relaxing, quite the opposite. There's never enough time to get everything you wanted to do done in a day so you go to bed feeling vaguely unfulfilled and anxious. Or am I getting confused with actual real life? The end-game of Stardew valley (and potentially life) is automation, so you no longer have to perform the actions that make up the game, which is odd. It is a very charming game, which is good because this sort of game lives and dies on whether the stuff you do is actually fun or not, because as soon as you break out of the grip of the all-encompassing race towards an ever-diminishing horizon it all disappears from your brain and you realise how ephemeral all your achievements in making cash, expanding your house, and giving gifts to uninterested women really were. Or again, am I getting confused with real life?

Want
I need some new shoes.

Bin
My old shoes.

PLAY
DREDGE - Liking this a lot, though it's not easy going - there's a lot of back and forth looking for specific types of fish, a chance that your catch might get infected with… something which means specific fish become useless for any quest purpose, sea monsters can fuck you up at any time (knocking out parts of your boat or, worse, sending your cargo overboard) and if you forget to sleep, the hallucinations start. Great stuff.
Vampire Survivors - Late to the party. You all said it was great. I played it, I didn't get it. I do now. Yeah, that's great.

WANT
I'm forcing myself to have a few quiet months to try and get a buffer in my bank account so, right now, nothing springs to mind. I guess Zelda, since it's now only a month and a bit away? Plus the time to play it.
A better brain - Thanks to a law change about making Germany more accessible, I've been here long enough to only need A1 level German to apply for permanent residency. I'm doing an online course at the moment and absolutely none of it is going in. Don't get me wrong, I'm quite surprised how much I do already appear to know, but a lot of it is just going completely through my head and out the other side. It's fucking child level stuff! It shouldn't be this hard and yet apparently, it is. Very annoying.

BIN
Nothing really. Life's fine, work's fine, everything's fine I guess. The war? Arseholes running the world? I'm not sure when that ever stops being on the list.

I'm fairly sure we had a healthy dollop of no Corbyns in the forum for a bit, with a yearning for Blairite cargo cult bullshit delivered by a man with a drinking problem obsessed with triangulating the votes of racist people in the red wall areas.

Well, you got what you wanted.

Completely unnecessary. I'm more than happy to discuss politics with anyone here but there's no need to make it personal.

Back on topic - I've also been playing The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap which is most notable for clearly having had no British people on the localisation team. Calling one of the key items "The Cane of Pacci" is really unfortunate, but I completely lost it when I met a dog called Growler.

It's pronounced 'Patchi'.

I'm fairly sure we had a healthy dollop of no Corbyns in the forum for a bit, with a yearning for Blairite cargo cult bullshit delivered by a man with a drinking problem obsessed with triangulating the votes of racist people in the red wall areas.

Well, you got what you wanted.

Completely unnecessary. I'm more than happy to discuss politics with anyone here but there's no need to make it personal.

Back on topic - I've also been playing The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap which is most notable for clearly having had no British people on the localisation team. Calling one of the key items "The Cane of Pacci" is really unfortunate, but I completely lost it when I met a dog called Growler.

If you think that's directed specifically at you, then maybe that says more about you than it does me.

Kier Starmer has a drinking problem. It has been supressed for years. He stands for nothing, and is attempting to appease racist red wall voters while haemorrhaging anyone vaguely progressive from the party. But all the centrist melts said he'd be great. This forum had some noCorbyning. I have little patience for anyone getting off the centrist bus at this stage.

Kier Starmer has a drinking problem. It has been supressed for years.

I've never heard that (although he is a rosy-faced fellow). Do you have any links?

He stands for nothing, and is attempting to appease racist red wall voters while haemorrhaging anyone vaguely progressive from the party.

Totally agree.

This forum had some noCorbyning.

Guilty as charged, although my concerns were always around Corbyn himself and his associates, not his actual policies which I generally liked a lot. I voted Labour in 2017 and 2019 and was very happy to do so.

I have little patience for anyone getting off the centrist bus at this stage.

I've never considered myself a centrist but I was prepared to give Starmer the benefit of the doubt. That didn't last long though, he lies as easily as Johnson does.

I hate to say this but: you were right all along.

I have friends who are Senior Civil Servants. Starmer's drinky issue will be weaponised at some point, it's a bit of an open secret in Westminster. The reason why it hasn't been so far is it's so ubiquitous an issue among MPs that lobbing stones at glass houses at this stage will smash quite a few and Starmer isn't really an establishment threat. Increasingly less so as time goes on.

So no, I wasn't specifically having a go at you. I can't even remember who the forums' Protocol Penguins were. I just have a really dim view of people finally coming to the realisation that we might all have to vote Green or shit in the voting booth at this stage, as the Labour right are almost as bad as the actual right right. They always have been. Being fucked over by someone pretending to be concerned is possibly worse than someone who just openly laughs while they do it.

So no, I wasn't specifically having a go at you.

You could say sorry for saying something he took the wrong way, to be fair.

You could say sorry for saying something he took the wrong way, to be fair.

Nah, let's just move on. And maybe take this discussion to the Drawing Room rather than PWB.

I could, that is true.

Sigh.

Anyway…

Additional BIN:
Have A Nice Death - Yep, done with this. It's not nearly as clever as it thinks it is, the levels are dull because of the procedural generation, it's uber-stingy with its upgrades and is generally just not much fun. Dead Cells is an infinitely better example of how the genre can be done. What a waste of nearly £20.

Additional PLAY:
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild - I never finished this. Got three of the four Divine Beasts done, then burnt to a crisp up Death Mountain and gave up. My partner also never finished it, but she got right to the end and only stopped because she didn't want it to be over.

We both agreed to restart it over Easter, knowing it won't be done by May 12th. To say it's hard going at the start is obvious: you have no health, shit weapons and the freedom to go to the wrong places pretty quick. It's worse though coming at it from the angle of having already done most of it, since you have that 'Pffft, I've done this before ' mentality. Plenty of swearing, especially on the part of my better half (she gets VERY frustrated very quickly when she can't do something that she knows she can).

We're making progress though, she's significantly further on from me (mainly because I get distracted by anything that isn't the things you're meant to do). No way I'll finish before TotK and I do wonder if I'm setting myself up for open world fatigue, but hey… it's still great.

I gave up on it when it became clear that the entire endgame involved those giant robot spider things for which I could never, ever get the parrying right.

At the risk of being told I have Wrong Opinions again, I never really loved Breath of the Wild although it was clearly very impressive for what it was. Just not what I really wanted from a Zelda game.

At the risk of being told I have Wrong Opinions again, I never really loved Breath of the Wild although it was clearly very impressive for what it was. Just not what I really wanted from a Zelda game.

Nope, not a wrong opinion at all. It's definitely an impressive game and definitely a great one, but it's also very much 'Not A Zelda Game' in the true sense. Truth be told, I prefer the likes of Wind Waker and Link To The Past over it. Probably a reason why this is literally the only Zelda game I've never finished (bar those CD-i monstrosities).

I love it, but never got very far through it. I keep thinking of going back to it but it just seems like such a monumental task. I don't mind difficult games, and I don't mind long games, but this is both.

Meanwhile I am enjoying 3ds Zelda quite a lot and I'm thinking that I might reply Minish Cap next.

To be fair it stops being difficult after a few hours, once you've collected some decent gear and hearts. I only really struggled in those first two or three hours.

It is challenging, for sure. Even when you're strong, some of the enemies can knock you silly very quickly. The difficulty is approaching it like anything but a Zelda game - you need serious patience to take down large mobs of enemies. In regular Zelda, there's some sense of being able to take on multiple enemies by rushing in, sword swinging. Do that here and you're fucked.

My issue with it is the same one I have in all open world games: don't put me in a world where I can go anywhere and expect me to go where you're telling me to go. This replay, it took me about six hours just to get to Kakariko Village. I spent most of that going in totally different directions, visiting towers completely out of the way and gathering side quests I have no chance of completing yet. And don't even get me started on the EX quests that you get right from the start with the Expansion Pass… though I'm currently dressed like Phantom Ganon in-game, so I won't complain there.

Update: in total, I've played this for about 16 hours over three of the four days of Easter. I've only just made it to Hateno Village, since I fucked about doing anything but the main quest. And then, when I got there… I went somewhere else on another side quest rather than continuing the story.

Fuck this stupidly open game.

(Not stopping now, obviously)

Additional PLAY:
Monopoly GO - Oh no. A deceptively simple mobile game that has its hooks in me (but, thankfully, not to the level of spending money on it). Goddamn it.

It only has Facebook integration though, and I don't use that, so a big chunk of the drive for me is missing (you have to be friends with players to unlock some minigames). That's annoying.

Play

I'm working through the post-game content in 13 Sentinels – a seemingly endless sequence of the "tactical" combat levels – which isn't particularly exciting but is a good "I have five minutes to kill" game. I don't know that I'll ever reach the end (there are apparently 999 of them), but it'll do until something else comes along to satisfy that short-burst hit.

Dropped off Paper Mario a few weeks ago, but I would like to get back into it before I forget everything that's going on. I've just finished the Dry Dry Desert, so things are still quite early.

I'm still dipping into Marvel Snap every day for a couple of matches, but it's not the battery-draining mainstay it once was. I've also kept up a couple of Isle of Arrows runs every day, though I think I'm at my skill limit (so much as skill is a factor).

Want

I keep remembering that Advance Wars 1+2 Reboot Camp is close, so I might be hitting up Crazy Mart's Discount Nintendo Codes for that before too long.

Bin

I've been feeling really rubbish lately – lots of headaches, very tired – so hopefully that'll get in the sea before much longer.

I keep remembering that Advance Wars 1+2 Reboot Camp is close, so I might be hitting up Crazy Mart's Discount Nintendo Codes for that before too long.

Speaking of this, I'm well aware it's about to be Zelda season (duck season, wabbit season, etc). I can get codes BUT a) they're more expensive because the game is a tenner more than usual full price, and b) I have to be a bit careful on how many I get in one go (so, if six people want it, a few might have to wait a day or two). So, get those requests in now so I can prioritise please.

I'm sure I'm the only one, but I'm kind of enjoying the occasional foray into the multiplayer for Halo Infinite. I only have the attention span for about three games on the trot, but I weirdly don't totally suck at it, and being able to select which season pass you want to work through means I'm not stuck unlocking the fucking hideous options for the fucking hideous new armour sets - sorry, armor cores. I've finally completed my Reach-era Spartan appearance, which is nice.

Additional Plays
Pocket Card Jockey - Yeah, I'm completely hooked. For the uninitiated, PCJ is a game where you are a jockey and race horses through the medium of solitare. Sounds straightforward enough, right? But on top of this are a whole load of nice little mechanics and a large helping of charm and humour. For a solitaire/horse racing game, it's needlessly complicated, but in a really good way. It's not just a matter of clearing the cards and your horse runs faster. You have to consider positioning, you have to try to keep the horse enthusiastic, you have to watch out for other horses getting in your way, you have to pick up the boost and experience cards, you have to hug the rail on turns and get clear for the straight. You have to think about what kind of horse your horse is, and build them up in the "growth" part of their life as a racehorse. Then when they retire, you can breed new and improved horses from your previous horses.

I wouldn't have been able to play this without Mart's efforts in grabbing me a 2DS from his staff store and going to the trouble of setting it up with a profile and accessing the estore for the first time, without which I wouldn't have been able to buy anything from the website. As thanks for this, I named my first horse Marty Horse. Marty was a good-natured lady horse who won a few races before retiring to the farm. She is currently recieving copius amounts of horse-loving from a large male horse named Lasagne. A fitting reward, I feel.

Fire Emblem: Awakening - Why doesn't anyone have feet?

Marty was a good-natured lady horse who won a few races before retiring to the farm. She is currently recieving copius amounts of horse-loving from a large male horse named Lasagne. A fitting reward, I feel.

Fire Emblem: Awakening - Why doesn't anyone have feet?

Rob Liefeld was in charge of the art direction.

I actually think I heard about it being something something similarly odd though, along the lines of them trying to make accommodations for memory constraints on the 3DS, and then only finding out halfway through that it actually wasn't as bad as they were expecting, so everyone could've had feet after all, but it was too late to add them back in.

They fixed that for Fire Emblem: Fates. Maybe they should have called it Fire Emblem: Feet.

I found an adorable interview with the game's art director Toshiyuki Kusakihara and Nintendo game director Genki Yokota talking about the game's lack of feet.

---

8-4: Speaking of doing something different, we have to ask a question a lot of the fans are wondering — what happened with the feet? (laughs)

Kusakihara: (Laughs) Well, they're there…they're just…omitted a little bit. The idea was to add a unique sort of deformation to the characters. As for why it ended up like this… At the start of the project, we weren't entirely sure how many bones and joints we'd be able to use in each character model. As it is now, there's a joint at the knees, and then there's nothing below that for the ankles and the feet. This makes it a bit easier to apply animation to models as well. We found out afterward that, with the 3DS, we had more than enough CPU strength available to flesh out the models a bit, add real ankles and so on. We were like "Well, if there's a next time, maybe there'll be more ankles…" (laughs)

We thought we could make it something that would work well with the characters, but now I'm not so sure. (laughs) So it's hard to give a real reason for it, but…well, I think it's kind of cute, though! (laughs) Isn't it? They look like they're wearing high heels. Aren't high heels the big fashion these days?

8-4: Did you get any feedback about this from Japanese players as well?

Kusakihara: Yeah, some people focused on the feet a lot. (laughs) I think if this was a game that involved people kicking and such, we would have put in real ankles. Instead, you're using handheld weapons for the most part, so we figured we could sort of omit some of the detail down there…

Yokota: We did get feedback about that in the playtesting sessions, but by that point it was like "Well, we can't do much about that now." (laughs)

Kusakihara: A lot of people seemed really preoccupied with the feet… Ah, well. (laughs)

https://kotaku.com/mystery-solved-why-no-one-in-fire-emblem-awakening-ha-466003115

Is that from here?

https://www.nintendo.co.uk/Iwata-Asks/Iwata-Asks-Fire-Emblem-Awakening/Fire-Emblem-Awakening/1-An-All-New-Fire-Emblem/1-An-All-New-Fire-Emblem-724239.html

It has the feel of an Iwata Asks, doesn't it? I've only really discovered them fairly recently. They're great. That quote is from an interview between the game's localisation team and the developers, though. I think it was published by Nintendo, but I can't find the original interview, only the Kotaku article which quotes it.

We still do Iwata Asks, except… well, obvious really. They're called Ask the Developers now (not nearly as thrilling a title), and they never do particularly well, but they're still a good read. They require a shittonne of work though, so I'm glad they're not my project.

I'm sure I'm the only one, but I'm kind of enjoying the occasional foray into the multiplayer for Halo Infinite. I only have the attention span for about three games on the trot, but I weirdly don't totally suck at it, and being able to select which season pass you want to work through means I'm not stuck unlocking the fucking hideous options for the fucking hideous new armour sets - sorry, armor cores. I've finally completed my Reach-era Spartan appearance, which is nice.

This is also enjoying a resurgence with the youngsters in my life, my 13 year old nephew is obsessed with it, and then my mate who has kids around that same age also play it.

I sent my nephew a shot of all the Halo games, books and merch I keep on display and the general feeling from his friends was that I was clearly insanely cool somehow, how the world changes.

I might get back into a bit more console gaming in the near future, as I've finally cracked and bought a new TV. Still running a creaky old launch PS4 (I can't really justify a PS5 yet - mainly I just don't think it'll fit anywhere), so won't see a benefit from the 4K outside of video streaming, but I am looking forward to checking out the HDR modes on whatever last-gen games support it.

I plugged in my PS4 yesterday for the first time in a long time. The sound of an actual disc spinning up already feels retro, not helped by the fact that the disc was 2Fast 2Furious and that wouldn't let me play the the movie before I selected a car and driver.

Discs are definitely starting to feel archaic. I found a Blu-ray of Inception at the back of a cupboard this weekend and realised we'd never seen it, so we all settled down and were enjoying the movie until the disc stopped dead halfway through and refused to play any further. Then we found a second copy of the movie on DVD in the package as well so at least we managed to finish the film even if it looked significantly worse than the first half. Should have just paid three quid or whatever to rent the thing on a streaming service.

I learned a while ago that discs can sometimes just degrade and stop working. The fault usually kicks in when it's getting to change layers, iirc, and there was a particular problem with a huge number that were manufactured in a particular factory (somewhere in France, I think). Half of my Phase 1 MCU movies just crapped out on our last rewatch pre-Disney+. Several wouldn't even make it to the menu.

If/when I do get a PS5, however, I'd still be tempted to go for a disc-based model - for now.

I still have too many discs to justify getting a digital-only machine.

Plus the option for second-hand and purchases away from the official walled-garden download channels is too important – there'd need to be a significant effort made by the big publishers and hardware manufacturers to bolster preservation before I'd be comfortable going full digital.

I learned a while ago that discs can sometimes just degrade and stop working. The fault usually kicks in when it's getting to change layers

Pretty sure that was exactly the problem, it was almost exactly halfway through the movie that it failed and it wouldn't play anything past that point. Very irritating as I'd only taken the shrinkwrap off just before watching, although I'd had the disc for some time.

I like owning movies on disc (and there is still an appreciable quality difference compared to streaming, especially when it comes to sound) but not if it starts to become a crapshoot as to whether or not they even work.

Don't know if it'll show up on yours, but all of mine that failed have a very visible brownish blotching around the edges on the underside of the disc.

Looked immaculate to me, tried it in the Xbox as well as the dedicated player and it seemed it was just DOA. No worries, as I said we did at least manage to finish the movie using the accompanying DVD copy. I just have to resist the urge now to obsessively check every other disc I own to see if any of them have quietly expired on me.

I remember reading that cassettes and VHS had a lifespan of about 15 years, CDs and DVDs about 30. So if you've got a collection of PSone games, go enjoy them while you still can, and then get started on your PS2 and Xbox games!

Over Easter our broadband was down for the day and my 6 year old was already confused about discs, for a start I showed her all her old disney blurays and dvds and she said "but these are just the films I watch on Disney?" - confused like I was trying to trick her.

Then when it did load she had no concept of the idea of a menu and I had to explain and show her, and then when it started I heard shouting that the wrong film was on, it was a trailer before the actual film.

Please excuse me as I crumble into a pile of ancient dust, to be scattered on an uncaring wind.

Over Easter our broadband was down for the day and my 6 year old was already confused about discs, for a start I showed her all her old disney blurays and dvds and she said "but these are just the films I watch on Disney?" - confused like I was trying to trick her.

Then when it did load she had no concept of the idea of a menu and I had to explain and show her, and then when it started I heard shouting that the wrong film was on, it was a trailer before the actual film.

How did we ever survive childhood

YOU WOULDN'T DOWNLOAD A CAR

I fucking would.

Regarding discs, we're old, guys. Our time has passed. The same amount of time has passed between today and the release of Nirvana's Nevermind as between Nevermind and The Beatles' debut album Please Please Me. Their debut. And that was released in black and white times. Half Life was released 25 years ago. GTA V was 10 years ago. Time passes quicker and quicker, the day night cycle seems to speed up to the point where it's becoming like a strobe light. You sit down for a breather and a year goes by.

A poem.

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I Have Started To Say by Phillip Larkin.

I have started to say
"A quarter of a century"
Or "thirty years back"
About my own life.

It makes me breathless
It's like falling and recovering
In huge gesturing loops
Through an empty sky.

All that's left to happen
Is some deaths (my own included).
Their order, and their manner,
Remain to be learnt.

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It's my birthday this week, and I'm not coping well with that.

I feel like I should apologise for bringing up the new TV thing…