PWB January

Good to hear!

That's great news, really glad to hear that Wev. Hope she's comfortable and everything's been a success.

Nice!

Additional Play:

I've finally signed up for Distant Worlds 2, an organised expedition of somewhere around 20,000 players from "The Bubble" of human-inhabited space to Beagle Point, the farthest point away in Elite's galaxy - a trip of some 65,000Ly one way.

It's expected to take five months, with the goal of increasing the number of systems discovered by players to more than the estimated one percent it currently stands at.

I've already started making the 5,500Ly trip to the first of the many checkpoints, and today finally got my official roster number - sadly too far from a station to apply it to my ship.

That's great to know, dude. Keeping everything crossed for you.

EDIT: This is obviously aimed at wev, not your latest game progress aniki.

I assumed 😛

That's great to hear Wev! Send her our best wishes.

Elite Dangerous: fly 5,500 LY to get squashed by someone with too much time and their A-rated, Grade 5, 2bn-credit death machine, for no reason whatsoever. 👍

I realise that their (stated) reason for doing it is "for the lulz", to wind people up, to watch the "salt" flow, but honestly… I just don't understand it.

I provided no challenge, rewarded him with no bounty, dropped no cargo. I didn't even have time to finish scanning him before I'd blown up, so it's not even like I gave him much entertainment struggling to get away.

The guy in question has a reputation of being the most reviled player in Elite, for social-engineering his way into a prime position during a major plot event to kill a significant NPC, which is at least an entertaining story.

But he spent twelve seconds and a couple of missiles to get nothing.

How is that a satisfactory way to play?

Said it before, I'll say it again: some people are just cunts. That's literally all they are.

Wev - I'm happy to hear that Charly has made it through surgery.

Best wishes to you both.

Thanks everybody. She's being discharged today, which is normal for the surgery she had but beforehand they had been saying she might have to stay in a few days. Taking the kids to see her after school as I doubt the discharge will be complete until later on anyway

Wev - hope you and Charley are well.

Additional PLAY

Sleeping Dogs: Definitive Edition - Platinum'd this on PS3 but never did the DLC; the PS4 remaster was reduced to less than £4 (!) over Christmas so I grabbed it. Playing it again, it's surprising just how rich and interesting the world is - feels so much more vibrant, more alive than GTA. The driving is great too, the voice acting is pretty decent and the combat (which is mainly Batman-style melee as opposed to guns, though there are guns in it) is really satisfying. It's big too, but not so big that you feel overwhelmed. I'm really enjoying it, though I appreciate the irony of being reluctant to start a new massive open world game like Spider-Man or Red Dead, yet will happily dive into one I've already finished before. Oh well.

I cant even explain why but yesterday I decided to see if Planetside 2 still exists, had never played it before but wanted to play a fps with some immersion. I downloaded it and then spent a fun but hellishly stressful 2 hours on it, in which I got maybe 5 kills total. Its a crazy concept and can't believe more have never been done similar. MAG had a go but it never had the same narrative style objectives.

Anyone ever played this? Was nuts playing a fps on my pc again. Honestly don't think I've done that in potentially 15-20 years.

I played it a little bit, but I always found it more frustrating than rewarding; if it's anything like the first one, though, it excels in a squad, but is pretty relentless solo.

Yeah I couldn't find how to get in a squad yesterday but have looked up how now. A huge amount of my issues are my unfamiliarity with keyboard controls. Was finding it very hard to move and crouch as fluidly as I would previous. Although I always found pads more comfortable which is why I stopped playing TFC and Counterstrike roughly when Xbox Live started here.

Now that I have had a go I am going to watch some of the tutorials but started yesterday and a lot of it made no sense having no concept of the game.

The real question is, what faction are you? Vanu filth, NC scum, or the great and glorious Terran Republic?

I am the Vanu. They looked vaguely like a cross between Tron and Crackdown. The Community seems decent though, notice there is a decent tendency to get revived and that if you are trekking about people in Vehicles will come near and pause so you can jump in. It's completely unlike Battlefield in that sense so far.

I have a deep-seated and firmly entrenched hatred of the VS and NC from my PlanetSide 1 days, where they basically had an ongoing ceasefire, in favour of stomping the TR (aka My Team).

Additional PLAY

Sleeping Dogs: Definitive Edition

Need to write something further about this, purely because it's in my head - despite having finished it once before, I'd completely forgotten just how brutal this game is. Not in terms of difficulty, but more the story… as far as depiction of triad life goes, it's really not very nice. I've been tootling around ignoring the story as much as possible, stealing cars, learning new martial arts moves by recovering statues, praying at shrines, hacking security cameras, extorting money for loan sharks, beating up goons, doing street races and occasionally having to deal with people carrying knives/guns. Pretty standard, non-nasty stuff. Then, with nothing left to do, I jumped back into the story and

Spoiler - click to showimmediately hit a mission called The Wedding. Weddings NEVER go well in fiction, right? And sure enough, I'm outside when there's suddenly screaming from indoors. Turns out, the catering staff are all plants and they've slaughtered everyone. EVERYONE. Blood everywhere. Cue a long mission of combat, gun fights and escape with an injured old man.

It doesn't stop there.

Spoiler - click to showThe restaurant-owning mother of the groom, who was the local leader of a triad gang, wants me to find who did it. I find a guy, beat the shit out of him and bring him back to her. She ties him to a chair, grabs her meat cleaver and… fade to black. Then she tells me who he ratted on and I find HIM, chase him in a speedboat, kill all his goons in a fish processing plant (which involves 'environmental' kills using swordfish heads and meat hooks hung from the ceiling) and drag him back to her. She ties him to a chair and force feeds him soup MADE FROM THE LAST GUY. Then she grabs her meat cleaver again and there's a very sharp cut to black.

Fucking hell. That's not nice. I mean, great game, but I'd forgotten how horrible it is.

I really appreciate Sleeping Dogs' dedication to the grimness of Wei Shen's situation.

Spoiler - click to showIt's essential to ratchet up the violence and directness of the triad to counteract their humanity and their empathy for Shen, contrasted with the police force's slow, bureaucratic coldness; the "bad guys" care about Shen more than the "good guys" do.

Spoiler - click to showThe post-Wedding stuff is just underlining how loyal Wei is to the friends he's made – that he's had to make – while undercover, despite his obligation to the law. What's important to me is that the game doesn't seem to be taking any glee in it (mostly because Wei isn't), where GTA wouldn't cut to black.

Exactly that last part. GTA wouldn't give a shit, they'd just show everything for everything's sake. Here, it's not gratuitous… rather, it makes you empathise with Wei's circumstances. Watching him gradually become the bad guy doesn't turn you against him, because it still feels like he's doing the right thing. It's storytelling done right.

What a game. What a genuinely great game. And it was less than £4 in the sale!

I've had this for ages, and played very little of it. I'll have to get back into it, if I ever finish God of War or something.

Such a stack of shame.

I'm going to be pretty brief, Kingdom Hearts 3 is everything I wanted it to be and more, I did the Toy Story world today and it was a fun world mechanically but being there with Woody and Buzz (taking selfies with, no less) was everything. Now I'm grinding the rails used in Monster's Ince to transport doors around the factory, it's great.

It's made me want to see Tangled now, I was going to watch all the films in this game that I hadn't seen already anyway I just ended up not doing so, but the world was lovely (if more linear than Toy Story) and I liked Rapunzel.

Combat can be pretty messy, but I'm still finding it really fun.

EDIT - DJFJAGJGJSJGWNGWSRJGWRGWRJG WRJSGJWRSGJWRGJRWG

Spoiler - click to showYooooooo they just put the entire 'Let It Go' sequence in the game, AKAthe only good part of the film itself. I don't care what anyone says, that was SICK. This game is sick.

Tangled is awesome, far far better than Frozen or Moana. Please tell me Maximus (the horse) and Pascal (chameleon) are in it? If they also do the "I have a dream" song then that'd be amazing.

They are both indeed in it. I was so disappointed when I saw Frozen, man, what a bad film. Spoilers for the Frozen world of KH3 not the film itself: (although tbh, they are kinda' one in the same…)

Spoiler - click to show Thank FUCK those trolls haven't showed up, fuck me. Olaf has, alas.

I've taken so many selfies of me on this snowy mountain, it's very pretty. Who the fuck said this world was 'boring', they were wrong. <3

Never thought I'd be defending Frozen, but here we are: what's wrong with it? The songs are just okay, but the twist at the end (well, one of them) was actually surprising and effective in a way that I didn't expect.

(Same for Moana, in fact; though it also has the advantage of having much better songs than Frozen.)

Spoiler - click to showThey both avoid, to a surprising degree, relying on their female leads being rescued by their male co-stars; "true love" in Frozen being non-romantic genuinely impressed me, and Moana "defeats" the antagonist with empathy and understanding.

Songs were awful in my opinion, (aside from 'Let it Go' obviously, which is amazing) when pretty much every Disney film is full of ban..hits. That twist was pretty cool but the story felt rushed as hell with so many things unexplained like why Elsa has powers and who the fuck those trolls were (Fixer Upper is an especially terrible song as well just by the by) or Hans' completely out of the blue heel turn which just felt like they were trying to say 'look at us, subverting those tropes!'.

I didn't like any of the characters except for Anna and Elsa, Kristoff is so forgettable as a supporting character I had to look up his name because I thought he was Sven, I'd rail on Olaf but whatever, he's probably a big hit with the kids which is all that matters I guess, his (or Sven's) humourous moments never really landed for me. The whole thing was just so weak IMO.

I love 30-something nerds arguing that Disney films aimed at 6-year-old girls aren’t to their precise tastes.

(aside from 'Let it Go' obviously, which is amazing)

Let It Go has a strong chorus, but I always thought the verses were kind of unwieldy.

Sorry Alastor, Fixer Upper is brilliant, how can you not like a song that has the line "that thing with the Reindeer" (or words to that effect). I've nothing against Frozen or Moana, aside from that having two girls under six means I've lost count of how many times Frozen has been on, I just enjoy Tangled more (and like the way it turns the damsel trope on its head).

Gar, the old Disney films still hold up and despite some gruesome Disney Villain deaths, were a hit for all ages, no?

Let It Go has a strong chorus, but I always thought the verses were kind of unwieldy.

Dude, when Elsa said 'It's funny how some distance makes everything seem small' during 'Let It Go' I felt that.

Frozen just feels, to me, like a collection of bits. All animated movies go through repeated changes and reassembly during production, but Frozen was the first one where I could really see the seams.

Subverting the "true love" trope is neat and all, but it doesn't make up for uneven pacing, poor storytelling, an irritating sidekick, crap songs, and a villain that pops up out of nowhere because they suddenly remembered they needed a villain five minutes from the end.

Subverting the "true love" trope is neat and all, but it doesn't make up for uneven pacing, poor storytelling, an irritating sidekick, crap songs, and a villain that pops up out of nowhere because they suddenly remembered they needed a villain five minutes from the end.

This. It's just not a good film, whereas I rather enjoyed Tangled, and have seen Moana approximately 3,762 times (because it's my 18-month-old niece and nephew's (only) film of choice) and it still doesn't annoy me.

The 'bit' at the start where you can probably miss the death of their parents until the next time it pops up if you get distracted and look away for like 3 seconds.They fucking blasted through that.

I finished Kingdom Hearts 3, just going to work on the secret ending now and getting as close to 100% as I can. 12 years and finally I'm now in a state of 'no longer waiting on KH3, even if passively' and it's pretty sad, I always said it felt like the End of an Era and it does, feels like proper goodbye to the PS2 generation I never gave.

I think Kingdom Hearts 2 Final Mix is still probably the definitive Kingdom Hearts game on content and gameplay, but if you're a fan of the series the payoffs of Kingdom Hearts 3 are pretty damn satisfying and that's pretty much what the game is all about.

Didn't KH3 only come out, like, 3 days ago..?

Yeah, well, it took me 40 hours for that first playthrough. I imagine it's as short as the rest when you know what to do though.

(13.3 hours per day.)

…I waited 12 years for KH3, it couldn't be helped.

This is the man who's got over EIGHT THOUSAND HOURS logged in FFXIV, I assume he outsources his game-playing time to Chinese sweatshops.

I assume he outsources his game-playing time to Chinese sweatshops.

Maybe he IS in a Chinese sweatshop.

If you can't type and need help, Al, just one winky emoji for yes and multiple poop emojis for no.

This is the man who's got over EIGHT THOUSAND HOURS logged in FFXIV, I assume he outsources his game-playing time to Chinese sweatshops.

That's almost a solid year.

My maths skills are on fire today.

That's only an eighth or so of the time since FFXIV came out, which is a paltry 3 hours per day. C'mon Al, quit slacking off.

TBF that's not included how long he's spent travelling to and from Fanfest or watching developer streams

Tht's actually crazy that you do everything I've done in the game in 3 hours a day every day for 8 years, feels like I've done so much more.

Also, the expanation for this is to just not sleep. I even started nodding off at FanFest during the Piano concert but I've discovered years ago that getting caught doing that fills you with a free adrenaline rush and you don't feel tired anymore, albeit this is isn't the best method to employ at work.

Or just for your own general wellbeing.