Mr Party Hat

I've picked this back up too. We're such sheep.

I gave up at the first Seraphite encounter last time. My daughter had just been born, I was sleep deprived, and the thought of being hunted like that wasn't my idea of a happy place.

Now that I know where the story is going, and I've knocked the difficulty down, it's more enjoyable. If that's the word. (It's not.)

I remember Perfect Dark got a BBFC 18 rating when it first came out. I was never sure why, because it's the same sort of thing as Goldeneye.

I reinstalled Death Stranding last night, after writing it off early on. (I needed to make Sam do a poo, but he refused to stand up. That's not a problem I need in my leisure time.)

I had been trying out Skull and Bones after it landed on PS Plus, and god that's a depressing game. It's Shareholder Meeting, the Videogame: Focus Group Edition. Every box mind-numbingly ticked, every system developed separately into some terrible Frankenstein's monster whose only aim is to make money.

The sheer calculated awfulness of it all made me reinstall Death Stranding. Because whatever I think of Kojima, here's a game that exists because its creator had a story to tell. A game that has no target demographics, skin packs and season passes. A game that, last night, made me spend 5 minutes packing someone's bag for them, and then immediately restart when he fell over and died.

On second thoughts, maybe lootbox pirates aren't so bad.

The new Pro Controller is great, but yes it's bloody annoying that you're basically forced into buying it. Makes the whole thing a £500 affair.

It's got a lovely matte texture, and the sticks are the best I've ever used. They don't quite touch the sides when you push them all the way, which feels super smooth.

Another mad round of layoffs at Microsoft. Alongside all the job losses, Everwild (Rare) and the new Perfect Dark have been cancelled.

There’s a lot of negative opinion online about this, although these two feel like games from the mad days before Xbox got their act together. They’re Halo Infinite-era vapourware, made when big announcements at E3 were all the rage. Now that we’re getting an actually impressive flow of games on Game Pass, the cancellation of these two might just be the final farty tailwind of a bygone era.

Got to wonder if Rare are done for now though. The level of corporate mismanagement over the last ten years with all these acquisitions has been mad.