DANGERMAN

I could happily have an entire episode of Tormund trying to win Brienne round 😄

their tv stuff is good, but considering it;s Amazon and they make £10mill a second the list of films they've managed to buy is absolute shit I watched a couple of other films yesterday too. Glass was decent but it felt a bit pointless. It wasn't bad, which makes a nice change, but it felt like it had built up to something, tried to pull a switch, but the reveal wasn't interesting enough I also watched The Sisters Brothers. I'd heard a lot about it, there seemed to be a bit of a buzz about it, which has since died off. It's pretty good, possibly the best of the 3 films I watched yesterday. It's slightly meandering, which I suspect is the point. The Sisters brothers are hired killers, chalk and cheese. They're hired to kill a particular man, Jake Gyllenhaal is their scout who's already on the trail of the guy, and as the story progresses you find out why, and see the characters change a bit. It's good, not the best western ever, and it seems to struggle to find a balance between humour and its more gritty tone, which is probably a consequence of hiring John c Reiley

I've not watched that yet but I've heard it's awful

one for @wiivo 2.0 I think. I've just watched a film called Arctic starring Mads Mikkelson. I was half expecting it to just be The Martian but set on earth, but it is it's own thing. The synopsis I read is that a man is stranded in the arctic, and just when he thinks he's about to be rescued things go wrong, which is pretty much what the film is. It's very quiet though, barely any speech, maybe 1 conversation. It's good, maybe not amazing but I enjoyed it a lot

I installed the ray traced version of Quake 2 on my pc today. Ray tracing, for those that don't know, essentially treats light as though it's real, so it bounces off every surface. This means, theoretically, reflections are accurate, and you get lighting looking real rather than a candle lighting up an entire room, even behind objects. The problem is to do this requires a lot of maths, the latest Nvidia cards (RTX) have a core dedicated to doing this, doing this on a traditional card will use the resources of the card. That means even something like Quake 2, which came out while I was at school, will run at 17fps on a GTX1080 if you try to run it at 1080p, I dropped it to 720p and managed to get over 30fps I'm going to put them in spoilers, but here's a few videos of it working. First up the game without ray tracing turned on. This is the vulkan version of the game, so it has some modern touches (I don't think the window that smashes was as transparent), but you can see the laser beam is a light source, it did this even back in the day but I don't think it casts shadows, so it lights up things but the world doesn't react the way it would to real light. You can also see how lit the hole where the armour is, and how the grunt hidden in an alcove is very visible next is the same section with ray tracing on. You can see how dark the alcove with the armour is, how the grunt is hidden, and how dark areas can be lit up by the beam and finally the reflections. These aren't great, you can see that they're accurate, but because the game wasn't built with them in mind the surface of the water isn't transparent at all, so you're basically walking on a mirror (Quake guy has no body). When I find the secret in the water you can see that it looks like the water emits a green glow, but as I leave the area it's clearer that the green is a texture on the walls, , which is how it was faked back in the day. You can see the silencer I pick up briefly lit by the laser as it travels past it, before going dark because the light is behind it. You can also see the light from the exploding barrels at the end create a slight shadow on the rear of the boxes, where the light created wouldn't hit

here's the thing though, I don't know you from Gtm, I haven't posted on there in over a decade, yet your posts read the same to me as they do to people who did know you from there. I didn't know your old username, I don't know your history, but you still come off a certain way to me. If people new and old all read your posts the same way, surely that implies the issue is with your posts. I'm willing to believe you don't mean them how they come across, but it's something only you can fix I think

@OCH I'm still not seeing a proper explanation as to how you've been misunderstood, which does seem to be a common trait of your posting. You get pulled up on something then claim to be misunderstood, but never walk it back and make yourself understood. Unless something changes this is just going to keep happening, which isn't enjoyable for anyone anyway, I'm sure we've all got better things we could be doing on a bank holiday than arguing on the internet 😄

I laughed almost all the way through that. It also made my rape of Jennifer Lawrence look positively gentlemanly and I think graph paper is how Nintendo originally designed Mario levels (plus Riley will fucking love that graph paper)

@OCH feel free to explain it to us if we've misunderstood. I'll be honest, I'm not seeing another way of reading it but if I have misunderstood I'd happily retract I would also say, as I've said before, making statements like "this is the business model you all brought into being.", particularly with how you prefaced it, is only going to illicit a certain response

I know I'm going to regret this, but how is that any different to anyone else? There's plenty of us who don't like this kind of model. It strikes me that by buying this game but attacking other people for it is massively hypocritical. Also, "prior to my purchase", the game isn't out, so you're supporting preorder culture. Isn't one of the series' key characters locked behind a pre-order bonus? If you want to be above it all put your money where your mouth is and don't buy the game

Anyone else have a bit of a block when it comes to playing games out doors? I'm sat in the park enjoying the sun, my kindle is flat so I've taken an analogue kindle with me. I was going to take the Switch, but there's something about playing games in public I hate

It looks a good build to me. The cpu is a difficult one. If the rumours are true about the cpu in the next consoles we really might all have to upgrade

there's definitely an element of that with some of them. I think a lot of the old arcade games (Simpsons for example) had that problem, you felt like the odds were so stacked against you that it was less about skill and more about luck Streets of Rage 2 (and a few other games) had enough of a moveset to them that there was skill to it. timing was important, reading AI behaviour, and learning the levels to an extent. I could, possibly still can, beat Streets of Rage 2 without using a continue, I used to be able to do that on the harder settings, and have beaten it without losing a life. There's definitely a level of skill to it, but I do think it's an example of the exception proving the rule Also, Guardian Heroes was great, it doesn't get talked about enough

Killer 7 got a HD port on pc, I suspect it's nailed on to come to consoles at some point, I'm amazed it hasn't already tbh

it's more advanced, but it's not a fun game, which is a shame because it did some really clever stuff for the time

the next batch of games have been revealed, and there's some decent ones in there - Castle of Illusion - World of Illusion - Thunder Force III - Super Fantasy Zone - Shinobi III - Streets of Rage 2 - Earthworm Jim - Sonic the friggin Hedgehog 2 - Contra Hard Corps - Landstalker I'm currently playing through Landstalker incidentally, it's still good, but it's enough of a faff that it seems like the exact sort of game that people aren't going to stick with if you put it on something like this

I picked this up on the Switch as it was on sale, more as a curiosity than anything. Firstly, Doom holds up really well, I know it's not exactly old, but I did wonder if it was more the surprise of it that was so great and the flaws might be more apparent now. I stand by that this is still not the version to get, it's half the framerate as the other console versions, sub HD most of the time (if not all the time), but it actually plays pretty well. So far I've not had too many instances of the framerate dropping, it's still 30fps at best, and there's loads of motion blur, which has a bit of a double edged effect. On one hand it makes the game look and feel smoother than it is, on the other, coupled with how brown and low res textures and pixels are, everything looks very mushy. I remember watching my housemate play Wolfenstein on the PS4. He was playing on normal, he got to the fight prior to you getting planes, I was warning him that it was a nightmare of a fight but he breezed through it. On pc that's a difficult fight, strong enemies and numerous waves, on PS4 it was nothing. Doom reminds me of that, you barely take damage from incoming fire, and while enemies aren't dumb, they aren't quite falling over themselves to kill you either. Still though, it's pretty good, fully featured and all that The biggest problem are the controls. I've been playing handheld, and there just isn't enough movement range in the Switch analogue sticks. It's fine for movement, but I've found I'm not aiming with the right stick as I should, instead I'm pointing in the general direction then using the movement stick to correct. I had more control docked using the PS4 controller, and I've not tried the motion control yet, I think that will help a lot tbf, works with Splatoon well I've captured a video in an empty room, playing handheld, just to show how it looks. The video hitches on opening the door, I didn't notice that at the time so I wonder if that's just how it's captured 2019041418110100-CF035A1DEF1D6DADE285B7ACA9873642.mp4

@Maf I get that, I just think this is such a half-arsed way to go about it. It's not tempting enough and it's too late in the gen for it to have any impact. If all you want to do is try Gamepass then you can buy a 2nd hand Xbox, if you don't want a 2nd hand one, the full console is about the same price. Gamepass is great for people who already have the means to use it, for everyone else it's a £200 outlay before you even get started on it, and that's £200 a year before the new consoles arrive. It's pointless

It's a weird one in general I think. It's not radically different from what they already have out in terms of price (and form factor I guess, but that's less of an issue), and it's right at the end of the generation. You assume Microsoft are testing the waters but it's so late it's barely going to sell even if it had been priced better. I just don't see the point from MS' point of view (or anyone else's tbh), the streaming box at the start of next-gen makes more sense to me

Ubisoft are giving away Assassin's Creed Unity (the one set in Paris) on pc in honour of Notre Dame. They're also donating €500K to the rebuilding, which is good of them, you get the game through Uplay

I think the 8k is just them future proofing. There's no way the PS5 is running games at 8k, but there's no reason it can't output an 8k signal. Like you said @Nag could just be video, presumably by the end of next generation Netflix, Amazon, Youtube, iPlayer etc will all be outputting at 8k SSDs are coming down in price. I'm wondering if there's going to be means to have a 2nd one in there rather than a larger one. 1TB SSDs aren't crazy expensive, but anything larger than that is going to be. Who knows though, it's possible Sony feel like their download speeds will be enough, or that we'll all be streaming everything. I suppose we shouldn't see a massive spike in file sizes next gen, we're already dealing with 4k textures, 60gb file sizes, we're probably looking at the same for the first couple of years

aren't those 3 games on gamepass? Seems a bit redundant to me

I'm on a rewatch. I've just seen Cersei say

The short version, it's a really quick hard drive, which means really quick loading and pulling in of data. Load times should be fairly obvious, but with the latter it means textures loading in quicker, and fewer hitches when playing (Batman Arkham Knight didn't really work on pc unless you had an ssd for this reason)

I've seen the run times for the rest of the series. I think this week and next are the usual 50 minutes, then it's 80+ minutes, so you're essentially getting an episode and a half as the series goes on. Smart really, given that there's so few left and potentially some huge fights, they could have one massive battle contained in a single episode without it feeling truncated