Comrade

They should make an in-universe one-off pilot of Jumble! With Lynne.

Having worked at the BBC I appreciate that Alan flashes his temporary pass in the opening titles.

Obviously the proof is in the playing, but they could have convinced me that it was something they were committed to tackling. They could come out and say something like “We know you’re sceptical about game streaming, and the main reason is latency. Well, we’ve cracked it, if you live in our designated areas and have internet speeds above this level we can almost guarantee less than Xms lag, because we’re using our innovative techniques like etc, etc, etc.” There were some sops towards that kind of stuff, like the wifi controllers and the talk about providing a direct connection to the data centre, but not enough. It was just airy silicon valley guff.

Without announcements of any new or innovative games, or even a hint of what the business model is (monthly subscription? Ad supported? Just buying games as normal but streaming them?). The whole thing was pretty much nothing. Basically “if it works, maybe it will be good, but you’ve shown me nothing that convinces me it will work”.

It just means the controller has a wifi connection to your router so your button presses get to the server a little faster without having to loop through a console or dongle first through Bluetooth.

PIMPIN’ AIN’T YVESY

There is a narrative about of this being a failure because the the entire press hate Coogan (because of the phone hacking stuff) and want to stick the boot in.

Green Book should have won best song too.

Literally anything with Alan Partridge in it is some of the best UK comedy of all time, so if you care about comedy at all, you should watch all of it.

Looks like Fox sees the writing on the wall:

I saw the thread title and came in to post a story that turned out being fairly similar to the original post. Well, I’ll do it anyway. So Mario 64 was pretty much all I could think about from when I saw the original report on the 1995 Shoshinkai show on GamesMaster (https://youtu.be/lKBNzjgN_hk) to when the game finally trundled onto UK shelves in March of 1997. I obsessively pored over every scant pre-release screenshot to glean the slightest insight of how this astonishing thing might play like. But the true torment began on the game’s Japanese release, in July 1996 - almost a full torturous year before the British one. I agaonised over the fact that actual people in the world could play this game right now, and I had to wait a whole other fourteenth of my life to date to do so myself. I read every single review of the import version I could find, over and over again. And then the magazines, officially catering to the tiny import market I guess, but in reality likely providing methadone to desperate obsessives like me, started printing full walkthroughs of the game. I remember that since Super Play had been axed (with an SM64 review in the final issue), and N64 mag wouldn’t launch until the console did, Future plugged the gap with a “mini-magazine” section in GamesMaster. There they covered the games out in Japan, and then later in the US, but they also had a monthly walkthrough that I read over and over again. I’d compare the info to the screenshots I’d seen and try to imagine the levels in my head. Eventually I found a copy of the US EGM that was for some reason in a local newsagents, and it had a pull-out full walkthrough that even had crude 3D model recreations of all the levels. I remember sometime in the winter of 96/97 I was stood agog in front of the window of the Virgin Megastore on Tottenham Court Road while a US or Japanese N64 played the attract mode with a sign that said “coming soon” next to it. By the time March finally rolled around and I walked into the Ealing Broadway Electronics Boutique to pick up my console and game I had memorised the position of literally every coin in the game. There was not a single surprise left in there. I still loved it though. Part of the reason I so utterly spoiled the game for myself was out of fear. It sounds silly now I was genuinely worried that I simply wouldn’t be able to handle the complexity of this new-fangled 3D gaming and needed to prepare myself as thoroughly as possible. Until I actually played the game it was impossible for me to truly imagine what playing a game like that might be like. Ocarina of Time was a close second to the madness of Mario 64 as well. In the build up to that I’d got the internet and every day I’d check my list of Zelda fansites to see if there were any new screenshots, usually scanned in from Famitsu. I managed to avoid actually spoiling the entire game for myself though. I remember I got a bit scared again when Mario Sunshine came out that I wouldn’t be any good at 3D Mario without knowing the levels inside-out before I played. Luckily my fears were allayed.

Atreus gets no development?!

Hey, I might be getting this stuff together soon. So, obviously if I’m making an emulation box I need software to emulate. Speaking merely hypothetically, wouldn’t it be great if we lived in a world where people would just contact you, maybe by messaging you in private, with info on how to get those giant collections of every rom for all the systems, perhaps in the form of a trusted torrent or something. Wouldn’t that be great?

There you go, an arcade racer for PS4.

I loved God of War (after not giving a shit about the series previously too), but Red Dead is so obviously the game of the year it’s unreal.