Anne Summers

Is this still going to be episodic?

When I was in my late teens/20s I had the spare time and disposable income to spend a week researching what I needed to buy, a grand on parts, a few days putting it all together etc. Maybe when my daughter is older I would be able to justify doing it with her as an educational activity. These days my gaming time is limited to grabbing an hour here and there, in that narrow window of time between everyone else falling asleep and me starting to feel my eyelids getting heavy. I don't want to spend any time setting things up at all, I just want to pick up the controller , and for that to automatically switch on my TV, amp and speakers and put the game I am currently playing in front of me. In my experience that just still isn't possible with PC gaming. To be honest I think with streaming on the horizon, owing hardware will be a thing of the past soon, so my poor deprived little girl may never experience quality father/daughter PC-building time.

Optimising settings doesn't seem to have been solved though. I have bought games on Steam recently and then has to adjust graphics options and screen size and stuff because it didn't match what I wanted, or the spec of my machine. PC gaming will always exist but I think it will remain a niche compared to consoles. I love PC gaming because of all the cheap old stuff and indie games, but new AAA stuff I prefer to buy on console because I know it will be optimised right out of the box. Does anyone buy a PC to play games like the latest FIFA or COD any more? Those aren't my favourite games either but we know they are what the mass market wants.

Finally got round to watching this ... somehow managed to avoid all the spoilers and have given it a few days to settle in before I write my thoughts, I still haven't read any reviews or any other opinions on it so I'm writing this without knowing whether it's getting the same level of hate as the last one (somehow I suspect not - not for the same reasons, anyway). I enjoyed it. I know that doesn't really mean a lot with movies these days - I can say I "enjoy" most of the big all-action spectacular blockbusters but I rarely see one I want to watch twice. This - I probably will watch again, like I watched TLJ again (haven't been enthused enough to watch TFA a second time though I snoozed through most of a rewatch of it on a flight). I didn't get bored once, which is more than I can say for either of the previous films in the trilogy. I liked TLJ as well, it was mostly good with a few slow bits, and this is good too, but for very different reasons. I enjoyed seeing Luke, Leia and Han again, although I can see that a lot of people might think their cameos were shoehorned and a bit cheesy, but I don't mind a bit of fan service when it comes to something like Star Wars. I would have taken it further if I'd made this film and had the force ghosts of Luke, Obi Wan, Yoda, Mace Windu, Qui-Gon etc all appear during that bit where Rey is saying "I am all of the Jedi!" and pile on top of the Emperor and start stomping him, then all do a jumping hi-five. But that's probably why no one would let me make a Star Wars film. Further back, during that bit where they're all getting sucked under the patch of dark coloured sand, I was hoping it was going to turn out to be a Sarlac. I even found myself grinning massively when Wicket appeared. (Was i supposed to be Wicket? I saw that Warwick Davis was listed in the credits.) The new kids - have never really grown on me. But in this film Rey and Kylo came into themselves a bit. Kylo certainly took his time, but came across for the first time, to me at least, as quite interesting and well-developed character. It's weird and probably reflects badly on me, but I the fact that the he (or the actor who plays him) seems to have a funny face might have stopped me feeling the character, in the way the writers intended. I don't know if it's just me, as I've never seen anyone else mention it, but he just looks silly to me - sort of gormless and goofy. Please let me know if you agree with me on this as it seems really obvious to me but no one else seems to say it. Maybe its the case that he's a very handsome man but in a way that people who aren't attracted to men don't really appreciate (like Peter Andre), and so to a straight man, looking at him without making a judgement about whether he is attractive or not, he just looks a bit funny? He has a big nose and a really long mouth but then normal sized eyes and forehead. Looking at him I almost get a kind of uncanny valley feeling like he's a not-quite-perfect CGI. But by this film I'd managed to get over that, and I enjoyed his performance. Finn and Poe on the other hand still leave me pretty cold. In a way they just seem like they're characters that have been put in because it's a film and it needs characters. They don't seem to play a key role in the plot at any real point, and their character development doesn't influence events in the universe, as far as I can see, in any way, beyond the "we're all friends together!" stuff. An escaped Stormtrooper is a good concept for a character, and obviously they needed a rogue, space adventurer type. But the team never came close to having the same sort of chemistry we got when Luke, Han, Leia, Chewy, 3PO and R2 were all knocking around together. I liked the final act too, although I can see it's clearly going to cop a lot of flack for just being a re-run of the last third of RotJ. Again it was probably mainly because I enjoy the fan service. The crashed Death Star looked really cool, and the Emperor throwing out force lightning was fun to see again, though I was gutted that when Rey said that thing about being all of the Jedis, he didn't say "So be it ... Jedis". Ok so to sum up - I enjoyed it, it gets a "pretty good" rating from me, but that comes with the caveat that I have bad taste in films and love fan service. I'm going to put it (for now) at number four or five in my overall ranking of all of the films - below the original trilogy and either the best or second-best of the new trilogy. Will be interesting to see how my opinion changes over time.

Perhaps GTA was not included because of the reputation it's developed over the years for being very violent. Otherwise I would say it stands out as a landmark of UK gaming. If you don't like Dizzy you aren't a real gamer.

I know what they do as we shared an office for a while! They, um, sit around at desks ... and talk about stuff ...

I am surprised there's no Miner Willy.

New collection just announced by Royal Mail. Dizzy on a stamp! Who'd have thought? https://shop.royalmail.com/special-stamp-issues/video-games?cid=SC0120_VIDG_PR_01

It's definitely doable

Why wasn't the sequel a real sequel? I only played SR2 on the Speccy back in the day, but have played all the versions recently due to investigating then for inclusion on Antstream. It's a great game imo.

Awesome to see such things. But ... it doesn't look like a Spectrum game, does it? I'd like to see a version with colour clash intact!

I expect it was because he realised he would make way more money making F1 licensed games.

The joystick feels much better. Solid and clicky. Annoyingly it doesn't seem like you can plug into into a PC and use it as a retro controller with other devices which is a shame.

Someone talk about earlier stuff ... What were the most impressive later Atari 2600, NES and BBC Micro games? (Nothing that used the BBC Micro transputer adapter please).

It isn't anything to do with me or my department but I know we've also just (or are very soon) launching "gift card" memberships which I think work the way you describe. No reason you couldn't buy one as a gift for yourself!