smac

There was a Charlie Brooker playlist promoted alongside it/series-linked to it.

Yeah, won a sweet battle with this the other day - we were losing, our basket had just reset after they had scored, extra time started and one of our team had been goal-hanging and scored; I picked up the giant ball, super-jumped to his location (Arowana Mall, on the ledge above their goal area), and dunked in the goal that gave us the lead and won the game. Suh-weet. The other thing people don't do enough of is feeding clams to other players - if you see a guy on your team with eight or nine clams, and in a good position, pass them the clams they need to get to ten. Or, lay those clams down on their route to the target. Goes double if they're playing paintbrush - f'goodness' sake, give your clams to the guy with the paintbrush. Especially if you are slow.

It links in and fleshes out the base story with a self-contained side story, but is mostly a new area to explore and tame.

It's a beautiful environment to explore. But you do need to be a decent level before you attempt it, as the creatures are pretty tough. So yeah, having to restart would royally suck.

Yeah, I tend to be a lone wolf player; I do OK at Clam Blitz, but mainly because I have a speed/close combat build that often allows me to get into the end-zone alone. Depends on the stage. But against a well-coordinated team, being the loner doesn't work. You can tell you're against one of those because they trigger all of their specials at once, just at the point they're rushing your end zone with the super ball and three other players trailing 9 clams...

It would be stockings. We did the reaction to create nylon, y'see. But yeah, I agree with your basic point; a typical problem that has dogged SF since the early days. I think the current fan service-laden approach of your mainstream anime and comic books doesn't help, either.

Good advice from rgraves - not everyone gets the game, so the free demo is a great idea, but in the main game they do hold back the more competitive modes until you get to level 10. Clam Blitz, in particular, is pretty confusing at first.

You had me puzzled at first...then I spotted it!

Try the free demo out today, for a week.

There's a fairly extensive single-player mode, and more if you buy the octo expansion (although it's not super-easy). No voice chat in the basic game - just 'Booyah', 'This way' and 'Ouch' emotes, so no great griefing there. Most annoying is the post-splat view of the opponent who splatted you, who will take great pleasure in bobbing up and down in victory. There's the *very* occasional off-colour picture posted in the plaza, but you can turn off the option to view other peoples posts there (basically, you can draw profile pics and they appear in the plaza of people you play against. I've seen maybe a handful of pics with dicks/swear words drawn in them over the last couple of years; mostly seems to be kids drawing sweet pics about how much they love splatoon; oh, and memes ).

Join usssssssssssss....

Even better - from Nintendo in a later tweet:

Oh, that is a nice offer - all of the game modes and a week's online sub. I mean, the 33% off will be offsetting the sub that you need to play online, but it's a decent slice of demo.

Really? I wonder if it's just the solo stuff or if they'll let you try out some Turf Wars. Because you really need to play the online game to know what it's all about. Edit: looks like all modes. You really should...

Quite, a mid-tier game with heart and soul does it for me.