Treble

Also an Al Needham fan, I'm guessing?

That was great!

S01E05: "Night of the Paw": the screenwriter had the cheek to think he could use The Monkey's Paw story and create a pseudo-sequel of merit. He failed. Sickly re-tread of the classic story, poorly told and sloppily directed. 2/10 "Times is Tough in Musky Holler": Feels like a discarded draft of a Walking Dead episode. A bonus point for some gnarly SFX but, other than that, entirely superfluous storytelling and film making 3/10 This episode is a real low point in a series that's struggled to find a voice so far. I watched it ages ago but had totally forgotten its existence, hence the late write-up. I'm fervently hoping the final episode goes out with a bang, as it's unlikely we'll see a second season of this.

Blimey, that's amazing work! I'll look forward to his port of Death Stranding

I was in two minds over Special Reserve. I grabbed an issue of Amiga Whatever magazine (Power, mostly) now and again and they were always going on about how hard drives wouldn't necessarily be the answer for a lot of games, as many wouldn't play off the HDD. Knowing my luck, none of my favourites would have worked! Speaking of laser printers, a school friend of mine's dad ran a design firm and owned one for the business, as well as scanners and every other piece of design & productivity hardware you can imagine they'd need. There was a promotion running on some cereal boxes where you could cut out a grid from the box (3x3 I think) and a couple of tokens. Fill up the grid with these tokens from purchases, and you could take them in to any shop and get a free can of decent pop: Coke and whathaveyou. You can see where I'm going with this.... yep, my mate printed pages and pages of tokens, and as decent colour printing at home was non-existent, all the shop keepers were 100% fooled. The only drawback was the fact you still needed the cardboard backing grid, so still had to buy the cereal, but I still got 3-4 cans free out of it!

After reading through the excellent Amiga vs. Consoles thread which, in typical Retro forum style is far more considered and thoughtful than it has any right to be, I was cogitating on what it was like being a gamer at school. So I was in high school 1987-1994 and was lucky enough to own a Master System aged 11. Owning that was the most beautiful experience... I can't even tell you. I was (still am!) obsessed with arcade games, had never owned a gaming machine before, and its visuals blew my mates' Amstrads and Spectrums out of the water. When I was 13/14 YO I got an Atari ST, which I quickly sold when I realised that 'grey import' Mega Drives were a thing. I sold the ST to a friend's dad for basically retail price (I was a bit of a grifter, even back then ) and ended up getting an MD with Space Harrier 2 and a PAL conversion for £199. Then lo and behold, the supplier (Raven Games, I think?) sent me another one by mistake! We tried calling them and even sent a letter to them, but we never heard anything back after a good few weeks trying. I ended up selling it on the local paper for about £100, so with the ST sale money and that, plus a little extra, I was able to get an Amiga 500 as well. We weren't exactly flush with cash, but I budgeted sensibly. Even so, I could expect to afford an MD once or twice per year, then maybe one for Christmas. I had loads of friends who ended up with MDs, though, so we traded all the time and engineered things so we didn't all end up buying the same games, and nerfing swapsies. I didn't go to high school with my local mates (two of my best friends at the time went to catholic schools, and my other mates went to the local comp that I avoided) and none of them had Amigas. None of my friends at school had them either, only kids I sort of knew in passing, so the amount of pirate stuff I got was minuscule next to some owners I knew! I ended up liking the Miggy, but not playing a great variety on it - truth be told, i'm pretty impatient and anything RPG or Strategy-based, I'd ping right off-of. I rinsed the better arcade-style games, and grew to love some of the more esoteric and complex stuff, though: Syndicate is still one of my favourite games of all time, and I was obsessed with F-29 Retaliator despite the frame rate averaging out at about 10fps most of the time I could/should have had access to a wider range of copied games but you know what power structures are like in High School: you'd ask a kid you didn't know very well to duplicate a disk for you, and they'd leave you dangling for days/weeks before saying something like "My Dad wouldn't let me copy it" or, "I couldn't find it" or, "I loaned it to my cousin and he hasn't given it me back". You know, all the regular proto-capitalist hoarding bullshit Despite all this, the Amiga was a great success for me. It was my first proper experience of modern computing, post-BASIC, and taught me a lot. I got a printer for it and it ended-up being the machine I wrote my first short stories on, and using for all my course work throughout University. I still have a great affection for it, enjoyed @Lorfarius podcast loads, and am always umming and arring over buying a Vampire card-enabled machine. Going back to games-as-leverage, there was a lad at my High School - Andrew - who took this to the next level. He'd frequently get new releases (his family were well-off and also, IIRC, his dad had died) and manufactured a group of friends simply through judicious loaning-out of new titles, particularly Game Boy stuff as I remember. Even at the time, I saw the sadness in it all. Kids have very little power to exercise in this world, and you can understand why he behaved the way he did. That said, he could be a right priggish arse and he wasn't very pleasant generally. I gave up borrowing stuff off him pretty sharpish. The frequent response of, "I don't want to borrow that one" when you offered him a loan, only to see him get bought it a week later, soon palled. He was also jealous when I got import games (like Turtles on the GB) and made a big thing about only buying PAL releases. I felt a mix of sadness and pity for they way he was: my school was a C of E one (not private in any way, but you did have an interview to 'prove' you were godly (lol) and an active member of the church, before getting in) and was located in an awkwardly-placed suburb, so most kids either had a school bus to their area (if they weren't part of the main town's suburbs) but the rest of us got the public bus into town, then another bus from there to home. His Mum would always meet him off the bus - hilarious to us independent kids - and when a new arcade opened down by the river, she wouldn't let him come with us to check it out. So yeah, a sad tale and I hope he's doing well these days. I do remember the whole span of time between 11-15 as being one where time was infinite. No-ones' parents - not even the rich kids' - took them to after school stuff. Ok, the odd one went to Karate once a week, but that was it. Basically, if you weren't in school you had acres of time to fill. You really mastered the games you owned, got good at speeding through stuff so you could hand borrowed games back before such-and-such's Mum started to get antsy, and got copies of anything on computer you could lay your hands on. Most kids were obsessed with gaming up until they had any luck with girls, after which 'hanging around' became the time-filler and games were a distant fourth behind the important topics: girls, alcohol and footy. Before that, though, it was all about cost, cost, cost. Console games were hugely expensive, each title was treasured - even if it was actually crap, or too short - and the small number of people affording console meant the second hand market was pretty barren outside of larger cities. GAME only arrived when I was about 13, so the range of games was skimpy. Even when that store rose to prominence, anything older than a few weeks disappeared and PAL land in general was a joke: 50hz, slowdown, a rush to afford a new release so it didn't become a rarity, ludicrous prices & small range of titles compared to what we'd been used to for home computers. In reality, this bubble only existed for a short time; probably between 1990-1995 when consoles started to become the games machines of choice but cost/availability was bad, up until the PlayStation in 1995 when variety exploded and trade-ins, Platinum titles and second hand became the norm. Phew, what a long one. Would love to hear some tales of your teen years and school-era gaming!

ReYARRRR Windu

You have to differentiate names if you're in SAG (Screen Actors Guild, US) and Equity (UK) have the same rule. But they don't cross over, so you can be Delquoit Humpernackers III over here and find out to your chagrin there's a bloke with the same moniker living in Des Moines, possibly stealing your roles.

The MandaYARRRRRRRRian

Ebay might be a good idea?

@Plums My biased view is that they are all magnificent. My unbiased view - if that's even possible - is that the first book is an unusual one for King. It's curious on first read, but more likable in retrospect, once you've read the others. If you like his novels, I think you'd find it hard not to love books 2 thru 4 (Drawing of the Three | Wastelands | Wizard and Glass). King's novels are always at least "one genre + horror" but those four are his widest reach in terms of mashing things together into a tasty and satisfying genre-stew. Every sci-fi principle, fantasy trope, wild west-aping, post-apocalyptic, Arthurian, Lovecraftian horror inflection is exploited to its fullest, with even less restraint than he usually has (!) The fact he blends them all so well is a testament to his ability stick the needle firmly past the red line, whilst also weaving his other stories into one big universe. The final three (Wolves of the Callah | Song of Susannah | Dark Tower) are recommended to fans, but some people are less keen. The stuff constant readers love (intense focus on characters, some of whom may have little bearing on the narrative; lots of evocative description whilst the main plot is spinning its wheels; minutiae about how the world works and a general expansiveness that could- probably should - be whittled down in editing) is in full-force. It's still a fantastic story being told, but you will only feel the full benefit if you like his novels generally - a good barometer is: do you love and re-read The Stand? Do you appreciate and obsess over the tiniest details in IT? If so, you'll fly through 'em. As for the final book in the series...I don't agree King's endings are poor. Yes, they often run to natural conclusions, which means a lot of characters you care about die! I think some readers find this irritating & off-putting. Book seven simultaneously manages to be peak-King and also subvert those criticisms to an extent - impossible to explain without spoilers. I think, though, that the series' ending is fantastic and had me chuckling with glee. That's not a common reaction, though! It is a very divisive book in general, but I would argue the end of huge fantasy epics are rarely what the fans want, nor what they feel they should get. If you make is as far as #7 I would temper your expectations. So I guess my tl;dr is: for King mega-fans, the series is as essential as converting air into carbon dioxide. For people who haven't pored over every book but quite like his style, books 2, 3 and 4 are fast-paced and will appeal to just about anyone into genre fiction, but that audience might be turned-off by the latter third of the trilogy, once King series settles into his more usual style. So, keep going for now, Plums, but don't waste your time on them if you aren't intrigued enough to get you through the dense thicket of lore and character that springs up in the final three novels EDIT: I'd say another barometer of taste is, have you read the His Dark Materials novels? How did you feel about them? DT is sort-of comparable, as it's often hard on its protagonists, is often emotionally tough to get through and (narratively-speaking) can never end up being anything other than bittersweet, at best.

Agreed. I only buy Edge intermittently, but was going to buy it for their DS review. And I think their more regular readership would like a review of the biggest indie game of the year/one of the biggest games of the year full stop. Well yeah, but that only applies to the Edge issue close enough to align with the release date. Once the game's embargo's lifted, it's fair game.

I'm not sure it will eventually make money. You know more about the streaming side than me, so I'd be interested to know roughly how much the likes of Netflix and Amazon pay. In terms of Box Office though, the cost is far higher than the reported $185m, as I've mentioned a lot of times (and in my Box Office report threads, back in the day ). The rule of thumb is, for tentpole and major releases, the budget will be under-reported. Add at least 10% so we're up to somewhere around $200m. Double the cost of the budget for P&A (prints and advertising) for major tentpole releases. For this one, it's not had the marketing push the likes of - say - Endgame had (that's what you'd call an AAA release, whereas this is AA I guess?!) so somewhere around $100m at a conservative estimate. Returns from overseas distribution are far lower than in the domestic territory, due to complex rights agreements, so they look to US as the key profit maker. For releases of this sort of cost ($200m is the rough production cost of most action/sci-fi films these days) they look to make $200m domestically and about $300m from the rest of the world before they consider it profitable and a success. So Paramount will have invested at least $300m in this project, will have wanted to see a global return of at least $500m, and it's currently made $129m. There's a chance it'll recoup quite a bit from sales to streaming, but i'd be amazed if it garnered the extra $200m+ it needs to be considered break-even, let alone the $250+ it'd need to be considered profitable :|

There are really good bits in Salvation. Basically all the Anton Yelchin stuff and some of the tech. Poor Anton Yelchin, by the way. What a horrible way to go

@Tonald Drump, I'd argue that, if you were going purely by exclusives (depth) vs. volume (breadth) then the Xbox One X with Game Pass is a no-brainer. HOWEVER! the single greatest purchase/gaming experience of this gen for me is VR. The idea of having missed out on Astro Bot, Wipeout VR, Super Hot, Moss, the X-Wing level/demo, Arkham VR, Tetris Effect, Rez, Sprint Vector and a bunch of others leaves me feeling odd and cold inside. VR is such a huge part of my gaming life, now, that i'm trying to work out when I can afford a PC headset. So i'd say if VR appeals, then: PS4 Pro, bunch of the quality exclusives second-hand, and PSVR when you can afford it