“You don’t know what’s in that shite” - Debbie, 52. Lifelong smoker.

He’s actually three zeros off.

It’s 0.0021%

I’ll go with the small red download button in the middle.

It could be the very bottom one, but it probably says advertisement under that and it’s just been cropped out.

But even the correct button is likely to launch you into a popup to try and get you to download a “downloader” of some description, as if that’s not literally the sole function of a fucking web browser, and then suddenly you’ve been taken to livejasmin.com or a sketchy gambling site targetted at Asians.

protections we put in place to secure players’ data

The player data that we are required to agree to share with 1643 trusted data partners in order to connect to your service? That player data?

Go fuck yourself, you ghouls.

It’s got Gareth Edwards on board at least. I’ll probably give it a watch at some point just for that. Plus action hero Chris Pratt is the worst Chris Pratt. I liked him better when he was fat.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone more out of their depth than Colin Trevorrow. A real shame that, because I actually enjoyed Safety Not Guaranteed.

According to Wikipedia, they started it in 2015 with Beasts of No Nation and stopped in 2018 with Roma.

Lots of others did it during covid though.

The last time I actually enjoyed a cinema was a tiny little place in Iceland that appeared to have two screens, a ticket stand and a snack stand, and had one old guy running between all of them like a novelty act. This is how a cinema should be, not some horrible 12 screen thing showing the same Marvel shite at 20 minute intervals.

We did see Die Hard 4 though, so it wasn’t all fun and games. Still it could have been worse. It could have been Die Hard 5…

They could easily do so on a console or game streaming service, just give you like 2 hours and then switch it off.

I think Sony actually do that as part of one of the PSN tiers.

But I think the main driver behind no longer doing demos is that when they started analysing it, they found it mostly reduced sales. A lot of people were no longer interested enough to buy it after playing, at least not at full price. I gotta admit, back when demos were common on the front of magazines, there were very few that I actually purchased on the basis of the demo. The ones I did buy, I’d have probably got anyway, like Metal Gear Solid 2.

I think it was Netflix that went through a period of releasing movies in cinemas and putting it on streaming on day one.

It was such a resounding success that they no longer do that.

I guess MS has deep enough pockets to not realise their folly yet. PSN Premium/Extra isn’t as good value from a consumer point of view, but it also hasn’t killed their own console. What that cannibalises is the “wait for a sale” people, who would likely have paid £20 for a game a year or two down the line. I think that’s a more manageable than losing all the day one £65 sales.

It can’t be worse than those Chris Pratt ones, can it?

You can take it on with the basic pistols if you like. Plenty of spots to stand and shoot from safely.

Well she is British…

Doubtful, but if anything mine would be more accurate. Fewer calculation steps to lose precision on. I think most spreadsheet software fudges floating point precision anyway. A computer programmer may accept that 0.1+0.2 is not 0.3 but an accountant or mathematician would not be having it.

I think she was just shit at maths tbh. As a kid you sort of assume all the teachers know more than you about every subject, and that’s not the case at all.

When I went to Tenerife, the chip and pin machine said “numero secreto correcto” and I’m still not convinced Spanish is a real language.

We had computer classes where we had to learn about spreadsheets.

To do a number plus ten percent we had to put in A1+A1*10/100

I did A1*1.1 like a normal person.

She then went round to make sure everyone had put it in correctly. Got annoyed at me and changed A1 to something else to expose my folly.

Was visibly annoyed when it showed the right answer.

Halo predates BF2 by nearly four years.

Why do you think Musk wants to colonise Mars?

Oh, VR is pretty neat. It sure as shit don’t need no $3000 graphics card though.

The first few were really good on console. I played the first one on PC as well and there was definitely something missing with mouse and keyboard controls. The vehicles especially.

You have to remember that most FPS on consoles were pretty terrible back then (e.g. Medal of Honor series), and there was a lot of experimentation to try and find a control scheme that didn’t completely suck, along with just the right amount of aim assist. Other devs were still wrestling with that into the Xbox 360 era. Sony put so much effort and money into Killzone, and it wasn’t anywhere near as good as Halo.

Plus, split screen co-op made it very popular. It’s one of the few games to keep that into the modern era as well.

I assume a lot of the top level staff stick about until their contractually obliged period for getting a massive payday is over, and then look very closely at whether they actually want to be told what to do by a bunch of suits all day long.

Realistically they’re working to make somebody else richer at that point, and there’s only so much enthusiasm anyone can have for that. Certainly not enough for the long hours needed in the games industry.

Bizarre Creations had the misfortune of being owned by both of them before being shut down.

It really shows that something is fucked up in businessland that they’re so bad at managing studios, when managing studios is literally all they fucking do.

Same with EA. It’s just a wasteland of dead companies. The list of studios they’ve closed is bigger than the list of ones they still own.