Thrik

He looks about the same to me, just more detailed. Especially compared to his Blood Money rendition. Forgot he looked so ugly in the original Hitman.

Yeah PS4 has been offline-only every time I've played. The game's so broad that there's more than enough to do until FOB is back in action I guess.

You know it's love when you don't mind doing that.

Right you early delivery BASTARDS, I'm getting this tomorrow and I can't bloody wait!!!!!

Yeah me neither, you absolute bastard.

Put them on imgur now.

Like an absolute bell end I managed to burn my arm by reaching over my just-boiled kettle for some kitchen paper. The steam did this in about half a second: I was advised to keep it wet and dressed as it's apparently faster healing that way rather than scabbing. Unfortunately this means a lot of pain each time you change the dressing and if you fuck it up and get the adhesive on the damaged skin like I did... Yes that fucking hurt! So keeping it wet can get stuffed. I'm going to keep it clean but dry so it can hopefully scab over and if it takes longer to heal or scars then whatever. I'm also missing out on swimming because of this nonsense, so hopefully once scabbed I can resume.

I know what you mean, I've literally grown up with these crazy-ass characters like Snake and Revolver Ocelot. I played my first Metal Gear Solid game when I was... 11? And I'm now 28. It's all so silly but when you've spent so much time following the series it becomes something else. What else has run for so long and been consistently good? Not many games, mostly Japanese ones. To see a huge missing part of their evolution as characters brought to life and also the best Metal Gear game yet in terms of gameplay is going to be brilliant. Also the fact that it looks like we'll see the return of some other much-loved characters (although perhaps not in a lovable way) — wonderful.

Wow that is one off-the-charts engagement! Congratulations!!

Absolutely excellent reviews across the board. What a relief after hearing about all this turbulent development. Twin Snakes is an interesting one. I personally prefer to replay it over MGS1 because the latter is just so dated now that I can't enjoy it. It was excellent in its time but I think that 3D games started to become somewhat timeless-looking as of around the PS2 generation, and games before then really haven't aged very well at all. I don't believe there to be anything wrong with Twin Snakes' voice acting. There is the odd bit of dialogue that perhaps isn't delivered with as much success as in MGS1, however I would say that the performances are better more often than they are worse. For example, Snake clearly sounds a lot more like he does in the later games when Hayter got more comfortable with the role; the same goes for Colonel, who sounds more like 'he' did in MGS2 and MGS4. The Ninja was voiced better (wasn't just the same voice actor as DARPA Chief), Sniper Wolf was better, and the original actors were retained for almost everyone else. Naomi losing her accent was no problem and it never made sense for Mei Ling to have a non-US accent as she wasn't Chinese, both of which were retained for MGS4. Some gameplay mechanics make the game a bit easier, but that's why you play on extreme which provides a superbly challenging game. Everything else I would say is pretty much a triumph for Twin Snakes, from the graphics to the music to the cutscene direction. The main theme was dropped, but you might notice it's not in later MGS games either because of legal reasons. Admittedly the oft-mentioned flip Snake does over a rocket was a bit excessive, but aside from that the cutscenes were much better in almost every way. I mean I just can't take the originals seriously when compared. Better music, better dramatic timing, better dialogue delivery, better cinematography. Considering how important cutscenes are in MGS games, this matters a lot yet is frequently overlooked. OK I went off on a bit of a tangent there, sorry. But I do think that Twin Snakes often being so readily written off is an injustice to what is an excellent and faithful remake. It might not get everything right, but neither did MGS1. Nostalgia does give MGS1 a plus, but then I get nostalgic about both. If choosing which to play today, after drawing up a list of pros and cons I always lean towards Twin Snakes. And if I'm recommending to someone who've never played either, I find it very difficult to believe they won't prefer Twin Snakes over MGS1.

Indeed, I've only played it a little because holy shit I don't have the time needed for this game, but it's like the ultimate gaming equivalent of Lego with built-in adventure mechanics for easy role playing. I can only imagine how wonderful it must be to play it as a kid. Children are unsurprisingly a huge part of its audience.

Interesting, I always assumed this game was completely built around its Wii U game pad aiming gimmick and never paid much attention to it, but I guess it must be considered a worthwhile play in its own right to be ported. I do actually have a Wii U so if it's a legitimately good game I could get it for that...

They actually released an update for UC3 not long after release, adding an option to the settings that restores the aiming to the UC1/UC2-like way. It makes the game feel so much better it's not even funny, that really should be the default now.

The Bluepoint remasters I've played (God of War Collection and Metal Gear Solid HD Collection) have been superb so that's all good with me.

Absolutely splendid. I know that the plethora of remakes are often criticised, but why wouldn't you want this wonder of a series to be preserved in the best possible quality? Definitely adding this to my collection for years of replays to come.

Yeah, @jackophant is right about it being a drag. It's always a challenge finding a balance between not destroying staff sanity and keeping spam out, because of course it's possible to make everything super-restrictive but when you've got 10–20 people signing up every day (that excludes ones blocked by automated spam detection) that's a serious pain in the ass and queues will inevitably build up. I think that the 'must have X posts before posting threads' will work quite nicely in that it'll discourage hit-and-run spam and drive participation in existing threads. Like Sprony I don't like the idea of a promotion forum because frankly, if we don't want it in our regular forums I'd rather avoid having what is effectively a 'spam bucket' forum. Our registration form does actually say that hit-and-run spam isn't OK and that promotional threads are only welcome from established members, so I think this could work out.

Possibly, although that's quite a bit more work and could lead to even more broken signatures as it'd effectively be search/replace stuff. It'd take longer as I'd need to simulate it on a test DB a bunch of times. I'd rather invest my time into other enhancements than pursuing this for too long. Another approach that I'm considering is creating an announcement that signatures will be going live a week later, and that members should take the opportunity to update their signatures before then so that they show up correctly and adhere to the new limits (few lines or whatever). Then if non-adhering signatures appear we re-save and/or nuke them, which will be a bit of a PITA for staff for a little while but will probably result in less crapped-up threads. I think I'll bring this restriction back, but in this particular case I do think it was correct to allow free posting in the contest section simply because it's a cross-site contest with reddit and disallowing members there to not easily post threads here wouldn't go down very well. Nonetheless I understand what you're saying and will consider how to re-implement the minimum post requirement in a way that ideally encourages participation in the creative forums. And yeah, the spam almost certainly has increased because of traffic. We've clearly ended up on the radar of spammers who don't just use bots to sign up, but actual people. This makes it much harder to fight but the minimum posting requirement will hopefully serve as an effective deterrent.

Haha, yeah you are right that it is because of the contest. We did have a system in place that allows new threads only after a certain number of replies to existing threads (first five, then just one). It was disabled for the contest because of the obvious requirement of people being able to post their stuff. With that said, it is possible that with our updated software I can configure this more precisely so that the restriction doesn't apply in the contest forums. The spam is something we've all been battling with, and automated means aren't proving effective because it's actually human beings signing up — so revisiting the earlier system will be a good step I think. I'll look into doing that this week. Just to give an update on the signatures, I did enable them last week however the forum almost immediately exploded due to all of the old signatures being broken and screwing up threads. I've been discussing with the vendor how to just reset them all, which basically requires some database stuff but I aim to do this week following a cautious backup. So they'll be back soon... I swear!

Absolutely excellent.

That new trailer is much better, I really like that the much-criticised annihilation of the city is serving as the catalyst for what's happening in this film. Unlike in Avengers where there was a similar amount of absolute destruction yet it seemed like nobody really gave that much of a shit after.

It's certainly not gamer-friendly, but then you can buy both consoles for the price of a single decent gaming PC so I don't have that much of a problem with it within the scope of consoles. Ironically enough though, there are less platform exclusives around these days so it's more of a pain in the ass to buy the second console because there's so little stuff that I need it for — except those sweet-ass few games.

The XBone sure needs some decent exclusives that aren't repackaged old games or sequels. This is like the only thing I'm anticipating coming out for it. I wouldn't mind buying the console if there were anything to do with it.

Welcome back friend. What happened?