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Happy Birthday to Space. Twenty two years old and not a pube in sight. Well done that man!

Technically this isn't really a new game, but an iOS conversion of an old DS classic. The good news is it's great, largely because it's a complete breath of fresh air in many ways

At the beginning of the game your character finds that he's a ghost next to his corpse, which is lying at the bottom of a junkyard. An unfortunate side effect of being recently dead is that you've completely lost your memory, so you've got no idea who you are, let alone why you're lying dead or how you got there... or who the redhead girl is or why she's being attacked by a blue skinned hitman in a sharp suit. And you've only got until dawn to unravel all these mysteries.

Thing is though, you're a lucky ghost because you've got special "powers of the dead" (or indeed "ghost tricks" ) which allow you to possess and manipulate objects, travel down phone lines and rewind time to four minutes before someone's death (except your own, of course) so you can change their fate. And thus an unusual film noir-esque mystery thriller unfolds through the medium of a continuous series of puzzles.

The action itself is quite straightforward. You switch into "ghost mode", where time is paused, to move between objects which you can then manipulate when you switch back to real time. But your transfer range between objects is very short, so you have to create a chain of objects to get from A to B. It starts off pretty simple, with solutions as simple as opening a box will cause the lid to extend far enough for you to reach the gate which you can swing to knock the gun out of the hitman's hand and save the girl... at least temporarily. But it gradually gets more complicated and introduces timing related challenges too, such as open a cupboard door to flick a ball across the room, then quickly move to the ball so you move with it and get into position for the next trick. Thankfully the game is quite forgiving; it's primarily about solving the problem, not precision timing. Once I'd worked out what I was supposed to do it usually only took a few goes to get it right. Also, while some of the solutions can be a little "unusual", the characters are often quite generous with hints to point you in the right direction. I found I made it through the whole game quite comfortably without ever really getting stuck for long.

However, what really sucked me in and held me was the plot. The story is quite dark in theme, but told with tongue firmly in cheek. There's a large cast of crazy characters and events get increasingly outlandish. Things possibly get a little too silly towards the end, but is saved by a suitably satisfying denouement. It's also just about the right length too - I managed to blitz it in probably about 10-ish hours.

I found solving problems and manipulating events from the shadows became immensely satisfying, particularly when combined with the wacky but involving plot served with large dollops of humour.

On iOS it's free to download the app itself which includes the first couple of chapters, and that's more than enough to know if you'll like it. After that you can buy the rest of the plot as an IAP for £9.99, which is a fairly reasonable price for the considerable enjoyment I had from it

If you want something completely different and refreshing then I highly recommend it

So, how are you guys?

I'm getting married in August with a stag doo at a retro arcade & pinball convention in Gateshead. Such nostalgia. Kids can't be far off after that. Eeep.

I took on a 3rd job. Or rather became self employed on top of the regular 37.5 week job and the weekend bar work.
The new chef at the pub is on another level though, stints at prestigious places such as Noma in Copenhagen, Heston's The Fat Duck and such. Plates look like art. Search for @erniechef on twitter for what he does.

My extra work is Network Marketing in nature, but I'm happy with it as the company is very supportive and I work with some nice people I wouldn't otherwise have met. I even started to attend a local breakfast network group with people who have like, proper businesses! Wishing I'd given business more serious attention a lot earlier but I always thought it was something better people did.

Since getting a smartphone I find I waste a hell of a lot more time than I used to. I don't even get through my subs to Private Eye or Viz. Before I'd just devour them in a few days. i don't know, the internet can be such a time sink. I'd like to post more but hate typing anything longer than a sentence on the thing.

Still weightlifting, still uploading 3rd Strike matches and I've gotten into Gin.

Getting on.

How are you fine men getting along?

Hello dead forum! 

 

Well I see the forum is not long for this world, so I thought id give it a last post or two! 

 

This is also your last chance to finally come out in a #metoo fashion, if you have been one of the many victims of Electric Boogaloo.

 

It was fun while it lasted folks!

 

;p

Hi guys.

 

This is a heads-up. A few months back, when the board went down, I had a chat with Singho and agreed to take over the cost of hosting. Singho paid for, I think, a further six months of life and then it'd be up to me.

I made two or three attempts to contact the hosting company around that time to find out what the process for paying was and received no response to any of my emails. Since then, I've come to the conclusion that I just don't use the board enough any longer - and, to be honest, haven't for nearly four years - to be able to justify paying for it.

 

As it stands, then, once Singho's final payment has worn off, the place will vanish again.

 

If anybody else wants to take over the payments, let me know and I'll bung you the email address of the hosting guy and you can see if you can get anywhere with it. Otherwise, I'd suggest that those of you who want to take an archive of the stuff here that you want to keep before it goes for good.

 

I'm sorry to do this. I don't believe that there's anything fundamentally wrong with keeping the board going for the three or four people who still use it, but as I say, I can't justify the payment for something that I don't really use any longer.

bit dead on here.

shout-outs to former #greenhillzone crew.

Happy Birthday to teh Hank. He wanted me to shoot him because he is like a grandad at 23 but I resisted. Keep him alive I tells you.

Y'know, this is honestly the most enjoyable objective-based multiplayer FPS I've played in absolutely ages. Unfortunately, it looks like it was pretty much dead on arrival and Boss Key have fundamentally misunderstood how to make a game appealing to a modern audience. Plus, matchmaking seems to have become broken over the last few days.

 

It's basically a bunch of different Capture the Flag and King of the Hill modes, with minor adaptations to spruce them up a bit and make them feel more competitive. They all work and they're all fun - barring Blitzball, potentially, which can often see one team dominating the other and winning the match in about three minutes. Boss Key have pushed the idea that this is an FPS that brings a skill requirement back into the genre and there is some truth to that. While it's got the Hero Shooter thing of having different characters with wildly differing abilities and weapons, the main thing that you have to learn in this game is how each character moves and how best to make use of thir individual styles of movement.

 

Each character has a unique jump, for example, plus a unique dash move. One can run more or less constantly, one has a stamina bar that empties pretty quickly, another has a slide move that pushes enemies backwards on contact, a fourth warps forwards. Where the jumps are concerned, some can double jump, some can triple jump, some are that plodding that they barely leave the ground. And you can combine jumps and dashes to find new moves - the robot dude, for example, can convert a jump into a sudden crash to the ground if you change your mind midway.

I guess the obvious USP here is that maps contain areas of extremely low gravity, which adds to the complexity of battle. It's not Descent, but it has that same thing where the other team members could be above or below you, as well as in front, to the left, etc. One character has a move that can create a low-gravity zone wherever they want.

I've really enjoyed getting to grips with some of the characters and finding how best to use them in different situations. There are others in here that feel way out of my comfort zone and that I'm really struggling to do *anything* with. The Assassin is the one that feels most difficult to use properly, but when you consider that most games end with an Assassin player as MVP, it backs up the claim that this is a game that you have to play skillfully in order to be any good at.

But it's a game that's also got some fucking massive problems. The first - the one that most reviews have mentioned - is that it does nothing whatsoever to make it look like it stands out from the crowd. I'm sure there's a lot of technical skill on show here, but there's very little understanding of how to make a game read clearly. Everything has lots of detail, but characters can be stupidly difficult to see. Put it this way: the designers felt the need to put a red outline around the enemy team so that you stand a chance of seeing where the hell they are. That's indicative of a whopping great failure at the heart of your visual design.

Another issue comes with making a team-based game that demands a level of skill above and beyond what the mainstream FPSes ask for. I've had some absolutely wonderful matches in this, really epic-feeling tug-of-war games where teams are evenly matched and everybody clearly understands what it is that they're doing. But I've had others - an increasing number, actually - where I feel like I'm the only person on the team who understands that this isn't just a fucking deathmatch. When you die you have a cooldown period before you spawn again, and you can use this to look through the eyes of your team-mates. The number of times when I've done this and realised that none of them are making any effort to play the objective is depressing.

And now the fatal problem: barely anybody's playing. I've seen people saying that they've seen the number of concurrent players on Steam drop to as few as 13. I'm playing on PS4 and I've had evenings where it's been impossible to find a game. Most evenings, the games I do ghet into don't have a full cohort of players. Fuck, I keep coming across the same people and that absolutely should not be happening for what is still a new game on a platform with a massive installed userbase. It's not the price that's keeping people away - the game's just over £20 on PSN - so I guess the utter lack of publicity, combined with the lack of clear visual identity, combined again with the fact that lots of people presumably think this is just another attempt to cash in on Overwatch's popularity... I guess those are the things that are killing it.

 

Boss Key are supposedly making efforts to increase the player base. The main one of these misses the point spectacularly. They're adding in team deathmatch. After saying that they wanted this to be different than other FPSes out there, their solution to the problem of a lack of players is to introduce a mode that's in every other FPS. And deathmatch just doesn't fucking work in this game - the character skillsets are tuned entirely around the objective games. They're also talking about introducing proper ranked matchmaking, but I don't see that doing anything other than making it even more difficult to find a game. At the moment, some of the existing matchmaking stuff seems to have broken, too - lobbies aren't loading up a new game after one ends, for me, I'm just left sitting on the results screen with no movement and have to drop out. This means that if I do find a game with a bunch of decent players, I get that one game and then lose them as I have to exit out to the title screen.

I was loving this game the previous couple of weeks. This week, it's just depressing me.

We kind of need a new TV. The one we've got is the one that I bought a month or so after I first bought a 360, so it's something like eleven years old now and it shows. There's burn-in down one side of the screen from me watching lots of old 4:3 telly and playing 4:3 games through it - well, not burn-in exactly, but some kind of LCD equivalent - the speakers are kind of crappy and there's always been a significant overscan problem when playing the PS3 through it as well as, I've now discovered, the PS4. And it won't play PS2 titles or some Wii games at quite the right screen ratio (everything's a bit squished horizontally), but that's been a problem from day one.

I took the easy route when I bought it and, instead of doing any actual research into what makes and models were decent, I just found out what MS were using in the 360 demo pods and bought one of those.

 

But now we could do with a replacement. I've learned to live with the faults, but having finally got a PS4 last weekend I'm finding myself getting really pissed off with the overscan issue again. I could do with some recommendations, though.

 

Ideally, we're looking for something with an LED screen no bigger than 32" (anything larger would look ridiculous in this room), decent speakers and, if possible, a good selection of different input ports, although I know that's probably a bit of an ask in this day and age. I would like to have component input as well as SCART and, obviously, HDMI, but I guess it's not a deal-breaker. Freeview would be nice, but if it's not there I'm not going to lose any sleep over it. Options to get rid of overscan are absolutely essential.

 

What I really don't want, though, is an internet or smart TV.

Any recommendations? What are you guys playing stuff through now?

And New Year

I'm not going to comment on it (in case I get an awful case of the quoteys). Just try it out when you can!

 

We showed off some more in Orlando this morning: http://www.businessi...ise-demo-2015-7

Merry Christmas everybody

Happy birthday Qazi

Fuck, I got so drunk last night that I managed to eat macdonalds off the floor, I started lighting matches in the lobby and don't remember anything from the pub home. I've never done that before. Apparently I was calling one of the people my mother after she told me not to eat chips off the floor. Fuck! Class night!

lets hope by his 30th he gets laid... All the best dude

Things changed. The colleague who was in the pool with me for the remaining job decided that she wanted out and that left me unsure as to the best course of action: taking the opportunity to get the redundancy payment and find something else, but potentially leaving myself unemployed long-term again, or taking the job and potentially hating it. In the end, I took the job. The restructure/redundancy meetings at least gave me the opportunity to finally make my feelings clear on where the organisation has been going wrong for years, without fear of a bollocking, because the transfer of the business meant that the senior managers in the meetings with me were all from the company we'd merged with, so they didn't have the baggage and preconceptions regarding me that others from within my own organisation might have had. The contract is worse, in important ways, than the one I was on previously, but I managed to argue them into giving me a pay rise, which counteracts the stuff I've lost.

I still don't know whether taking the job was a mistake or not, tbh. I've effectively ended up with a weird (minor) promotion, thanks to the pay rise and the change to my job description, plus the fact that I'm the only person left within our bit of the company that has a proper understanding of the funding rules that we operate under, the rules relating to our data submissions, etc., I feel like I've got a small element of... I don't know, authority, maybe... due to having that knowledge and being kind of unshackled from direct line management. So that's good and, hopefully, might stand me in good stead for future job applications.

 

On the other hand, there hasn't been a single day since taking the job when I've not ended up feeling irritated, frustrated or angry due to the shit that's getting sent through to me. I guess that's a result of being in an even smaller team now - when there were six of us, if one person found themselves becoming pissed off by the stupidity on show elsewhere, somebody else within the team would inevitably make a daft joke a couple of minutes later and pull that one person out of their anger. Now that there's just three of us, that's proving more difficult, especially given that the other two guys who are left are both much quieter personalities that the three who've gone.

Put it this way: the plan is to use the next ten months, before the negative changes to my contract come into play, to gain a bit more knowledge and experience, while also looking for something else. The pay rise doesn't make up for how wound up I'm getting a lot of the time, due to the general crapitude of the stuff being thrown in my direction. But I'm getting paid every month, I still like immediate team that I'm in and I'm kind of enjoying the fact the senior managers' clear need for me to stay means that I can speak my mind a bit more and try to effect some of the changes that I think the place needs myself.

\

rocking it in black.

 

rocking it in colours.

winter wear

 

look at these god damn dresses, this is so unfair, i wanna wear them

 

Thank you for your time.
 

Just thought I'd wish everyone on here a Happy New Year.

 

Because why not?

 

Hope you all have an awesome 2016.

Quick update from me.

 

I'll be Dad in December and I just bought this place with my in-laws as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

 

Post them here and I'll add them into this post.

 

Format? GHZ name = Steam profile name.

 

 

davejm = dmoscrop

E. Randy Dupre = E. Randy Dupre

Jakeway = mrjakeway

Kensai = kensai79

MrToad = MrToad

plopboy = plopboy

qazimod = qazimod

uiruki = Baltordian