Bobfoc

This week's Humble Bundle has Cities: Skylines and its expansions. £1 gets you the game and £14.50 gets you all the expansions. There's also a middle tier, as usual.

No Man's Sky will come to Game Pass next month.

The Netherlands fit the bill for the World Cup in general. They've been runners-up three times and beaten semi-finalists twice. I've always found their record to be interesting. After reaching the final twice in the seventies, they then failed to qualify twice in a row. Then, following a semi-final defeat in 1998, they didn't qualify for 2002. After that, having lost in the final in 2010 and finishing third in 2014, they once again failed to make it to the next World Cup. Another country that comes to mind is New Zealand in the Cricket World Cup. They've been runners-up twice in a row, most notably last year, when they lost by the finest of margins.

While next month will ramp things up with the Not E3 festivities, there's a showcase tomorrow that will cover some smaller games. There are said to be over fifty of them, so expect a fairly quickfire affair with a few sizzle reels thrown in.

Call of Duty: WWII will be one of June's Plus games.

Lemmy was a better vocalist than a lot of people give him credit for.

As for Arya, they made her too powerful for my liking. We saw her surviving what for any unimportant character would be a fatal stab wound and then come back to kill the waif, and then she's almost immediately capable of infiltrating The Crossing and killing all the Freys, despite her fairly minimal training in the art of assassination. That also presumably meant that she had to spend a couple of weeks convincingly masquerading as Walder Frey before the feast, despite only meeting him once. Once she's massacred everyone (because the whole thing she learned from Ed Sheeran's crew about not everyone on the opposing side being evil apparently didn't apply to the Freys, who are all villains), she takes off her disguise and casually walks outside, where you'd imagine there'd be guards stationed. The next time we see her, she's easily beating Brienne in a sparring session, even though Brienne is one of the best fighters in the land and has many years more experience in both melees and real fights. In my opinion, the whole "badass" portrayal went way too far way too quickly. By all means, make her an angry seeker of justice, but suddenly turning her into an invincible death ninja was a case of fan service going overboard.

And don't forget Euron actually being a good character.

Dany being the big bad wasn't problematic in and of itself. The problem was that she had won the war and then decided to burn everyone for no reason. Yes, we've seen her deal out horribly violent punishments, but never against civilians. In my case, and I'm sure in those of many others, yes, I do care. There are still a lot of interesting plot threads and characters that weren't in the show, and GRRM has said that not all of the endings for the characters will be the same. Even if they are, I'd like to see how they get to those points in a way that's explored in more detail.

I finished Series 2 of Mr. Robot. I put it off for a while because I heard it was the worst one, but after a few ponderous episodes, it really kicked into gear. Episode 6 had perhaps the wildest tonal shift I've ever seen for its first twenty minutes, and I loved it.

Needs more 1894.

I've often wondered what sorts of games I'd be playing if I were a child now. I doubt I'd be into online multiplayer games because I was so anxious, and I probably wouldn't have been creative enough to get a lot out of Minecraft. I'm not sure I'd have been into console games at all really, except perhaps for something like Super Mario Odyssey.

I find it hard to see a reboot happening for years and years, if ever. As @livid suggested, there's so much room for spinoffs that HBO can milk it for a long time if its popularity doesn't tail off dramatically. Speaking of spinoffs, what ideas have people come up with over the last year? I'm particularly keen on series that focus on a small number of characters and really go to town on developing them. That said, I'd also love to see something akin to The Crown, only based on the life of Aerys II. Have each series cover a different time period and chart his gradual descent into madness. You could start with the Tragedy at Summerhall and then cover his role during The War of the Ninepenny Kings, his budding friendship with Tywin, his coronation and his outlandish promises that came to nothing. Then you could really explore the tensions that developed between Tywin and him, as well as Aerys' lust for Joanna Lannister. You've also got the difficulties Rhaella had with childbirth and the irrational punishments he imposed on those involved. The Defiance of Duskendale could then take up a good few episodes, perhaps even a full series. You'd get to see Ser Barristan being amazing, Tywin being ruthless and Rhaegar possibly making plans for his ascent to the throne, along with the all-important breaking point for Aerys' sanity. The Year of the False Spring would follow, and we'd see some of the pivotal moments that shaped the events to come. Jaime Lannister is named to the Kingsguard, Tywin resigns as Hand, Varys joins Aerys' court and Aerys begins to order the stocking of wildfire beneath the city. This series would end with the Tourney at Harrenhal, setting up Robert's Rebellion. Then, of course, you'd get the series about Robert's Rebellion that so many people had wanted. Hopefully, everything will have been built up effectively by this point and we'd see everything from a more complex point of view. People who didn't read the books could see that Aerys wasn't always mad, but that the seeds of his descent were in place early in his life. Personally, I hate the theory that he lost his sanity because Bran meddled with time because it cheapens the impact of all the under significant events in his life.

Any time someone promotes their show or film with the word "epic", I'm put off. It makes me think of bombastic special effect showcases, rather than well-crafted stories. Game of Thrones was at its best for me when it focused on smaller scale events between characters. I think the only battle I really liked was in Blackwater, and that was particularly effective because we only saw short glimpses of the actual fighting, with the dialogue between characters on each side taking greater precedence. The fact that GRRM himself wrote the episode was no doubt a big factor in how well it turned out.

The show ended up developing a narrative style that mimicked bad wrestling booking. It became more about creating "moments" than about maintaining logical storytelling with believable consequences to the characters' actions. This was especially apparent in the Winterfell battle against the army of the dead. The Dothraki charging into the darkness and getting obliterated looked great, but everyone could see how tactically stupid it made the humans look. It was like the time WWE wanted Shane McMahon to jump off the cell at Wrestlemania, but they didn't have a good idea of how to get to that point, so they just spurted out a setup that made no sense as soon as it began. Then, much like with the Dothraki, it turned out that the result of the match didn't matter anyway because Shane got the winning stipulation prize and the Dothraki were still mostly intact. Then you've got Dany's murderous rampage, which was like one of Kane's sudden "RAAAH I'M A MONSTER" heel turns out of nowhere. Yes, we got to see something spectacular, but it came at the expense of narrative cohesion. For the most part, the actual ending points for the characters weren't all terrible. If you'd told me years ago that Tyrion would be Hand, Davos would be Master of Ships, Sansa would lead The North, Sam would be a maester and Jon would go back beyond The Wall, I wouldn't have been surprised at all. Bran being King could make sense with the right build-up and explanation too. The issue was that, as noted before, the writers had no idea how to get to those end points without the source material to guide them, and the result was a scattergun mishmash of cobbled together explanations that fell apart under the smallest amount of scrutiny.

If nothing else, the way the show turned out in the last couple of series gave me a greater appreciation of the books. The Winds of Winter is something I'm really looking forward to, even though it's almost a myth at this point.

Sonic, CM2 and Tekken would probably make my list too. I didn't play FF7 until I was an adulthood, though. I'd add Metal Gear Solid and Street Fighter 2, I think. Special mention goes to Hover, the free Windows 95 game, which was my favourite pick-up-and-play game.

It was seven years ago today that the Xbox One was officially revealed. So much has changed for the Xbox brand since then, and yet Halo, Gears and Forza are still its biggest franchises. Suffice to say that there's more hope now of new properties than there was back then.

Speaking of DLC, the Season Pass content has just started. The price looks a bit steep at £32.99 for what looks like eight new civs and a few as yet unrevealed game modes.

Money. In all seriousness, I don't know how FF7 Remake would go down with someone who hadn't played the original version. Unlike, say, the recent Resident Evil remakes, which were presented as definitive versions to supersede the games on which they're based, FF7 Remake serves as more of a companion piece to the old PS1 game. Most of it is perfectly comprehensible on its own, but the stuff the game throws out at the end would be a lot more difficult to make sense of if you're not familiar with the source material.

I was thinking of getting it on Switch for £2.49, but the file size is 42GB.

It seems to be heavily reduced on all platforms.

I played GTA V with a keyboard and mouse and it was fine.

Red Dead Redemption is ten years old today. I won a copy in a competition at launch and have played it through three times since. I have no hesitation in calling it Rockstar's best storytelling effort at the time, eclipsed only by its sequel.

I can imagine the younger versions being sold as DLC.