JasonM

The full Phase 5 slide from SDCC. Spoilered for... size and spoilers?

Honestly personally the interesting part is the claims of Rockstar having truly did their due dilligence in trying to fix the crunch culture in their corporate structure. It's honestly hard to believe the veracity of those, and I need to see if it's going to be the same when they're months removed from release whether they'll be able to avoid crunch then. But the fact Jason Schreier (to a degree) vouches for it makes me believe they're genuine, because I don't see someone like Schreier who has crusaded against crunch culture to peddle bullshit without genuinely feeling there's merit. Also reading the bloomberg article and its sources, R* has lowered the wage gap from 34.4% to 13.8% in four years, with the UK industry average being 17.1%, so honestly good on them for making the right moves, and I hope it continues.

Disco Elysium is 65% off on GOG and you can pick it up for less than $15, which is honestly a steal for an absolutely phenomenal point and click-ish adventure.

Are you in any shape interested in sports anime? Then I can suggest Aoashi (based on Football), it's 16 episodes into its first season and already have hit a few notable highs in terms of story and character work. It certainly looks like it has the potential to become a big thing. Older stuff if you haven't already, Megalobox S1/S2. Psycho-Pass, Akudama Drive, Vinland Saga, ODDTAXI, Deca-Dence.

Butt connoisseur jones over here

I'm not expecting it, because it's Volition/Saints Row. But I would like a decent story to come with all the zany insane antics. 3 and 4 never really resonated with me because the story didn't interest me, Saints Row 1 and 2 I felt had relatively good stories albeit short ones. Just a little bit of groundedness in the middle of all the pure insanity would work.

My local team never has money to make poor transfers with. Instead we just let most of our actual talent walk for next to nothing, making sure we never have money to make poor transfers with.

Now that you mentioned it, I agree with that Ms. Marvel could've been a really good origin film. There's some parallels with Spider-Man in that she's a teenager who gets powers and has to figure out how to be a hero, but with the Spider-Man films having avoided the origin story trope, Ms. Marvel would've had the perfect chance to showcase its own origin story. I loved the show, but it definitely struggled with the Marvel formula that they have been running with since WandaVision. Most of their shows have ran into the issue that they either don't have enough time to tell a story in six episodes (or they have to leave some pretty big blanks to get there), or they kinda stall around episode 4-5 because there's not enough to really fill out a six episode season with. Marvel should definitely look into their TV series formula going forward. It seems She-Hulk has 9 episodes, so maybe that'll be better OR worse, but at least it should lead to a different formula compared the past series. But Secret Invasion/Ironheart seems to be only 6 episodes (but I guess that might change before release?) I still Marvel hits more than they miss, and with series not lingering the bad ones don't leave a bad taste whilst the good ones leave you wanting for more, so it's not the worst formula, but it can always improve. I still feel Loki, Hawkeye, and Moon Knight were the best. But all of them have done something for me. Also second the desire to see more of Ms. Marvel going forward, Iman Vellani is definitely a gem.

I mean Man Utd wouldn't have needed a different kit to make people feel sick watching them.

This is the experience I have with this. I like neither of these assholes, but am slightly behind Novak because I think a cunt like Kyrgios shouldn't ever have the honour of winning a slam. Both as a person and as an athlete do I find Kyrgios to be everything I dislike. Novak I utterly despise as a person because of his science denying covid insanity, but can respect as the athlete he is. It really is a choice between two terrible choices. I don't want my tennis to be like politics. Anyways, Novak up 2-1, let's see we can avoid a 5th set and forget this final quickly. EDIT: Well that's done, onto the US Open where we at least know Novak won't be welcome. Might become an interest tournament depending on how bad Rafa's abdomen tear is.

SVR and SVR06

And the English will claim him, as is tradition

Of season 3 or season 1? Because if you're still in season 1, you're going to be in for a hell of an episode 7. That one straight up cemented that Atlanta/Glover can write anything he wants.

Safe to say it did, tbh

Pretty excited that there are two Dutch players in the 3rd round for the first time since 2004. I don't see either going much further than that, but it finally feels there's at least a few that are figuring it out.

Honestly with Multiverse of Madness opening up the idea of there being different universes, i'd rather they just avoid the issue entirely and set anything X-Men related in their own little universe away from the rest of the MCU. As said, X-Men has always been about the dynamics of persecution and bigotry and mutants have been used as analogies of jews, racial segregation, anti-semitismm, Anti-LGBTQ+, and other forms of discrimination for as long as they existed. To bring them into a world where people are taking selfies with Dr. Strange or drooling over Thor, it would create a very weird situation where on the flipside you have mutants be discriminated against despite being the same but different. Or you'd have to remove the bigotry from their story, but that kind of defeats much of the point of the X-Men and their overarching story of overcoming persecution. Not saying that Marvel couldn't make it work all the same, they've knocked most of their work out of the park with the MCU, but it would honestly give the entire X-Men much more legs if it has its own room to breathe rather than having to be fit into the already existing world. With the multiverse opened up, you can always bring them in for Avengers Vs. X-Men related shenanigans. Or maybe they could debut the X-Men/Mutants through the multiverse, and build on general themes of xenophobia of powered humans coming from another universe to 'endanger' the current universe, and in turn mutants can be treated like dregs because they're not originally from the MCU's main universe. EDIT: Although TBH, a "We were always there, but we're choosing to make ourselves heard" story could also work just as well. People IRL find all sorts of excuses to discriminate against people, and the hypocrisy of putting Avengers on a pedestal and finding Mutants scary is a story you can definitely play out.

BeamNG is an utterly delight of a game and every time I come back to it I continue to be impressed by the improvements the developers have made, it's just such a brilliant project. Another thing I love is that there's also a modding community that's producing comparable vehicles to base game, realfakes with a level of detail that matches the cars made by the developers. With an absolute glut of variants and ways to modify them, so they feel like they're on par with the vanilla content. On another note, I have been playing a bunch of Ride 4 in the past month or so after picking it up on sale. (currently also on sale for 75% off). And I must say it's a game I love and hate in equal spades but I keep coming back to because despite the frustrations and the grind of improvement I truly feel like it's challenging me in ways that games like Gran Turismo or Forza never did. It's not perfect, the AI can be utterly insane, but they also genuinely are breathing down my neck when I got the difficulty at 100 out of 120, they push me to my absolute limits and well beyond at times. So I get angry, I get frustrated, but an hour later I will find myself back playing the game because I want to get a gold medal on every challenge. And there's SO MANY challenges that I truly feel I can play over a hundred hours and not be in the final leagues. of course, that's ignoring the mental multi-hour endurance races that are in this game. If you love bikes, if you're prepared to grind to reach a competent level let alone become truly fast, then Ride 4 is one of the best SP racing games i've played. Truly reminds me of the days playing GT4 on PS2 as a wee lad and trying to improve. Bombing down a windy road at 200+ KPH is a truly terrifying experience that no other racing game has managed to give me.

If you need an online PDF of the 5e Player's Handbook to flip through, I found this. http://online.anyflip.com/dkneq/yerq/mobile/index.html Page 18-21 on dwarves, and the two basic subraces of Mountain and Hill dwarves!

Roleplaying!

I saw some footage of Matchpoint and I wasn't certain if I liked it because it seemed like the players had a lot of 'warping into place' whenever they'd go hit the ball and it looked a bit hokey and unnatural. Did you experience that playing the demo, or maybe I was mistaken seeing developmental footage? I definitely hope it'll be good and as @Bobfoc mentioned also has a good meaty career mode. I currently mostly play Tennis Elbow 2013 on PC, but that game series has never been a looker and is ever the clunker in terms of looks (although I love the gameplay, still).

[rant incoming] Having done International management in this save (once getting Poland to the WC final and winning the euros with the Netherlands), my biggest frustration with it is that it just isn't fun or engaging in any way. - Scouting players straight up sucks and it takes a lot of setting up to get a decent picture of what you're working with. - There's no interactions whatsoever between games, other than the odd player whinging they weren't called up, or the odd player asking if they should flip nationalities. - There's zero prep, no training during international breaks, and it's extremely hard to impossible to get tactics familiar even if you call up the same group every time out. - It has no real hook that makes it even interesting to try aside from club management, because all you're doing is calling up a group, playing 2-3 matches, then processing a few months to do it again. There's nothing to keep you busy, other than the aformentioned tedium of making sure scout report/national pool is still up to date. It's extremely shallow, and it hasn't seen much or any focus from SI for as long as I can honestly remember. I think I could boot up FM05 and have largely the same thing going on with international management. But the latter is also just FM in general, where there's quite a few upgrades all around, but there's also still so many things that have barely or had no improvement at all in the past seventeen+ years. And also a bunch of systems that lack the granularity it needs to really work. Like why is youth intake a complete lottery, for example? Every team IRL has a philosophy in scouting/recruiting, why is it near enough random what you get every year? Fuck, Total Club Manager 03 had more depth on the youth system than FM has now, in TCM you could even set up overseas academies and look into pre U-18 youth squads. I'm not saying TCM was a better game than CM4 or FM05, but they actually had features back then that aren't even in FM22 now. Why are almost all stats exactly the same as the Championship Manager games? I know they added advanced stats like xG, but with near enough none of it being saved from year-to-year, what's the point in giving advanced stats when clubs irl track that stuff over significantly longer periods than a singular season. You can't even have something like "Top 100 scorers in Premier League history" lists, it's just THE top scorer and fuck every other player that isn't him? Compare that to a game like OOTP, which tracks EVERY stat over every single season, from youth to seniors and everything in between. Set pieces are some of the most dynamic and important aspects of football, yet in FM it's still shallow as hell. You can only have a singular corner strategy per flag and there's no real flexibility in what you can do. I can't slot a player on the edge of the opposite side of the box, I can just pre-set them to very specific places. Free Kicks are even worse, with many teams having all sorts of different routines depending on the situation, you can't even set a routine on free kicks on the sides of the box, only in front of it. It's truly wild that a game this focused on accurate football has neglected these aspects. Some parts are even a step back vs. CM0102, in that game you could set up defensive and attacking positioning, even to a level of granularity where you could tell players how to position themselves based on where the ball is. in FM22 there's only guesswork in what the roles and all the instructions will actually give you. And those four things are just what I can think up right now. And don't get me wrong, I love this series and this game, I got near 600 hours on a singular save on this year's title. But the more I play this game and this series, the more frustrated I get about the very selective (and underwhelming) improvements.

Holy moly Fernando Alonso showing why he's still one of the best.

Politicians who have the legislative power to do something about the environment but choose not to Vs. Racing Driver who on his own has only a voice to call for change. And as Chris mentioned, Vettel knows that it's hypocritical to call for these things when his team is driving in a Saudi blood oil competition, but that doesn't take away the fact that these politicians are the bigger cunts for not pushing for change when they do actually have the power to. TL;DR - Those politicians need to do less whinging at people and more doing something about the climate crisis. But they won't do it, because the lobby's too far up their ass.

General opinion was that it's fun and interesting, but too short a story compared to UD/TQ (which themselves aren't exactly the longest games). It and the rest of the Dark Anthology are more so a case of giving you multiple smaller stories with a different cast every time, rather than one bigger story like you got with Until Dawn and you have with The Quarry. If you can find the bundle of the three released TDA games around $30-40 then that'll give you a good amount of fun, but dropping 30 bucks on a singular title in that series is a bit too much in my opinion.

Mate of mine got it because he loved Until Dawn (and also liked the Dark Pictures Anthology, but a little less), and survey so far is that the game is definitely fun and hits all the right beats that Until Dawn did, but at the same time it doesn't really captivate them as much as UD did for them, partly the story itself and partly the characters in it. But as a whole it's a fun game, and YMMV on whether you'll like the story more than UD since i've heard opinions go both ways on it. ACG also did a review on it and noted that it's quite heavy on bugs, and again YMMV on how those will affect your enjoyment. They did note there's quite a bit of replayability in how the story changes depending on who lives and dies and what choices are made throughout.