I thought I need purpose and narrative drive, otherwise I'm just playing a mindless videogame about shooting and jumping about. That's not enough to sustain me longer than a couple of months and even then without a purpose I'll be wondering why I'm wasting my time.

Really? It's pretty much spelled out for you in the opening cut scene and first few missions exactly who and what you are.

So who's got it and on which console? It's screaming out for some Beexer fun.

Do you need anything else?

1. Destiny is a ‘well designed’ game in the way a chair might be well designed or a lampshade might be well designed. It is the IKEA Billy bookshelf of videogames: safe, sturdy, inoffensive; as a Billy bookshelf does a very competent job of being a bookshelf in the most generic, conventional sense so that there is not a home that a Billy bookshelf would look strange in, Destiny is a very competent game in the most generic, conventional sense. It’s the safest possible game Activision and Bungie could have created. Like some kind of ur-videogame object. Maddy Myers said on Twitter yesterday that it looks like the kind of videogame you would see in the background of a film, and she’s not wrong. It is derivative, generic, and conservative; but not in the sense that it fails to achieve some innovative greatness that it is aiming for. Rather, it is clearly derivative, generic, and conservative by intent. It doesn’t want to be something creatively progressive or imaginative. How then to evaluate it? I typically like to approach a game on its own terms. Not in some sort of ‘authorial intent’ kind of way. Rather: what does the game tell me about what it is striving to achieve, and how well does it achieve that? Destiny tells me it just wants to be a safe, competent videogame object, and it achieves that very well. So therefore it is ‘good’, I guess. But there is nothing here critically or meaningfully or thematically. There’s no depth. It’s a bookshelf. It’s an object. But it wants to be an object. Ok the

5. So there is a lot of Halo here. But Destiny also lacks what made Halo interesting. It’s hard to over-estimate just how satisfying Halo‘s battles were with the explicit hierarchy of enemies: cowardly grunts, elusive jackals, and cunning elites. Every single elite felt like fighting an equal to Master Chief, and they felt that way, in large part thanks to the many grunts and jackals backing them up. Every encounter was a strategy of figuring out how to pick off the small enemies without being destroyed by the elite, so that then you could destroy the elite without being destroyed by them. It was a juggle of weapons, where individual weapons did not matter so much as what combination of weapons you had. There was so much moment-to-moment strategising that people often fail to appreciate, instead remembering it as the conventional run-and-gun modern shooter that it helped to normalise on consoles. Destiny lacks that. It has interesting-to-fight enemies, to be sure. But they are all the same except for a slightly different placed weak point. Some areas are satisfying to fight in, constantly moving and spinning and throwing knives and grenades. But it’s all grunts and no elites. Even the tougher enemies like wizards don’t require any real kind of strategy, just more bullets. It’s wrong to fault Destiny for not being Halo, but as its similarities help us detail its strengths, this difference helps us detail its weaknesses: Destiny is not strategically interesting. It is just running-and-gunning.

The problem with that review, is that it isn't a review.

On t'piss 4?

Is it the kind of thing you'd value a Dave (Mr) to play with?

No more Dinklage

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-33785569

Mr Dave and I are going to give this a go on Thursday evening if anyone fancies joining us. We're both n00bs so not really interested if you're a level 30 something or other. PS4.

Are you doing the new bits (Taken King) or the old stuff ?

I'm somewhere around level 12 or so I think - I played a little at the start and it did not grab me but I'll join in if its the original stuff your going to go through ?

(i'll be online from around 21:00)

It popped up the other day saying the update had been downloaded and installed. But I'll check it out when I get home.

I'd not even put it in my disk drive before last week. It only needed about 4Gb of updates total...

I had a little look at my character last night. Level 6. I've finished the levels in New Russia, but happy to do them again for your benefit.

I started mine up yesterday and it downloaded another very small update (10mb or so) and then started - i was level 7 , and did one mission just to remind myself of controls and how things work and got to level 8 so not that much different to where you are.

Happy to re-do any of the earlier missions (I've done 2 on the 'next location' after New Russia)

After dipping in and out of it for the last year: the shooting is soo good. The strikes are great. PVP is pretty good. The story sucks, there isn't and I think will never be any straight answers to a lot of stuff. The raids? Dunno. Never played them, never going to play them.

If you don't have at least 5 friends who play regularly then all the end game stuff is not going to happen.

That was a lot of fun. We should do it again soon.

It was but I cant believe the normal 'story' stuff locks out once you have 4 people in your team - was that just for those few missions or can you really only do 3 players max ?

Sozzles. Pretty sure I've played 4 player stuff before. Raids maybe? Not sure. Probably unlock later or summat.