Be Excellent To Each Other

So if your clearing dust off it is that not called 'dusting' ?

Friday tuneage.

There was a tweet the other day that said "if you broke into my house and pointed a gun at me and told me to eject the disc from my PS4 on my first attempt or you'd kill me, I wouldn't even try, and I'd just tell you to shoot me right now."

And a followup "If the first guy had a go and got it wrong and got shot and I saw it, I still wouldn't like my odds of getting it right."

Come on, you hail from Scotland. There’s no way you call it “dusting”. Us common folk say polishing.

No way! Polishing is for brassware and knobs.

Power button is next to the power light is how I remember it.

Polishing involves polish

DEFEATED by the Mrs Hearthly boss!

I was all ready to get my freak on with a telly and an X after work, when Mrs Hearthly WhatsApped me to remind she's out this evening and would I be home by 6pm.

As such I just had to come home after work and my shopping extravaganza was cruelly DENIED.

I'll go telly and X shopping tomorrow morning.

EDIT - It's a good thing she did WhatsApp me really, as I'd completely fucking forgotten about her going out. So me turning up with a car full of new shinies when she's late for going out would not be a good look, and would severely reduce my chances of some action later on when she gets in.

On the other hand, at least you would have had a new console. She'd have come round eventually.

I got this TV just before Christmas, and it's ace.

https://www.richersounds.com/samsung-55 ... lus-2.html

Cor, that's a tempting price

I don't understand why anyone is caring about physical buttons on the PS4. Under what circumstances would you ever use them?

If you’re going over to the console to change/insert a disc pressing a button is more convenient than trying to spaff out the disc using the menus.

I have the slightly smaller model. It's also ace

These appear to be my 'off the shelf' choices (i.e. in stock so I can buy one and take it home) in the 49/50 inch category, within a price range I'm comfortable with.

Anything beyond 50 inches is too big, and I've had a 40 inch for the last 11 years so it'll be nice to get a size upgrade. Also, the bezels on my trusty old 720p Samsung are so massive that a modern 50 incher won't actually be that much wider.

That Samsung one in the middle at £549.99 seems to be a pretty keen contender.

Yeah, but no. I have a 55” and I’d go bigger if the price didn’t go funny past that size.

42" was perfect at my flat and the new house. I had a 50" at my old house and it was too big. It's all about the viewing distance. Otherwise you get the "front row of the cinema" syndrome of having to move your head from one side of the screen to the other.

I have just done MEASUREMENTS and I'll be about 8 feet away from the screen, TBH I've never felt the 40 inch is too small, it's not like squinting across the room to see a blurry 4:3 20 inch CRT telly in the corner, listening to sound that appears to be piped through a broken coffee filter.

Also, the corner of the room where the telly is going will accommodate a modern 50 incher just about perfectly (it'll be slightly wider than the old prodigiously bezelled 40 incher), 55 would require different positioning and this would irritate me.

I'll see what they have available, and maybe the salesman will be able to schmooze me into getting something gargantuan.

Oh yes, another key factor is the fact that it'll have to go in the back of the car as I don't want to wait for delivery. Having a practical estate car finally pays off!

I'm basically getting ready to spend over a grand here for Burnout Paradise Remastered and my old 360/XBLA collection. (Still cheaper than a new car, I must keep telling myself.....) I'm sure there will be other good things on XBox One X though. Positive.

I got the 55" one in the back of the Focus.

I did have to drive home with my knees by my ears, though.

Regarding your old Xbox 360 collection, it's worth checking what is actually available because not all games are backwards compatible.

I'll do research into all that trivial stuff later on, y'know, like what I'm actually going to use it for. As of now MAN SHINY SPENDING MODE has been activated and I don't want silly things like facts and evidence getting in the way of that.

We sit about 8 ft from a 100in projector screen. Probably wouldn't want to go bigger.

We are about 12ft from a 42” TV and it can make me feel motion sick watching the TV, and a lot of video games are just a straight up no on it as they are far worse. I think something around 28” would be perfect for me.

Estate car power, room to spare!

I fear this project is going to incur significant budgetary overspend.

Now for the XBox itself!

One X get!

They had a bundle for £449.99 that gets the console, an extra pad, a dual-slot charging station, and Gears of War 4.

I also had to get a new telly stand as the existing one isn't big enough for the width of the feet on the telly. They threw in an extra optical audio cable for free, so that's a tenner saved.

Total spend = Cough cough ahem £1300.

Console gaming is expensive.

I’m going through Gears at the moment. It’s super-pretty but, hnnngh, so intensely boring. It’ll look awesome on your new 4K HDR set up, mind.

That looks bigger than 50" to me!

What? How?!

Please don't forget to add this to the WongaWatch thread to knock me down another position.

I have one of these for my PS4 and it’s low-key one of my favourite things about this console generation. It uses the (proprietary) lower charging port, so they just drop in to a little holder, no fiddly alignment necessary. I always know where the pads are and they’re always charged.

Hmm. I wonder if any console maker has looked at Qi charging... Maybe the pad doesn’t have a large enough flat area to accommodate the coils, though.

If only your new 55” TV could be used for things other than console gaming!

Fucking ten minute fucking assembly time for the TV stand MY ARSE.

Haven't even got the telly or the XBox out of their packaging yet.

I'm also taking this opportunity to retire:

Chipped XBox
XBox360
Wii-U (sob)
VHS video player/recorder
LOADS OF WIRES

Gears of war was always a game that needed 2 player coopings. 1 player were dull, and for some reason >2 player didn't realy work either.

Aahhhh I've got it now, bloody thing. It doesn't quite fit in the corner.

Subwoofer and media centre PC re-arrangement is now required.

Good job I’ve been cooping it then. But it’s still boring. There’s an entire act where you shoot robots. Just robots. And kick robot footballs.

£800 for telly, it's from a higher range apparently and has well good stuff on it that makes everything look snazzy and that - ue55mu7000t is the model code.

http://www.expertreviews.co.uk/samsung/samsung-mu7000

£50 for stand. Reduced!

£450 for XBox One X.

Equals £1300.

It is all set up and everything is working, the One X setup was painless. One 900MB update and a reboot was all it needed. Logged in with my old 'ChoppoTurnip' account from the 360 days and it's brought over quite a few of my XBLA games but not all.

Burnout Paradise Remastered has been bought digitally for £35 and is downloaded ready to go, haven't actually played it yet though.

The media centre PC amusingly changed its res to 3840x2160 which made the icons thrillingly tiny, so I've dropped that down to 1080. (Not that the humble thing could drive anything at 4K anyway, even if the tiddly Radeon card inside it can output the resolution.)

The One X is a quality piece of kit, very impressed with it, and the pad is excellent. The UI is super as well.

Later on I might actually play a game on it.

Oh yes there seems to be MODERN TRICKERY going on as the telly knows it's got an XBox One plugged into it for example, and there appears to be a bit of crosstalk between them on certain things. Which I like.

Ahhh and finally, the telly has just two wires coming out of it, the power cable and a special Samsung cable that goes to an external in/out box that you put all your inputs into, the digital output is from that, and so on. And they've built little channels into the back of the telly and one of the feet so it looks like there are no wires coming out of it at all.

That stand on that av unit makes my sphincter pucker.

New telly's are far lighter than then used to be. We got a 49" and 55" when we moved, there is barely any weight to either of them. We only moved them two person due to their huge size and not wanting any accidents with the screen.

You're not the only one.

Me three.

Why what's up with it?

You've spent £1300 to play a ten year old game.

It looks like it's sitting right on the edge which is slightly scary.

Also, if your TV and the Xbone support HDMI-CEC you should turn it on so that if you're ever watching films or whatever on the Xbone you can use the TV remote to play/pause rather than having to keep a control pad handy and turned on throughout.

It's not the weight, as bamba said, look at it perched Right on the very edge at the bottom left! It's a strong curry away from toppling off!

I don't think it's as close as you think. It's blending in abit with the chrome of the unit legs.

It's not as bad as it looks. It's very firmly planted as well as the underneath of the legs have very grippy rubber on them.

Also, I'd forgotten how fucking good Burnout Paradise is, and ZOMG it looks amazing in 55-inch 4K-o-vision.

It's good you're enjoying it. £1300 for a game is too rich for my blood, but the knowledge that your main TV no longer tops out at 720p makes me oddly pleased.

Of course it's your sphincter that counts but jeepers!

Enjoy your TV and Xbox anyway, my X is sat on a shelf while we finish sitting the living room out and using the bone in the other room feels outdated somehow, even though it's only used for media usually.

I will be playing Mutant Storm Reloaded next, which I could have played on my 360 yesterday, which was still connected to the old telly and worked perfectly, and is now in a cupboard downstairs. (The 360 is in a cupboard, not the telly, that is far too big to fit in a cupboard.)

Oh yes, CASUALTY NEWS. I moved the trusty old 40 incher up to the main bedroom as an upgrade to the 32 incher that is in there now. Alas it did not survive the trip, and had horrible jaggedy lines going up the middle when I turned it back on, poor bugger clearly didn't like its first proper move in 11 years.

So we're back on the 32 incher in the main bedroom.

The old 40 incher is a lot heavier than the new 55 incher. It's like technology progresses over time, or something. I've left it up on the top landing for now as I don't fancy carrying it down two floors, my back is already complaining a bit about all the lifting today. (I properly put it out about 12 years ago and still have to be careful.)

I know I'm technically at '£1300 for one game' but in reality I think I'll get a lot of use out of the console as things go forward, for all my PC spoddery I do still love me a bit of a console gaming.

Somewhat OT here but tenuously linked and not sure where else it belongs.

Turns out that even fucking tellies get hit with the 'Isle of Man doesn't exist' problem that afflicts things like the Google Play Store (whereby we only get the 'free' version of the store unless using a VPN as Google doesn't think the Isle of Man exists and categorises us as 'rest of the world' if it identifies an IOM IP).

I was thinking there was some stuff missing from the apps list on the telly that should be there. A few of us chaps were WhatsApping each other last night about all the usual shit we WhatsApp each other about - (chubby Russian brides last night, somehow) - and I'd mentioned NEW TELLY AND XBOX ONE X to the group as of course you would, and a mate mentioned that there's a hidden menu on Samsung tellies that you can access during initial setup to force it to an internet/geographical region, he said he'd done the same on his and it opened up a load of stuff on there that'd previously been missing.

So basically you have to do a factory reset on the telly, go through the initial setup as normal, but then on the T&Cs page press a specific button combo (FF, 2, 8, 9, REW - on my model), and it brings up a list you can choose from to 'manually' locate your telly rather than have it go off IP address. (Brings back memories of my old Samsung DVD player that you could region unlock with some remote control trickery, plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.)

(In fact, I remember now, it was the Samsung 709 DVD player, wasn't it, using an AIWA remote of all things.)

I chose the UK, and true enough when I'd finished the setup I had a much more fulsome apps/menu/options list presented to me than I'd had when allowing it to go through setup automatically. (I was also able to select a broadcaster to get normal telly, I picked the Granada region, whereas on the auto setup if I chose 'Television' as the source it just said something like 'you have no broadcast provider'.)

Tchoh, eh?