Be Excellent To Each Other

Good point. I stand corrected.

Because of a love of shitty dpads

XBox One X games played so far. Zero. (Well, I know Burnout Paradise Remastered is an XB1 game, but it's a remaster of a decade old 360 game.)

Other than that, imported 360 XBLA games are the only other thing I've played.

Oh wait, I did one lap of the course on that TT game, we found our house on it (which is actually there, individually modelled), haven't loaded it since.

I've found myself hankering to play Burnout Revenge again, but that would entail getting the 360 out of its new home in a cupboard and setting it back up.

Trousers is an arsehole with his scores on the various Geometry Wars games.

Don’t friend me then

Is your gamertag 'DBSnappa'? Want to make sure I'm not just adding some random dude as a friend

That’s me.

The games with gold for April. Nothing to see here... Move along... Soon be May.

I'm not sure I'll be paying for Gold or Game Pass once my one month trials expire.

Unless they start putting a load of old arcadey 360 games on there, of course.

The XB1 is a fantastic Netflix player by the way, better than the telly's own app or using a browser on the media centre PC. And I get proper 5:1 DTS because I've got an optical out from the XB1 into my amp.

I just play Burnout Paradise Remastered and watch Netflix with it, really.

Well there’s a bunch of shit games I don’t want.

Really? That Assassin's Creed game was brilliant fun and The Witness is meant to be great.

Assassin’s Creed games can get fucked. Overrated bollocks. All of them.

The Witness on the other hand just isn’t for me. Line puzzles for 50 hours just ain’t going to hold my interest. I’ll give it a punt to see what’s crack-a-lacking but I don’t expect much.

I've literally only played that one so have no loyalty to the series or expectations going in and it was just really good fun throughout.

Glad you enjoyed your time, but I find them generic, bland, collectathons that couldn’t tell a decent story if it had been written for them by Shakespeare himself. There’s zero atmosphere and you’re hardly a stealth assassin in any of the games.

The latest episode turns the middle east into Grand Theft Egypt. But of course it wouldn’t be a Ubisoft game unless enemies shone bright colours through the scenery or had large numbers hovering into their noggin, y’know, just to spoil the fabulous worlds that their artists painstakingly create before someone from The Gameplay Department comes and shoves a thousand collectibles and mission markers all over it.

The visible numbers thing is a new feature believe it or not as Origins is a bit of a departure from previous games in a few ways by all accounts. Eh, I'm not really defending the series because I suspect that playing only the best one and none of the others makes for a fun time, and I realise I'm in a near unique position to have done that.

That’s why I mentioned it as part of GTE. Ubisoft should learn a trick or two from Breath of the Wild because if they removed the HUD and all the bullshit they could probably make an incredible AC game. They certainly have the artistic talent. I doubt they have the Nintendo to do this though but FC5 has paired back on some the bollocks so maybe in a few years when they’ve properly studied BoTW there might be an actual classic game in them after all. Let’s just hope that game reverts to Prince of Persia.

Ultimately, for better or worse, "Ubisoft open world game" has basically become a genre in its own right. If you only play one of them every now and again then it's an undeniably good time. Playing too many of them in general engenders fatigue very quickly. They definitely need to allow for more innovation across the board, but their stuff is well done and I like that it exists.

Oh, if you have sent a FR and am wondering why I haven’t responded, my 360 isn’t connected to the Ethernet at the moment, but should be rectified in the next few days.

Best "Ubisoft open world game" is Mad Max, even though it wasn't by ubisoft. Everything is so so smooth. Beautiful deserts to have fun driving.

That and Far Cry 3, but yes, the formula is beyond stale now.

Mad Max is free on PSN this month, so I'll remember to check it out.

Also the best Ubisoft Open World Game is Mercenaries 2, also not by Ubisoft.

Helps if one is fan of the source material (who isn't anyway?). Apparently it was low rated by reviewers for being a reskin of Shadow of Mordor, but when we are driving at smooth 60fps through a gorgeous desert who cares.

Besides, the game has the best story of recent AAA games. Someone stole Max car. Max just wants to get his car back. No pretentious bullshit or "cinematic" experience.

Myself and 3 friends have all activated our free trial of Game Pass this evening just so we could play Sea of Thieves.

It is brilliant fun with the four of us! It's the first game that we've actually worked together on.

I'm not sure whether we'll all buy it because for the same money, we could just game pass for a few months. That'll give us more games to play and from what I've heard, we'll have seen everything we need to see in Sea of Thieves by then.

Also... the sea is pretty. Superbly pretty!

By all accounts there's about 5-8 hours of game, then you've seen and done everything.

But yes, everyone agrees that what there is, is magnificent.

Should note here I haven't actually played it myself (it's installed on my XB1X, but, y'know, Burny Pee Remastered), but have spoken to people at work who've played it (two of whom actually got refunds out of Microsoft for it despite the 'no refunds' policy on digital purchases), who were eulogising about it on day one and two, and by day three were saying they were bored.

Don't do what I did and on finding that you can't cancel game pass from the console, forget to go to billing.microsoft.com for several months.

You can't cancel it from the console? Good tip! Thanks.

I have one, bought in 2016 without Pop buttons as they weren't out at that point.

I really like mine, one remote to control them all, you don't have to spend £200 on one either they do cheaper models.

The only downside is that it gives 4 years olds easy control over the TV with one button so start an activity, I'm always looking for ours as my wife hides it from our eldest

Some more original Xbox games are being made backwards compatible in the next few weeks. Panzer Dragoon Orta is the one I'm looking forward to!

There’s some ace games from yonder day.

SSX3 was The Tits.

Mercs was good too.

Can confirm. Is very sexy.

https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digi ... x-analysis

It very received a P release? Outrageous.

That's where I went wrong, the PC version probably got released years ago.

TOP TIP.

Even though the 'Capture' menu says you can only capture 30 seconds of footage at 4K, as long as you have (1) An external USB 3.0 rated drive and (2) An Xbox One X, you can capture up to an hour at a time in 4K.

(It won't allow this if you're capturing to the internal storage, and/or have a standard XBox One.)

The 'replay capture' feature is indeed capped at 30 seconds if you change the capture mode to 4K (down from 2 minutes), but the standard 'record from now' function will actually capture at 4K once you've set it in the Capture preferences.

It really does look a lot better than the standard 1080p crappy bitrate capture. Obviously filesizes are much increased but with a 1TB USB 3.0 drive costing as little as £40, that's no biggy.

(Compare this video to the videos I've linked in the Burnout Paradise thread, which were captured at the standard 1080p/shit bitrate quality, before I realised you could force 4K.)

EDIT - Actually it doesn't look that much better once it's gone through the YouTube mangler, and for some reason it's 1080p instead of 4K. Stupid YouTube. Windows definitely says it's 3840x2160@60FPS though. Well it looks fucking good when you're watching the raw footage, anyway.

EDIT AGAIN - Turns out YouTube was just being slow, it's now available at 2160p/60FPS. Looks pretty sweet!

My trial XBox Pass that came with the console has run out, so MS have given me some more for free.

I haven't actually played anything at all on Pass during the trial period (I installed Sea Of Thieves but haven't even loaded it).

Who has that much free time to play games? I love playing on my XBox but it's also competing with Hearthstone, fruit machine emulation, watching series/films, and being an internationally famous content creator on YouTube. (And I also love watching stuff on YouTube.)

I can't see me paying XBox Pass any time soon, or most likely at all, I'm not sure I'll get any value out of it whatsoever.

I've paid for Gold membership though.

I agree about having time as I'm the same but, I can imagine that if I was single and without kids with all the time in the world then the game pass represents excellent value for money.

I have a feeling that we'll see more of this particular business model over the coming years.

GAMES WITH GOLD MAY 2018:

XB1:
Super Mega Baseball 2
Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain.

360
Sega Vintage Collection: Streets of Rage
Vanquish

Ooohhhh Streets of Rage, I can see me and Mrs Hearthly getting together on that for old time's sake.

We used to play it on my Megadrive in our crappy student house in Manchester in 1993 whilst my girlfriend was out having sex with her fiancé.

Your stories make me sad.

Oh, and it’s all 3 SoR games which is cool.

The game pass that came with my Scorpio didn't even work.

The first SMB was excellent fun.

I bought RAYMAN LEGENDS for my XB1X yesterday which is only £23.99 on the MS Store.

The good news is that it's an incredibly accomplished version of the game, with the extra RAM of the XB1 being leveraged to effectively eliminate loading screens completely after the initial game load. (The same is true on the PS4 version, apparently.)

Beyond that it's really just the same as the 360/PS3 versions, running at a flawless 1080p/60FPS. (The Wii-U was a rock-solid 720p/60FPS.)

It does however suffer a bit from the lack of motion gamepad controls implemented in the Wii-U version (which is the platform I previously played it on), which makes sense as the game was originally designed for Wii-U, they've done a workaround with standard controls, and it only affects the small number of levels that were designed for the Wii-U's gamepad, but it is still a small tick in the 'negatives' column.

Overall though, if you've never experienced Rayman Legends before, I can very much recommend snagging it on XB1 for the bargainous price of £23.99 (note that this is £6 cheaper than the Switch version, and that the Switch version is the weakest version of all, being inferior to even the Wii-U version, I was going to get it on Switch until I read up on it and got the XB1 version instead).

Turns out the XB1(X) makes for a fantastic media player. There are both VLC and PLEX apps available in the store for free.

VLC is great with locally attached drives but I've found it badly behaved for network stuff.

In the end I just installed Plex Media Server on the Media Centre PC, created a library in there, installed the app on the XB1X and it works flawlessly, connecting happily to the Plex Media Server.

There seem to be some new hyper-compressed codecs around that the old Media Centre PC has trouble with, suffering from stuttery playback whatever media player I use, whereas the XB1X copes without a hitch. (VLC on the XB1X will play MKVs that VLC on the Media Centre PC really struggles with.)

It's turning out to be a rather impressive multi-capability box.

I was on the cusp of spending about £600 on a new Media Centre PC yesterday, had it all specced up ready to order at PC Specialist, but now this is not necessary, which is good.

So Mrs Hearthly hasn't got any better at this in the last 24 years, the best thing to do is stay well out of her way or you'll most likely get an iron pipe in the face or a knife in the back, or get grabbed from behind and violated, and not in a good way.

Plus in the heat of the moment her fingers tend to wander and she does ten back-to-back special moves which use most of her health and I'm like 'You're pressing the wrong button again'.

Anyway, this was reflected in our scores where I absolutely crushed her, which is the natural order of things.

i see Edge has had an update on the Xbox One... I don't use it much but it seems to do the job. I'm posting this from it as we speak.

OH SHIT SON.

BIGGEST INSTA-BUY EVER.

https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2018 ... n-xbox-one

Actually I had it as a digital purchase on my 360, so hopefully it will just appear in my games list.

If it doesn't I don't mind spending £9.99 again.

Revenge is easily the worst Burnout.

I love it, it's totally mental and has the BEST Burnout soundtrack.

Had it on my old XBox and then bought it again on 360, completed it both times. I think I may have even bought it on disc for 360, and then bought it again digitally, for reasons I have completely forgotten.

Pure arcade fun. I mean, it's not really a racing game like the earlier Burnouts were, but I'm fine with that.

I liked it, but after putting so much time into Takedown, it felt odd. I never liked the launch control mechanic on the Crash mode.

says I have issues.



http://worldofstuart.excellentcontent.com/fadeaway.htm

Yep, this should happen!