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Does the Xbox version get Spawn?

I mean it’s only my third LEGO set as an adult, but this thing is huuuuge. And gorgeous. Can’t wait to put it together :).

Well, that went quickly-NES done. It's 2600 pieces, but a lot of small ones, and a lot that goes together really quickly (e.g. the 60 tank tread bits to make the base for the scrolling screen). This set is an extremely cool build, and has a couple of my new favourite mechanical features in a Lego set. The cartridge receiver is ingenious-it uses the shock spring parts, and a mech that has a sliding technic pin and some slopes to lock the tray up/down (you can sort of see it here). Either way, this means that it feels almost exactly like the original, even making a similar click: The other thing that I was impressed with was the TV. The scrolling image and mario work, but this was one detail I'd hoped they'd get: This makes the channel selector knob a-click, and b-stop turning at the right extents (there's a cam under that gear). The fact that they got to this level of detail speaks volumes, and it's extremely cool. Ad for the finished model, it's actually a little bigger than I expected. Here's a size compare with an original and NES classic: The slope on the bottom is really close to perfect, and that brick is probably what dictated the scale if I had to guess. The controller is much closer to 1:1, except for the oversized buttons that I don't think you could really do much about. 1x1 would have been too small, and 4x4 is too big: They also did some crazy stuff like printing on the edges of bricks to get things like the Audio and Video labels on the side (complete with fake RCA connectors), and getting the power connector looking like the actual power connector on the NES. What's really strange though is that they did the side printing for the jacks on the side, but not the back...although they did get the gaps in there from the original grooves in the bottom of the NES. They also didn't put in the expansion cover on the bottom, which probably would have been overkill. So overall impression is that this set is fantastic. I actually don't own a lot of lego sets that are recreations of things of this scale, so it's a neat space to make something in. Definitely worth getting. Yeah, it's pricey, but there are a LOT of printed parts in here (the cart and TV warning label are the only stickers in the set), and even a few extras that you can use later on.

I've been meaning to make this thread for 2-3 years after getting into a conversation on Discord after E3 with @Romier S one of those years about music similar to the Hotline Miami soundtrack. Here are some of my current favorites. I'll dig through my older favs later. https://open.spotify.com/track/1AWHIMK1YKJoOGD13t0OeW?si=AqzXze82RgyuYAlNMNrVjA https://open.spotify.com/track/4wOhPUptCNCCJK0OtjFzpy?si=lVJKdao7S6anxn-Z521p4w https://open.spotify.com/track/66MWaZizAcrA9hx7Q4MAoW?si=3yXaEppOSl2ymJDWqNfheA By the way, Spotify links are supposed to auto embed with version 4.5 of the forum software, which his imminent. Until then, you have to click the Source button and insert the embed code from Spotify, not the link. If you want to post music here or anywhere else on the forum, and your account doesn't have HTML posting privileges, send me a DM and I'll turn it on.

I've played the beta for a couple of hours, and it's...pretty okay! Enemies are repetitive so far, but each of the Avengers does feel really distinct, and there's quite a bit of variety to the combat. Of the characters in the opening tutorial, my favorites are the two you don't get to play as again in the beta. 😛 Ms. Marvel is ridiculously fun when she turns up, though, and I'm pretty sure she's going to be my go-to come September. Dialogue is terrible. Couldn't care less about the story. I'm skeptical that it'll have any real staying power, although I'm hoping I'll still be interested in playing when the PS5 comes out, since I could move the PS4 Pro to another TV so that my wife and I could play together. We'll see during the open beta if that's something she'd even be interested in.

Finished this tonight. I really wish I hadn't put it off for so long. That was a whole lot of explodey goodness. But on the positive side I get to go right into Eternal.

It's probably the best episode of the series, really. It dives into how the federal government placing marijuana as a schedule 1 drug (for comparison, COCAINE is a schedule 2 drug!) has desperately cut off lines of credit for these would be business owners and the over-regulation at the state level to compensate has made it impossible for those little guys to compete. You have to have serious money to play in the world of legalization and its led to the black market being alive and well. I'll reiterate for those who have not watched it, this is a remarkable series that looks at the world of drugs from a really unique lens. Go watch it! You won't regret it.

Mulan will be a $30 VOD rental in the U.S. sept 4 https://www.ign.com/articles/mulan-will-be-released-in-theaters-and-on-disney-plus-in-september. If your a family it’s cheaper then tickets.

I hate the bears, but perhaps not as much as they hate the Mongols. I love cleaning up the scraps and hides after the frequent skirmishes in the Mongol-Ursine War.

Got the lunar lander built yesterday. Took about 3.5-4 hours or so. It’ll look good on the shelf under the Saturn V.

A month later my copy of unbreakable arrived last week, never buying direct from waxworks again. Their customer service is not only rude, but likes to lie. SW Shadows of the Empire came today which was a surprise, Amazon never sent a shipping notice. I also got a bunch of older used releases from a place off discogs. Return to Oz, Treks 1,3 and 5, Buck Rogers, Dirty Dancing, Witness, And space balls . All vinyl are in very good shape. Going to give them a spin tomorrow.

It has its moments.

DREAMCAST PORT CONFIRMED.

Great article on how Game Pass allowed one indie developer to finish their game, make it profitable and generally make life easier. https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2020-08-06-xbox-game-pass-could-be-a-boon-for-indie-developers

Alan Wake!!

I've been trying to get a Nintendo Switch for one of my friends that was looking for one for a few months. I was finally able to snag one for her using www.zoolert.com and sending alerts to my phone whenever one would appear in stock at Amazon/Walmart/Target/Best Buy/GameStop. When they pop up, they will be gone within minutes so you have to act quickly. This is for the US versions of these websites so I'm not sure how feasible it is for someone in the UK to utilize this method. I have noticed that they have been popping up more lately so I think Nintendo's Switch production is finally starting to make a dent in the demand (reseller prices have been dropping too). Unfortunately, the Switch Lite cannot connect to a TV and it's not just a matter of it not fitting into the regular Switch's dock. The Switch Lite is missing the chip inside to send a video signal through the USB-C port. Nintendo could have just kept the price of the Switch Lite low by not including a $90 dock but they removed the internal chip too because Nintendo.

You're right, fellas. Pikmin certainly are cute.

A few recommendations mostly on the retro wave front which I absolutely love. Probably favorite and most listened to album from last year is Kalax III. It’s truly a phenomenal mix of high tempo electronic/synth wave with great vocal tracks mixed in. I’ve zoned on through many a long drive with this one: FM-84’ Atlas is another go to for me:

APFS

Bethesda.net is a shared resource across all Bethesda games for logging in + account entitlements, it's utterly possible for a problem on their end to affect multiple games, and not always all users either.

The sale price hit £36 and I had £10 credit on PayPal so I bought it. Barely played it - only loaded and tweaked settings, etc but, holy shit is this an amazing looking game. I’ve been on SWTOR with a friend playing coop so this is my “alt” single player game now. Genuinely looking forward to putting in some time with it.

I did try that and it didn't work... However, I dug around in the Nvidia control panel and looked through the global settings. My vsync was set to on, so I turned that off, no need with gsync. The other option I saw was Max Frame Rate. This was set to off, but the greyed out option below was at 58 fps. I enabled it and set it 144. I rebooted the game and viola, a 143 FPS, with nothing going on, but still success.

We already are. Timed and general exclusivity is never going to not be a thing in this industry while you have competing platforms (regardless of articles telling us that the console war is "over", too). Sony featured a slew of indie and third party titles that are exclusive to the PS5 platform and despite plenty of lip service from Phil Spencer about how anti-consumer exclusivity deals are, Microsoft isn't operating any differently in that regard. Plenty of "console launch exclusive" and timed exclusivity deals for their platform shown at their recent event last I checked. It's shitty regardless of the purveyor. I'm always a fan of seeing good games and experiences get into the hands of as many gamers as possible which is why the uproar over Sony releasing Horizon on PC was hysterical nonsense to me as an example. I would applaud Sony releasing the damned game on Xbox Game Pass if it let more folks enjoy that game. Not that it will ever happen and I'd question their business sanity a bit there but you get my meaning. The one thing that kind of galls me with this particular deal is that I might have understood it if we were talking about the PS4/PS5 versions of Spider-Man or Miles Morales (i.e. the Insomniac designs). I mean that is still even a little questionable but according to the blog post its just Crystal Dynamics own version of Spidey and will likely fall into the same design language as the rest of the game. i.e. Marvel Cinematic Universe-like uncanny valley. Blegh.

New MS Store looks good: https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2020/08/03/new-microsoft-store-coming-to-xbox-insiders/ Certainly good that it seems there won't be hoops to jump through if buying 360 games anymore.

Let’s be honest, if that game reveal had dropped even a couple of seconds of WipEout AG Racing then I wouldn’t be settled on having a Series X.

Ridge Racer 5, 6 and 7 are all really great games. Overlooked at the time as folks had reached exhaustion with the series but I own them all and they are in many ways the pinnacle of the series. The PSP games are even pretty damned great. Bugbear also did Ridge Racer Unbounded which was very different but a really great time. The PS3/360 era really was the golden age for arcade racers when you think about it!

The internet. It never fails. https://imgur.com/a/FcsFyvX#8O4q3D6

Can Namco just bring a proper Ridge Racer back? I’ll even take a remaster of the prior titles at this point.

When an Astrobot and a DualSense love each other very, very much...

DualSense battery life is apparently 3-4 hours more robust than the DS4.

The Beluga is a massive, massive ship, yeah. But have a good look down at your arms and legs - there was a bug at one point with one of the headsets, and annoyingly I can’t remember which, where the scaling of everything was broken. And yes, the moment the auto dock rotation is the most motion sick I have ever felt in a VR headset. I think it’s because it kicks in unrelated to you own actions; manual docking doesn’t bother me in the least.

It looks like other players on the same console can play the beta, but a linked Square Enix account is required. I admittedly did stop at that "sign up now!" prompt, though. No split-screen or anything, though.

Paramount still control the existing Indy films. We're safe there.

If you don’t pretend that there is any connection between what you say and what you do, then I won’t pretend that there is any connection between what I say and what I mean.

Ya know, that’s actually a great point and one I’d agree with. I played very similarly in that I completed everything in each section of the island before moving the story along.I think someone had mentioned earlier that when Act I wraps up, you get a bunch of new icons popping up to liberate the island and man that irked me. I literally groaned out loud. I was afraid they’d pull that same shit after each act, but that’s thankfully not the case. It goes back to my point of these games needing to just cut the bloat. It’s unnecessary. It was the combination of what you mentioned early on - the general bloat alongside the lack of challenge where things almost went awry for me. The addition of lethal difficulty truly reinvigorated the experience. Had it not been added, my overall opinion of the game would have probably been far worse as the grind had started to set in in early Act II and I was sleep walking through encounters. It also helps that the story picks up tremendously in Act II and subsequently Act III.

Yes. I wasn’t contradicting but asking if theaters were in fact open in other regions as I had heard but wasn’t actually sure. In those countries, as @iainl states, they should have both options available to choose from.

Got my NES yesterday as well. Started in on the build, and I think it has my favourite mechanical feature I've seen in a while. The way they got the cartridge receiver to click up and down correctly is ingenious. I also appreciate the 1:1 photo recreations from the original manuals/box art.

I saw news about this yesterday. I am a bit disappointed with this and wish Apple would let these apps exist.

I'm really not sure how much storage I'd want internally in an iMac. I priced up the new 27" model with a 2TB SSD, which seemed like a safe choice. Everything else I'd offload onto desktop raid storage over thunderbolt I think. A Macbook Pro I might think about differently, depending on what I anticipated doing with it and where I anticipated taking it, as if travelling and doing photo and video work it might be nice to max out storage on a laptop knowing you can offload your media to it (that's basically how I approached my iPad Pro purchase, so I have a little room to dump content from a couple of 64GB SD cards onto it if I need to reuse the cards while away from home). I do worry about RAM on the future iMacs though as I've pretty much convinced myself that Apple are going to take the little access panel away and force people to pay the disgusting prices they charge. I simply do not trust them to do the right thing and let us change it once the desktops have switched to the new silicon. That's going to make things devastatingly expensive. I'm genuinely anxious about that happening. If the 21" is to move to 24" and become the first desktop model with the new SoC (and the lack of update this week might suggest such rumours are true), then it will be interesting to see if they have the decency to let users access the RAM. Of course, if they didn't on the smaller model it might not necessarily mean they won't on a bigger version down the road since historically the smaller iMacs have always denied such a "feature," so we'll see. I always assumed it was locked out on the smaller models due to the smaller body requiring more things to be soldered down, so now that so much will change internally, particularly on the power and cooling front, that may not be an issue preventing RAM access anymore (the roadblock would most likely be apple's obsession with making everything thin and little else).

Coming in the next batch of games:Microsoft Flight Simulator (PC) - 8/18Battletoads (Console & PC) - 8/20Tell Me Why Episode 1 (Console & PC) - 8/27Wasteland 3 (Console & PC) - 8/28Crusader Kings III (PC) - 9/1Disgaea 4 Complete (PC)Leaving August 14 Devil May Cry 5 (Console) Kingdom Come: Deliverance (Console & PC) Space Hulk: Tactics (PC) Where the Water Tastes Like Wine (PC) Yoku’s Island Express (Console & PC)

Mulan is being released in September on Disney+, but not as part of the usual subscription. They will be charging a $29.99 rental fee (on top of the subscription). Will be interesting to see how this works out for them. https://variety.com/2020/film/news/mulan-disney-plus-premiere-1234711185/

I'm still rocking my Late 2012 iMac, which I had upgraded to the i7 at the time. And now that I'm working at home, I use it for daily image, video and layout production work and it's remarkably quick still. The writing is on the wall, though. Especially with the upcoming transition, I'm not sure if I want to have the last Intel rev, or hold on for everything to be smooth on the Apple Si end...

Been typing a lot on my iPad pro . So i decided to finally pick up the magic keyboard. I have been using it for a few days now and this thing is awesome. I bought an open box to save a little on the price and its like it was never used. In an earlier post i had picked up Powerbeats pro’s and never did the review lol. I used them for a little bit and was very happy with the sound. However wearing a mask most of the day and when I’m out shopping having an over the ear earbud (With the mask straps)is not that comfy. I sold them and used that money to get the Air Pod Pros. The pros sit very well in my ears and half the time i forget i even have them In, Plus the noise cancellation on these things are amazing. BTW did anyone pick up a skin for Magic keyboard? The all black is kinda boring lol I was thinking of getting this Retro Nintendo Skin

I popped it off by rocking it back and forth gently. I took a pair of small hand clippers and removed the excess solder and then cleaned the area with some 99% IPA. Haven't had an issue since. I mean the "right" way to do it is to desolder it from the bottom but there are about a hundred damned screws holding the motherboard in place and that's just too much work for a simple capacitor removal, IMO.

"Alternative means". I didn't know the AUS version was a thing either until right now and now I must catch up. Loved the US version, though it fell on 'reality competition tropes' at just the right moments to save the right people to annoy me. At those moments.

I think I saw that too and tried it. I’ll try again tonight.