Miguel Sanchez

Hahahahaha

Careful, they'll start saying "So" instead.

Me, when the chinless wee weasel's marriage to Alison Brie reaches its inevitable conclusion:

The extremely obvious bots who bumped the thread three years later did.

My favourite was her dad who seemed to be Jean-Paul Sartre's body double.

Sally really is growing up to be a horrible little shit.

I'm watching the first episode of S6 now, so yes.

Holly Stallcup on Twitter: "Before I leave for NYC, here is my thread on seeing Taylor this weekend while she is dating a racist, Islamophobic, anti-semitic overall problematic white man. While I don't necessarily "owe" anyone this thread, it is important to me to take my public leadership seriously." / Twitter Not sure if this is embedding or not but it's certainly a read.

Ange isn't seriously being considered for anything, is he? I've seen his name float about in places linked to these jobs and I can't take any of them seriously. Even more so than usual.

Is it too early to arrange a minute's silence at Ibrox?

If we get denied the joy of seeing The Ev go down after the nauseating shite that's surrounded the petrochemical franchises this past week I'm going to be very unhappy.

I'm still watching Mad Men (meh) and I'm watching it Pluto, which you might have seen Drew Barrymore advertising recently. It's now showing up as "Last Chance to Watch" which I think means I'm going to need to shotgun 33 episodes pretty quickly.

I carry a machine pistol to protect my bichon frise from passing lions.

Need for Speed (PS4, 2015) Need for Speed is the fourth Need for Speed game I've ever played. I don't think I've sampled the high points of the series (Shift, Payback and Heat prior to this) but even with this in mind I feel as if I've always been in a state of rapidly diminishing returns. I'll grant some leniency for this being the first game of the 8th console generation, but that doesn't absolve all of its flaws. You are... a person. You arrive in... a city. I think it's named but I don't remember. You turn up, you go to a garage and get to pick a car - a Honda Civic, a Subaru BRZ and something else I don't remember because obviously I picked the Civic. You then drive in a series of events progressing five different "storylines". You have races, time trials, drifts, Togue runs - which is drifting with other people to get in the way, and a Gymkhana mode which offers no points for air time, effectively making it drifting but against the clock. You can buy an assortment of cars to use in these events, with a range of impossible upgrades to their performance. The range of cars on offer is actually very good. I'll always give points to a street racing game which lets you make a Volvo 240 drift or go near 200 miles per hour. As I worked my way through the events I actually found myself enjoying the driving. I think the game is old enough that there's a simplicity to the physics. Regardless of the upgrades you install or the "tuning" you do, brute force seems to be the best way to get a car round a corner. Drifting is similarly easy and can be cheesed with no problems, but it's still satisfying to get a long slide just right. Of the Need for Speeds I've played, Payback had the best balance in terms of tuning and handling, allowing you to change your car's stats as you were driving. Here, if you want to do a race and then a drift you have to go back to the garage to change car or tune what you're already in. The whole feeling is just a bit clunky, and I'm glad it was refined in later games. You'll enjoy the driving you do, you're just stuck with it unless you go through the game's awkward menus to get back to the garage. Nothing defines a street racing game quite like the streets you race on. I think in a previous Need for Speed writeup I lamented that the pinnacle of genre, the original Midnight Club, remained both unmatched. Pretty much any kind of open world game is defined by its world, but when all you can do is drive it takes on extra importance. Need for Speed takes place... somewhere. There are buildings. There's a twisty bit in some mountains. I think it has a name but I honestly don't remember, and I don't think it came up often. There are some other cars on the roads but the whole place just feels lifeless. I don't know how the maps for these kinds of games are designed. I don't know if the map comes first and then the events are plotted around the streets, or if it's the other way round. This honestly feels like both, yet neither at the same time. The lack of anything engaging in the map isn't helped by the game's graphics. There are many problems here. The game permanently takes place at night. While this is presumably intended for the whole street racing thing as well as making everything look cool and sleek and reflective, the actual result is like a big action film from the mid-90s where everything happens at night in the rain to compensate for the unconvincing CGI. A lot of the time it was genuinely difficult to focus on what was happening. I was reminded of a time last year when my TV broke and bought a 720p one without realising and spent the weekend thinking I was going blind. In a game series which is as much about image as anything else, I'm surprised the imagery here is so muddled. You can't see the city, you can't see the cars. Not a great combination. There is, technically, a story in this game. Technically there are five stories. There are five sequences of events you can progress through, with a different character from your group of friends taking the lead for each storyline. I urge you to look up a video compilation of them online. I think I've only ever seen bits of the Fast and Furious films, but I've seen enough. I'm not as interested in cars and car culture as I was in my teens, and I'm not as interested in motorsport or sim-racing as I was a few years ago, but I know enough. I've also never been to America, or California, which I think is supposed to be inspiration for the game's location. With all of these caveats in mind, the cutscenes and characterisation in Need for Speed are not only cringe-worthy, embarrassing, hilarious or outright hollow, they simply do not reflect any sort of reality which has ever occurred on this planet. Your own character is never named. I think I realised once I was finished that the "GHOST" on your default license plate refers to the game's developer rather than you, but at least it could be considered ambiguous. The other freaks you get to see though, oh no. The cutscenes are actual proper video with real actors (I've even seen one of them in something) and none of it feels real. They don't talk like humans. They don't behave like humans. None of their surroundings look like things that have ever happened to humans. None of the interactions seem connected to anything that happens. There's a point where the big Hispanic guy whose hair is a bunch of... I don't know the name, tiny braids like you'd let a child do to you on a rainy day, there's some suggestion he's been inappropriate. You hear this in some phone conversations which happen in between events to progress the plot, but none of it makes sense. Nothing actually happens. You meet up with all of them and everything is fine. I don't know who this stuff is supposed to appeal to, but I now understand where the awful characterisation in Payback in Heat came from. Unbound doesn't look much better. I could forgive this since it's so funny, but for one thing. You know how in films and TV people drinking or eating will very obviously not actually eat or drink anything, ostensibly because they'll be doing multiple takes with the same props? If not you do now. Television is now ruined for you. Every cutscene with these alien imposters features several cans of obviously unrefrigerated Monster. All of them have one all the time, and there's obviously nothing in them. It's all very bizarre, but the one positive here is that it remains entertaining all the way through. Coming to the game sometime after its release I'm not sure how the various additions to the game were added, but each of the game's five storylines is centred around an "Icon", who the characters all... well, idolise. I actually like this. With the forgettable map and ridiculous characters, it's a good thing to try and connect the game to some existent aspect of car culture. Ken Block is in it, and I know him. I knew who he was before he died. I've seen the HOONIGAN cars with 43 on them. Do you know who Ken Block is? Fine. Do you know who Magnus Carlsen is? Magnus Carlsen is a chess player, I can't even make my own point properly. Do you know who Magnus Walker is? He's a guy with a beard who really likes Porsches. He pops up with no introduction. Everybody loves him, he's the best driver ever and everyone wants to beat him. Who is this guy? Do you know who Nakai-san is? Do you know who Shinichi Morohoshi is? No. The characters do though. They idolise them, but they don't seem that bothered in explaining who any of them are. All of this - the lifeless map, the absurd characters, the apparently significant Icons who are never introduced and whose terrible acting talents make the cutscenes even more surreal - just ends up feeling like it gets in the way, really. As entertaining as the terrible cutscenes were, and as brief as the storylines are, they all felt like they were getting in the way of the driving I was enjoying. That's never good. At release, much was made of this game being always-online. You can play solo, but you need to be connected and if you're in an online map there will be other players driving around who you can challenge to races, or who can do the generally online open world thing and just drive into you. I completed and platinumed the game without this ever really being a problem - I'll come to my experience with the limited online later - and it occurred to me how desensitised I've become to the notion of online-only games. On the face of it I'm fairly traditionalist in my approach to games. I prefer to buy where possible, and buy physical at that. Trophies and the notion of completionism have turned games into something of a checklisting experience for me, but on the whole I feel that's a positive improvement because I get more out of a game at the time, even if I don't return to as many as often as I might have done before. The notion of a game, or console, requiring an online connection to function is pure bullshit, however. It's not something I would ever support because it's so obviously unnecessary. The idea of not being able to access something for no real reason other than the publisher's whim is abhorrent. I played this game with very few of the online features making a difference. I applied some liveries to cars, but that's about it. Even still, there's a time where I would have heard about a game like this and never even contemplated it. I actually didn't realise it was a thing when I bought this game in a sale ages ago. Whoops. One thing to add here is that, eight years after it was released, the online connectivity doesn't seem very stable. Play for a while and you'll get a message popping up saying "The server you are in will shut down in 30 minutes." This seems to be a problem the game developed over the years. I don't know why. The messages count down but you can easily quit and join a new game with a new server and no problems. I'm only guessing here when I say this is related to the game's age (perhaps I'm giving EA too much credit) but it's a strange quirk, and a frequent reminder of the game's impermanence. Despite this, I don't really mind. I think I've become desensitised to this level of anti-consumer nonsense. Gran Turismo Sport is the most formative game I've played and that was always online. But then, the point of that game was online competition. I suppose in a very convoluted, unnecessary way, I'm trying to say games requiring an online connection are situational. If I lost internet access I'd still be able to play Rocket League, but the main gameplay mode would be inaccessible and the experience would be pretty rubbish. If I had no internet access I wouldn't be able to play Need for Speed, but if I could then there would be no appreciable difference to ~99% of the game's content. That's not right. I don't know where the trend for this sort of thing sits in the games industry overall for AAA games nowadays (this was 2015 and the 'live service' model has since exploded and died), but at least subsequent Need for Speeds ditched something so unnecessary. Good. As I mentioned, some content got added to this game post-release. Part of this content was Prestige Mode, which added new levels of targets for each event. This was the reason I actually bought this game, as the trophy for earning a gold medal in each Prestige event is one of the hardest racing game achievements there is. I've managed quite a few hard racing games in my time. Gran Turismo 5. Trackmania Turbo. WipEout HD. Need for Speed has forty events. I tried two of them in Prestige mode, got a silver medal and a fail, and gave up. There are videos online of people speedrunning Prestige. Getting gold in every event one after the other. I think all of them take about three hours. Any sort of skill-based game looks easy when you see it played well but I didn't even need it to realise I was never getting near this mode. It wasn't just the gameplay, or the weird graphics that put me off. It wasn't the other cars on the road which I just know would have had me throwing things at the wall. It wasn't the very deliberate means of car control for each game mode. It wasn't even the violence with which I was having to steer, and knowing I could easily go through several controllers and not actually beat anything. No, none of those things put me off trying to do Prestige mode. Actually that last one with the controller did a bit, I can't overstate how much I was wrenching the steering around. What put me off eventually was just a lack of interest. For the first time in a while with a game I was able to look at what I was trying to do - something I wanted to do, something I had fully intended to do, something I'd be proud of doing... and it didn't matter. I'm alright with leaving it. I realise I've veered quite far into self-indulgence if you've read this far, but I'm surprised and quite heartened by how quickly I gave up. What can we take from all this? A few things. The original Midnight Club remains unmatched, and anyone making a street racing video game should be made to play that to 100% first. Games with heavily integrated online functionality will only persist in the hearts and minds of people who cherished them. If you have a can of Monster in your hand you should probably rethink your life choices. Especially if you're being filmed. Life is too short to play video games you're not going to enjoy. It's taken me a long time to write this because I'm getting increasingly procrastinatory in my old age so it might not all make sense, but I think I'm done. I enjoyed my time with it, but that was enough.

The dots on this post tell quite a tale.

Legal action threatened via a sitting MP on the Gender thread.

Good thread today.

Week 20 update Turns out for the first time since I started doing this that nobody picked Doyle Brunson, so there's nothing this week. I did enjoy his final tweets though:

Only one motorbike gang I'd consider joining

I didn't listen (who listens to Sportsound after quarter past five anyway) but this reminded me of this, in reverse

Didn't Dundee spend money on Jack Hamilton?

To quote one of P&B's great philosophers, @throbber, if you are Schofield's age and you have sex with a 16 year old, you may not be a nonce in the eyes of the law but you are to me.

Calippo Shots were shite. I don't think I ever had one where all the bits hadn't just fused together into a solid lump.