Miguel Sanchez

Week 12 update We got nothing this week. More than one Irish racehorse died but that's about it.

Please get Richard Gordon back. Get an AI to listen to him to replace him eventually if you have to, just get him back.

This thread has a good history of Gretna: There's a documentary mentioned in there which I think is this:

This has evolved over the years to people with earphones in having conversations, no phone in sight. Bonus points if it's a young girl with hair covering her ears.

Also got the Ovo email. Standing charges up, unit charges down (by 0.01p for gas) and no change to the direct debit. My direct debit didn't change last September either.

That scene in the last James Bond with the bird in the cocktail dress and heels doing gymnastics while shooting folk like she was in the Matrix was shite.

People who say Notts Forest.

I've seen Maw Sanchez curled up and screaming with kidney pain which she said was worse than giving birth. Drink water.

Christian music feels like cheating as far as this thread is concerned, but having a song with a bunch of people from around the world singing bits in different languages is an interesting choice: Also interesting that for all the people in this video the thumbnail is a young girl with a bit of cleavage.

As I recall, Gordon took the huff and left because people told him that calling his Catholic mates "bead rattlers" wasn't really acceptable.

This coach? Euro 2020: Gareth Southgate evokes wartime spirit ahead of final urging England fans to be proud of 'an island our size' | UK News | Sky News

The strongest defenders of VAR seem to be defending how it's supposed to work as a concept rather than how it actually works in practice.

Hitman (PS4, 2016) Hitman is a game in which you play as a hitman. Don't you love something that gets straight to the point? You are Agent 47, a catastrophically bald man with a barcode on the back of his head who works for an organisation called the ICA. He gets jobs to go to places and take out targets. Oh for life to be so simple. Unlike previous Hitman games the missions aren't based solely around the structure of a story. The game was released episodically, with the first training area made available with other locations following (I think) every month. Thanks to the wonders of modern gaming I'm coming to the game well after Hitman 3's release, so I don't need to worry about waiting for my fill of follicly challenged murdering. I think in previous reviews of Hitman games (I'm pretty sure I've played all of them up until this point, I suppose aside from the other one called 'Hitman' because I started at 2) I've mentioned my somewhat tenuous grasp on stealth games. I'll usually start off for the first couple of levels trying to play in what I assume to be the "proper" manner. Then something bad will happen and I'll give up. Out come the guns. This Hitman ultimately gets around this quite well by the virtue of only having seven distinct locations with targets in them, with a focus on repetition and exploration. I'm sure in one of those previous Hitman write-ups I opined that it seemed strange that you were rewarded for trial and error. In real life you wouldn't be able to try several times to take out a target. You wouldn't be able to do what you can do here, hide in a bin and wait for them to do a lap of a building and come round again to your location. It all felt a bit unnatural to me. Luckily, the people creating this Hitman seem to have found away around this. You have targets, you have objectives, you have the assorted environmental and situational means of luring and killing them, but you also have a Challenge system which tracks your completion of these. This simple choice incentivises exploration and multiple playthroughs, and the concept is much more engaging as a result. If you're a complete dunce like me, there are now 'Opportunities' where the game effectively signposts you through special kill methods. What's that? You're over-hearing someone say that the ultra-famous model at this fashion show looks just like 47? Well, wouldn't it be nice if you were directed straight to where that model is? This can almost feel like cheating. Or insulting. Somehow though, it works. It's ultimately still satisfying to follow a convoluted yet daring method through to its conclusion. These Opportunities are only some of the scripted assassination methods, so there are still ways you can take out your targets without being led by the hand. Gameplay is straightforward third person action stealth. You can take cover, you can decide on your gear before you start a level. You can unlock more gear by completing Challenges for each area. You can interact with the environment to lure people around, then you can knock them out and steal their outfit to get around more easily. Control of the stealth and shooting is fine, although trying to aim for headshots with your pistol can be frustrating. If you're forced into shooting multiple people in a room - and I always felt like a failure when I did have to shoot - then there's enough leeway for you to retake control of a situation and still feel like a cool assassin. Agent 47 also has "Instinct", where you press a button and he enters x-ray vision, showing you where people and targets are. This helps, although now that I think about it I don't think it's explained how he can do this. I know how because I've played previous Hitmans, but does this follow on? Is it canonical? Will new players think he's actually just magic? Either way, get ready to press R1 in the next third person game you play and be disappointed when you remember you don't have that feature. Speaking of carrying the gameplay outside of the game, you know when you've become immersed in a game over weeks and you start seeing it around you when you're out? Hitman has this. Walk into a supermarket and you'll feel this compulsion to hunch over the tomatoes, trying to blend in while looking at your surroundings. That solitary employee there who's just turned a corner, you could chase after them, knock them out and put on their uniform. You could drag their body and hide it in a freezer. Is this the sort of thing people who think video games are a bad influence are afraid of? If so they should give it a try anyway because it's really cool. The different levels are all brilliantly made. They're large, detailed and absolutely filled with things to interact with. People, rooms, outfits, objects, vantage points, everything. I don't think even the most obsessive Hitman fan could have exhausted every detail in the month between each level's release. I still enjoyed some areas more than others, so here's a brief rundown of each: Paris - A big house with two targets in it. Various ways of getting to each floor. A great introduction. Sapienza - A big house with one target in it, another underground and then a seaside town added on the side not really doing much. Looked pretty, but getting to the two targets could feel convoluted and Opportunity-reliant. Marrakesh - One target is a military general in an abandoned school. The other is a wanted criminal in a foreign embassy. I'll leave you to guess how easy it is to access those. Made better by one kill method where you killed them both with an APC cannon. Bangkok - A big hotel with one target on the top floor and another wandering around outside. I'd say there was some social commentary at play, but they were both rich arseholes. Strangely uneven. Colorado - Four targets inside a militia compound. Especially annoying because there were several levels of militia disguise which limited your movements through different areas, but they all looked the same to me. Hokkaido - A nice nod to the end of Blood Money (I think) with a ninja costume and somewhere in the remote Japanese mountains. Contained, but not constrained. I really can't overstate the sheer volume of gameplay available in each location. In addition to the base story targets, the game's structure allows for a near unlimited amount of mission objectives. Each location comes with Escalation contracts where you go through five stages with an initial single target escalates into multiple, or in certain ways, or other modifiers. Some of these are a bit outlandish, but they show how effective the level design is that there's so much Hitmanning you can do. There are other unlockable missions I didn't have access to, so I really think there are hundreds of hours in this. That's before you even get to the online custom contract creation, where you can create your own missions or play ones other people have set up. If Hitman is your favourite series, then I think this game must have been perfect for you. The menu layout is quite confusing but that's about as far as I can go for criticism. I mentioned the story earlier. Story might be too strong. At the end of each level you get a minute of cutscene suggesting a conspiracy of some sort. I don't know, I don't care. It honestly feels a bit at odds with the game's structure with the distinct locations. I'm happy just turning up and killing people, I don't really need it linked together. There are bonus missions too in the Sapienza location which really do exist outside of the story and this just backs up my point. Trying to frame the locations feels like a token gesture that doesn't add anything. Since there have been two subsequent Hitman games following this I'm going to guess or hope that the story develops but here, it's not doing much. On a technical level I have to thank IO Interactive for making this game. The open levels with hundreds of people and interactive objects made my PS4 Pro's fan blow so loud I opened the top and properly cleaned it for the first time since I bought it in 2017. One of the screws on the power supply was stripped so I couldn't access the heatsink properly so it took a solid hour and a half of cotton buds, cable ties and tweezers trying to pull out the layer of dust. Since then, and with the dust cover I bought for it when I'm not playing, it's been completely silent. I even turned on HDR (which I couldn't use before because of the noise) and in its default unlocked framerate state, still no noise. Absolute bliss. I can't tell you how much more enjoyable this makes playing games. If you're not as fortunate as me, a 30fps mode is available. I do not recommend it. I've had this in my backlog for a while through PS+ and I'm glad I got around to it. Hitman as a character and series is something that's been around gaming for a while, and I think this is the best format it can exist in. From what I remember of the PS2 games they were quite rigid and structured. I'm not sure if linear is the word, maybe constrained. This 2016 reboot reinvented the formula while still retaining everything that made it so popular, and it really doesn't put a foot wrong anywhere.

What on earth does Southgate have on his feet? Diabolical.

Forbes to win and immediately shut down the economy on a Sunday. No shops, no telly, nobody doing anything.

The man is going to die.

I voted John Hughes on the 19th of February and have seen nothing since to make me change my mind.

The smell of weed is disgusting so Keith has something right for once.

I think there was a Scottish history thread or somesuch, but I'm tired and can't be bothered looking for it so I've found Kinky's youtube account as well as the best way of replying to him

Everyone always knew the rules were silly.

Let me get this straight. This wee chinless guy is engaged. He walks past Elizabeth Moss and then has to go and find her and f**k her. We then find out a few episodes later he's engaged to Alison Brie and this is the choice he's making? f**k off.

Some interesting footage of children fighting in the replies.

EGGHEAD LIKES HIS BOOKY BOOK.

Speed They don't make films like this nowadays. Just imagine it. A bunch of c***s on their phones filming everything and screaming the whole time.