Miguel Sanchez

Socks with holes in them. Face masks.

Is oaksoft still doing his civil disobedience bit? So boring.

Trackmania Turbo (PS4. 2016) Does a perfect video game exist? Can it? Can a perfect anything exist in the absolute sense of the word? I've been thinking about that recently. I'm not well-versed in a wide enough range of genres but I have a vague theory that a perfect example of each video game genre exists. It's probably hard to decide on what is defined as 'perfect', and I'm sure you can get really particular about it. Can you call something perfect only if it's completely without fault? If not, is there a certain amount of faults you can accommodate before you stop being able to call it perfect? Is it going to be a law of diminishing returns if you tried to name one perfect game for each genre - if you were unable to find a game genuinely without fault but ended up having to settle for something purely to fulfil the exercise? Trackmania Turbo is a racing game a bit different from most of the ones I've played over the years. It's a series I'm not familiar with, but conveniently it can be summed up easily. It's a time trial game. You have an assortment of tracks, a car to drive through them and target times to beat. In Turbo there are 200 tracks across four different environments and five different difficulty settings. There are other game modes and things like a custom track creator but my focus was the campaign. Throughout those 200 tracks I had a fairly universal response to each new one. First run, how am I supposed to do this? Second run, no really how am I supposed to do this? Then I just go slowly enough to finish and start figuring out which turn or jump comes next. The longest tracks take about two minutes so it's a relatively quick turnaround. Then I improve a bit more and a bit more until I eventually reach the point where I know I'm able to finish the track under the target time, and set about trying to be consistent enough to manage that. I'm a bit ahead of myself here. I think even as far as tracks in the 120-160 range I was able to manage a few golds on my first attempt. It's when you get to the properly hard stuff at the end you appreciate this game for what it is. Its faults are laid bare in the process, but they don't detract from the experience. Trackmania's courses are fast. They have turbo pads, they have jumps, they have loop the loops and vertical corkscrews you need to drift round. They have obstacles and different track surfaces with different handling properties (f**k sand) and a brightly coloured environment with some upbeat electronic music in the background. The gold times need a seemingly perfect amount of momentum carried between each curve and jump, and at higher difficulties you might have several of these chained together, or a really narrow gap you need to land in or jump through to make it extra tricky. The shift from feeling like it's not possible to get round a track never mind get round it at speed is as regular as clockwork. The sense of satisfaction with each completed track is always the same. The difficulty level spikes a bit in the final forty tracks (#180 is the true endgame, the next 20 don't compare at all) but the feeling of achievement is never diminished. Sometimes there's more relief included than others. A video game with basic, consistent controls and physics is something I feel like I don't play a lot of these days. If you play a sandbox or an FPS then you might reach a point where you feel like you can do anything. The problem is, you don't actually know where the edges are. You can't appreciate pushing your control to the absolute limit because you don't know what it is, and outside of speedruns which don't count as normal gameplay you never properly feel completely in control of a game. Here, you can. You know what the car will do. You know what will happen when you press the buttons. You just need to manage that level of control. The constant chase to replicate or improve your best corner or jump is as addictive as it is exhilarating. It's important to stress at this point that compared to some of the aliens whose videos I watched for reference, I'm nowhere near the limits of Trackmania Turbo and I'd be nowhere near any other game in the series. There is, feasibly, an absolute limit for track times in this game (which I suppose there is in any racing game) and the level of finesse and control some people can exert trying to reach this is remarkable and well beyond my brain or fingers. However, in my time with this game I could always feel myself getting better and closer to where I had to be to beat it. I wasn't always consistent on my runs even when I knew how or what to do, but the feeling of complete control over the car and complete understanding of the surfaces/elements was something which built every time and which felt amazing when they paid off. When it comes off, you just wonder how it took you so long to finish it. You can't spend as long as I did with Turbo and not pick up on some faults. That's the best part of six months, on and off for something which was going to be the third rarest platinum trophy I've ever earned. The biggest faults are effectively quality of life complaints. Making the menus a bit less awkward. Not being able to turn off ghosts on courses you've completed. None of these things affect the driving though, and that's what matters. I think the only perfect video games I've ever played are Tetris and Journey. If I sat with a list of everything I've ever played there are games I wouldn't change anything about, but which probably have too many memories or experiences associated with them for me for me to provide an objective assessment of them. Trackmania Turbo infuriated, thrilled and enriched me in equal amounts. I don't know if I've peaked in terms of video game achievement (there are one or two things I'd consider harder I'd like to try one day) but if I do top this, I don't know if I'd find the journey there as consistently satisfying. Ultimately Trackmania Turbo is simply as pure a video game experience as you could hope to find. I'm still very glad I'm finished with it though.

Good to see you back.

Going to be a lot of people from Dead Pools past absolutely seething at the Wilko Johnson news.

"Football World Cup" "Men's football World Cup" It's the World Cup You quantify shite like rugby or women's football, not the actual biggest sporting event in the world.

@Solitaire

Can only hope Pete was wearing gloves when handling those or there'll be a chap at the door in a few months.

They're going to use me for a sex game then burn me in the bath.

Cale Makar is the greatest human being alive.

Vinyl rather than Guinness World, presumably.

A 2 star review of The Passenger in the Metro last week said it was 400 pages of no plot, no characters, and felt like 400 pages of McCarty trying to cram as much as he could into a book with nothing but extended musings on philosophy and the world. Sounded right up my alley.

I'm needing to buy a phone. I don't need any particularly special features or performance from it, but if I have to pay a bit extra for something that won't become obsolete/unusable in a year or two I don't mind. Is it worth doing this?

Do you not have a wallchart, man? My age is in double figures, of course I don't.

The World Cup forum filled with threads called "Group C" and "Group D" and the like as if I know which teams are in every group.

That's an awful lot of fireworks.

Synchronised spin! Turns out they are good at something.

Week 47 update Nothing. A panda was euthanised and I learned that Taiwan is called the Republic of China (not the People's Republic of China, showing that the Chinese obviously don't do irony). I'm glad there's no counting today because I feel like I'm dying and if I do Aim Here is running this. Enjoy.

Does anyone else still watch the Channel 4 coverage? I think Coulthard's had work done.

So with the tournament less than six years away, North Ireland with no functioning government and the UK with... well, a government but up to its eyeballs in debt, they're going to build an entirely new stadium on that abandoned bit of waste ground? Very good.

My nan died of cancer, but hopefully your sister won't.

The Family Feud thread's going to be good soon.