Miguel Sanchez

I carried on. I enjoyed Bond's accent dropping out when he said "you've treated this girl like shit"

It's made by the guy responsible for The Last Jedi

I've just started watching Knives Out. I don't like Jamie Lee Curtis, I don't like Toni Collette and I don't like the modern kind of film which has lots of cuts and lots of Intelligent People saying Intelligent things and James Bond is talking like Foghorn Leghorn. Please try to convince me to keep watching.

@Cardinal Richelieu @Bully Wee Villa how much of this can we tell people because it's going to keep coming up

Did my first Sport Mode race at Deep Forest in a GTO. Qualified 12 seconds off pole. Finished last by 20 seconds. Yass.

Clean Race Bonuses were the same in GT Sport, if you go *off* you'll be fine but if you cut a corner you won't. After finishing your 9th menu in the Cafe

Have Rangers said anything about this yet? Celtic promoting it as a homecoming thing for their manager is fine, I wonder what the other lot will try and spin it as.

If anybody wants some times on their leaderboards for Circuit Experiences, time trials or... well, anything, you can add me: stpatty I will tell you when I finally get around to changing that too

How do you cook lentils? I tried curry with lentils once and it was a stodgy mush. I don't know how you're supposed to cook them to a point where they're still whole, never mind putting them in something which needs to be on a heat for a long time like chilli.

I'm quite gutted there's only six Music Rally events tbh, watching the State of Play video that was the best looking part. Hopefully they add more.

Mazepin not allowed to race at all unless... Nikita Mazepin would have to sign document forbidding supporting Russia to stay in F1 - BBC Sport

Anyway Yesterday my TV wouldn't turn on and was irredeemably fucked. I found a new one and ordered it from Amazon to come today. £199. After it arrived I discovered there's no screws included to attach the stand (although I had some which seem to be holding so far). I went online to check on my order and found it's now being sold on Amazon for £169. Is there any chance me getting this money back or am I going to have to find out where Jeff lives?

Is this an Australian thing? Will they do one when Dame Edna croaks?

The licenses haven't been hard since GT4. The AI is terrible so you're as well sticking it on max and going online if you want a challenge. Nope. Not unless you follow the right twitter accounts or the right Discord servers at the right time. Best to go in the PS5/Xbox thread for tips on that one. I've not started yet but I'm told the PS4 version is fully functional if not as accomplished graphically.

That was DAFC who was eventually banned of his own accord.

@TAFKAM

It seems like there are enough people into this to warrant a thread. @Mr. Brightside seems to enjoy the Alfa 155, so here you go: As someone who put around 2000 hours into GT Sport, feel free to ask me if you need any tips.

Some of us remember the things you do with mince, I'd quietly leave and not post any further on the subject if I was you.

Mixu was last seen as @TAFKAM last year. NotThePars' account and posts are still visible but he isn't taggable and I doubt he'll be posting again for reasons extraneous to Pie & Bovril.

^^^

I love taking my phone to Timpsons and paying a fiver to have the battery changed every time it runs out

Guess who woke up this morning to a non-functioning TV

1. Put the thing down, then look at the time. 2. Slow down, then look at the time. 3. I haven't been on a plane in 15 years. 4. If I'm reading a book I don't want or need to know what time it is. 5. Watch batteries run out and are significantly more awkward to replace than a phone is to recharge. 6. I'm a man, I have pockets. 7. If I'm in a place where phones are banned there's likely to be a communal means of displaying the time, or reminders, or I don't have to worry about it. 8. I usually only wear my Daisy Dukes, yoga pants or garter belt/suspenders combo in the comfort of my own home so this is moot. 9. Whether at home or in person I don't think there's anything stopping someone from carrying a phone with them.

Despite everything I'd seen (which wasn't much tbf) I wasn't really buzzed, I'm fucking buzzed now.

Crash Team Racing: Nitro-Fueled (PS4, 2019) Crash Team Racing is one of my favourite games ever. I wrote a review the last time I played it through and I still enjoyed it, what must have been twenty years after it came out. Thinking about it, it's a shame we no longer live in a world where developers just make kart racing versions of their popular game series anymore. Mario Kart is fine, there are other cartoon things like Garfield and Nickelodeon which have produced kart games but this is video games, surely it makes sense to make games about other games and their characters? Imagine a BioShock karting game, watching a Big Daddy and Andrew Ryan drifting through Arcadia while firing Electro Bolt blasts at one another. I'm off to Kickstarter. Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled is, on the face of it, great. It's hard to play the original if you don't have a copy or a working console to play it on. I remember being excited for a remake and knowing I'd get around to it one day and hopefully enjoy it as much as the original, just with more colour and refinement. When I found out it would have the tracks from Crash Nitro Kart too, a game I'm pretty sure I was the only player of, even better. Before I go any further I have two confessions to make. It's been a while since I actually played Adventure Mode in this. I didn't like it at the time I played it last year and wasn't really motivated to go back to it after. I also, usually, earn all the trophies in a game before I write it up. I haven't this time. I tried, I wanted to, I tried a few times and I just couldn't make myself play something I found so unenjoyable. And I've played some absolute stinkers in my time, so you know if I can give up on a version of a game I actually like then it must be going wrong somewhere. There are three reasons I didn't enjoy Nitro-Fueled and even as I was playing I couldn't really work out what they were, or try to articulate them. I think it was during my write-up of Detroit: Become Human I mentioned that I've never really understood the uncanny valley concept, where the more realistic something artificial looks the more unusual it looks to people because they can still tell it's not real. This obviously doesn't apply to Crash Bandicoot but there's a level of detail I just find off-putting. The characters and game worlds are extremely vivid and detailed. There's obviously been a lot of work put into these by people who were passionate about retaining the spirit of the original game and it's undeniable that it's all still there. The environments surrounding the tracks are filled with things you'd probably need to do a hundred laps to see in their entirety. The original sounds and music are kept which helps keep the spirit of the original game, and the control system is still as easy to get a hold of as it was. The characters and karts are just as detailed, if anything going too far when you see Crash up close and see his fur. Here's the thing. I don't like this. All the time I've been playing I kept trying to think of how to describe what I didn't like about it and I think I've settled on 'unpleasant.' There are other reasons for this I'll come to but in the time I spent with this game, I didn't have fun. I didn't have a bright, shiny nostalgia trip. I didn't even feel like I wanted to play the original game, I just felt like I was playing something that was familiar yet completely alien to me at the same time. I couldn't really reconcile those feelings. I've played remakes of games I'd never played and enjoyed them, I've played remakes of games I have played before and enjoyed them, but none of those feelings ever appeared while I was playing Nitro-Fueled. The second reason follows on from this, and I think it explains why I don't automatically like the amount of detail put into the game. It's cynical. It has so much - optional - cosmetic content that you can load up an arcade or online race and race against seven other characters who look like they've fallen out of another game. Kart models, colours of kart models, wheels, even colours of all the characters who I've never seen before, they all show up. You can probably spend real money to buy them, I've not paid any attention to it. It feels like an extremely large amount of time and effort was put in to either find or create all these extra characters for no actual gameplay benefit. There's only four different types of handling for the karts so it's all completely cosmetic. You know when people complained about the thought of a bright pink Darth Vader in Battlefront II? That's how this feels to me. I've already got an experience which feels familiar yet bizarre at the same time, now I'm being bombarded with garish colours and noises to further ruin the experience. 151 colours of paint! 108 wheels! 42 bodies! 227 stickers to put on the front! All unlockable only at the whims of microtransactions and what happens to be arbitrarily available in the store at a time. It's ghastly. The final point of contention I have is also what broke me in my attempt to get all the game's trophies. The gameplay. It's easy to play Crash Team Racing and complete the Adventure mode, as well as win any single race you do and post competitive times in the time trials. To beat the really good times though you need to master the boost mechanics. This is easy, you press one shoulder button to hop as you turn and start the drift, then the opposite one to time and launch your boost. Easy. Problem is, in the time trials you need to do this constantly and perfectly. Even on tracks that are effectively just giant rectangles, you need to be going sideways. This ends up making the game feel like the complete opposite of what a kart racer should be. It's not easy to learn and hard to master, it's easy to learn and completely unnatural to even attempt to master. There's no way to drive with any finesse or precision. No two attempts at a lap or even a corner have any consistency or seemingly reason as to what direction, angle or speed your kart moves at. I couldn't figure out how to do it, and I couldn't make myself learn. It's not that it was hard, it's that I wasn't enjoying trying and nothing I did seemed to make any difference. You watch videos of people beating the Developer times which are even more extreme than the target times I was trying for and I'm just at a loss. There are 37 tracks in the game you need to set a time on and I managed the top time on... none of them. I couldn't manage the first track in the game that's also probably the most-played by virtue of that, Crash Cove. I just couldn't do it. I honestly don't remember having a reaction a game like I did with Nitro-Fueled. I've played things I thought were bad, boring, stupid, broken, but nothing made me feel as uncomfortable and frustrated the way this did. I don't have much hope for the remake of the standard trilogy now, whenever I get to that.