Miguel Sanchez

There are some caveats to that: Gran Turismo 7’s “Sophy” Artificial Intelligence Driving System Revealed – GTPlanet I've not read the full journal article but I've seen bits of it and I could tell watching the inputs during the races - the steering inputs don't have the same delay someone with a wheel or a controller has. If someone using a wheel is steering to the left then to the right the direction doesn't change instantly, there's the time it takes for the wheel to rotate that far. Sophy doesn't have that, which I think is partly how it's able to go into corners so aggressively. It's also worth pointing out that the races here are all effectively in time trial conditions, with no tyre wear or fuel use which can be affected by the driver and can affect how fast a car can be. An AI could know how fast a car can be on different tyres or differently worn tyres and calculate a strategy accordingly, but I've played and watched enough GT Sport to know in those situations if a car has worn tyres and is going into a corner with two wheels on the grass during entry, it's ending up in a wall. It would be much harder to develop an AI agent in those situations and much easier to race against because humans can and do measure their strategy and car performance with that in mind.

Week 7 update For the first time this year, no deaths this week. Cheer up everyone.

Had a dream last night I was part of some kind of merger with the STV News channel and they didn't want me or the people I was with there. I called John Mackay a Ron Burgundy cosplayer with the personality of a box of own brand stationary. Jim Duffy was there and I called him a baldy c**t and offered him a square go.

What a pitch that is at Firhill. And what a strip that is for Thistle. And on the bad side, what an accent that is for Cammy Bell.

Ratchet & Clank (PS4, 2016) I've played most of the PlayStation mascot platformers. Jack and Daxter, Sly Cooper, Crash Bandicoot, Uncharted, I've played them all and enjoyed most of them. I'd never played a Ratchet & Clank game though. Considering how many of them there have been this is a bit surprising, but at some point I got the PS4 soft-reboot/movie tie-in in my library and I needed something to play, so here we are. I might as well have stopped after the "soft-reboot/movie tie-in" part to be honest, because this review is only going in one direction after that. You are Ratchet, a small, light brown furry thing of indeterminate age and you live on a planet dreaming of one day becoming a Galactic Ranger. One day you try out and you get turned away, then a small talking robot falls out of the sky. You name him Clank, then you go off and save the world. As this is my first Ratchet & Clank game I get the feeling I'm missing some story. This isn't helped by this game throwing characters and locations at you constantly with seemingly very little connection from one world to the next. You go to a planet, you complete one or two objectives, you meet some people, you go somewhere else and do it again. There's never a chance to build any knowledge of what's going on or who anyone is, and there's no real reason for me to care either. With the game being released alongside an animated film I get the sense it's aimed at a primarily younger audience, and this shows in the gameplay. I called it a platformer to begin and this is somewhat generous. You control an anthropomorphic being that can double jump. That's about as far as the platforming goes. There are some occasional puzzles thrown in that are either much harder than the gameplay or proof that I'm going senile in my old age, but the only thing that's really sticking with me in terms of gameplay are the weapons. Ratchet has a wrench which he can perform melee attacks with. This is useless against pretty much everything except small enemies which are more effectively and satisfyingly dispatched with a proper gun anyway, so it's useless. Throughout the game you unlock sixteen weapons of various different styles which gain experience and can be upgraded the more you use them. I cannot overstate how frustrating the weapons in this game are. For a start, outside of two different kinds of rocket launcher, almost none of them seem to do any damage. Even fully upgraded, you could enter a room full of the toughest enemies, use up all of your ammo for one weapon and still not manage to kill all of them. This reduces battles to enemies to nothing more than holding down the fire button and hoping you don't get hit. You know how in games with multiple weapons there's an easy way to switch between them? You might press right and left on the d-pad to cycle through them, or hold down a shoulder button then pick one with one of the sticks. You do that here too, only because the ammo runs out so quickly you'll be switching through them constantly. And you'll have to swap pages of them to actually see all of them. And you'll spend most of the time looking for one that's less upgraded than the others because you feel compelled to use those, meaning most of the time you're forcing yourself to use weapons that do less damage. There's a quick swap feature which lets you assign a weapon to each button on the d-pad but this is somehow even more infuriating than what I've just described. It changes with no reason or warning, so you can press a button expecting something to start firing and then it doesn't. Then half the time you'll have to bring up the menu to change your options here anyway because the four options you've got set up have all run out of ammo. None of this is to mention that gun battles against multiple enemies are a cluttered mess on-screen anyway. You can't see a thing that's going on between you and your constantly changing weapons, the multiple enemies and multiple types of fire that are coming towards you, the bolts which you collect from enemies to buy ammo and upgrades with, it's all just dreadful to try and follow as it's happening. Nothing sums up how hollow the game is and how awkward the combat is quite like Challenge Mode, which is effectively a New Game Plus mode you unlock at the end, just in case you want to play it again with slightly stronger weapons. There's a multiplier here which increases as long as you hit enemies without being hit yourself. The higher the multiplier, the more bolts you get. It's impossible to maintain this, and it's impossible to realise when you get hit. I didn't realise how bad this actually was until I played Challenge Mode but it's honestly amazing seeing proof of something which is happening in such a clumsy way you can't actually tell first-hand. In playing this game I can see inspiration from some of the great action adventure platforming experiences I've had in my life. At least in gameplay and setting, I'm saying nothing about the story or the characters. These glimpses are so small though that I'm not even frustrated that a great and popular PlayStation series has been so disappointing in my first experience of it, I'm just glad that it's over and I don't have to think about it anymore. I don't know who this game is supposed to appeal to. As someone new to the series I'm not motivated to play any of the older games (and I can't do so easily because what is backwards compatibility?). For someone who does like the series, is this a good example of why? I doubt it.

Got another letter about a booster today. They must be trying to catch up on people who didn't get one in December. Fortunately I don't have any friends and am a massive VL so I'm not going to get an HIV test every week

You're always welcome to submit a team one year. I'm sure your local knowledge could yield an advantage.

I saw furries in real life for the first time today.

You don't hear much about Insulate Britain these days.

The Aberdeen/Celtic thread featured a glib reference to a poster's recent health scare and has somehow got significantly worse since then:

The most shocking part of the Aston Martin reveal is obviously Vettel's hair

You realise Cram has commentated on athletics for the BBC for years, right?

There's a beauty contest that nobody wants to see.

The only appropriate reaction if you encounter someone doing this: Ugly

Polyphony Digital and Sony have been doing some AI stuff: and here's the current Nations Cup champion going 1v1 and not being able to beat it: No idea when/if this technology will make its way into a game but I can't wait to punt it into the wall when it does.

The Norwegian episode was... good???

Does anyone know a clinically vulnerable person who feels like they can't now go outside because of restrictions being stopped? Or are they all just on twitter telling the world how selfish everyone else is? Aside from the initial shielding period nobody I know seems bothered by it anymore, and even the most pro-government on here still seem to be going about and doing things.

One for the Falkirk thread, there's about forty of them.

I went back. "If I was still a bloke I could just get on with the job instead of having to explain myself!" I'm so fucked off I can't even think of a gif to post.

I've said it before: One giant league of 42, every team plays each other once.

It seems to be about 50/50 whether the train drivers on the Subway wear one or not. Still around 90% on there and in shops in my experience.