Miguel Sanchez

Alright then.

Scumpee Pooshited

Not having this tbf

The last time I was in McDonald's I'm pretty sure it was £6 odd for a Chicken Legend meal value for money my arse

I've said this before, but Raoul Moat is part of the collective conscious of the country which passed me by. It happened the same weekend as T in the Park, and by the time I got home it was just a thing that had happened. Any references since to Gazza, fishing rods or chicken are meaningless to me as a result. Same goes for the 2010 World Cup final. That didn't happen because I didn't see it.

I would simply tell the gang of boys that I did not enjoy watching them gang rape my mother, sister and girlfriend and I would win.

Bad Boy Chiller Crew are getting their own TV show on ITV (nme.com)

I've just realised, imagine this was last year and Donald was still president. Patter for years.

Iceland is where you want to go

I'm sure I've seen someone eat frozen donner meat before. @tongue_tied_danny rings a bell (forgive me making horrible assumptions about your life if it's not you)

throbber, 30 minutes after being kicked out by his mrs:

On the subject of Greggs: Liverpool Greggs superfan gets tattoo of vegan sausage roll - BBC News

Bob's Burgers should be on television. Going by the list of episodes it looks like S3 before it starts being consistently great. Over the first years it was on they always had trouble getting renewed by Fox to make new episodes, so a lot of the time they put the best episodes at the end of series so they were fresher in peoples' minds and more likely to get picked up. It's not always laugh out loud funny beginning to end every episode (and some of the singing ones lean to heavily on that imo) but there's always some laughs and the family relationships between all five of them are always endearing and just as important as the laughs. It's a programme filled with puns and fart jokes and I don't hate it. If that doesn't make people want to watch it nothing will.

That's that cleared up then.

Bob's Burgers started from the beginning again last night. It's brilliant. You should watch it.

University sent me in the opposite direction, maybe that's what puts me off

I am very glad I did not pursue a career in academia.

I think I'd rather starve to death than buy frozen mashed potatoes tbqh.

Absolutely nobody nearly started rioting, and the change in Irn-Bru's recipe is a national disgrace.

Batman: The Telltale Series (PS4, 2016) Looking at my PSN profile and all the games I've played, I don't think there are any genres defined by a game's developers. If I call something a "Rockstar sandbox" or a "Ubisoft sandbox" anyone reading this thread would be able to understand the distinction and the nuance, but they're not really unique enough to exist as clearly defined terms. The closest any developer has really come to establishing themselves as their own description over the past couple of console generations is Telltale Games. Which is convenient for the easy description of their output as Telltale games, of which Batman is an example. A cross between point and click adventures and quick time events, you control Batman as he does Batman things, then Bruce Wayne when he's pretending he isn't Batman. I lied earlier, I've played Tales from the Borderlands. That said, I like the general format of Telltale games. From what I understand of the rest of their output the writing and characterisation is good, so you're pretty much guaranteed to get an engaging story. The quick time events during combat are just enough interactivity to keep you awake between conversations, and given Batman is a character renowned for hand to hand combat the visuals here are engaging enough, and appropriate given the game's art style gives it a comic-book feel. There are a few sections where you investigate crime scenes by looking at stuff and connecting the parts that are related to one another. There's not much complexity to it but it's a nice nod to Batman's roots as a detective, and something different to the rest of the game. The real heart of a Telltale game lies in its dialogue options and moral choices. As conversations happen you have a choice of responses, and you can occasionally choose to go somewhere or do something which will all, as the game constantly reminds you, affect how your story plays out. I've mentioned before when I've played Quantic Dream games (is that a term worthy of being fully capitalised?) that I enjoy this format of storytelling. You can unequivocally get a unique story and unique results, assuming the game is well-made enough that everything works out effectively no matter what an individual player chooses. Batman falls short on some of these fronts. The game puts you in several positions where you can make a choice between excessive violence or restraint. In one notable moment early in the game you can beat someone up after a fight at the top of a skyscraper or you can handcuff them and hang them from a wall. I went for the tame option and later on I'm interrogating a guy who says we all saw me beating him up. There are some choices which force you into paths which feel somewhat contrived. I can't tell if the game's trying to make you both-sides it or if it's just the result of trying to contain several different action paths, but aside from that instance which feels more like a technical glitch the game runs into the perhaps inevitable problem where you find yourself asking why you can't just say this, or just do this, or just explain something rather than pick the limited options available. On a technical level the game isn't very good. For something which is mostly quick time events in terms of gameplay there are several things that just don't work properly. The frame rate dies frequently even when you're not in combat. Some characters don't load properly, one had a face but no hair, so she looked like a doll that had been sliced in half. Sometimes you'll be watching a news report on the TV and the newsreader will be fine, but the rest of the screen will be out of focus. The best case I had was a character who didn't actually appear at all, and I didn't realise at first because I thought she was hiding behind something because there had been a gunfight. To me it seems like the art style and interactive cutscene-based gameplay would preclude some of these issues, but apparently not. My biggest criticism of the game itself would be the episodic format that Telltale is also known for. I don't know that I could play a game like this in the five episode structure that they usually come in, with each episode releasing separately every few months. I'd never remember what had happened whenever a new one came out. You can also get through each episode in 1-2 hours at the very most, so it doesn't seem like a very engaging format to follow unless you can binge them all in a day or two. It also doesn't help in this case since each episode is directed by a different person or team, and this is noticeable in subtle ways like the tone of the dialogue or the events that take place. The game doesn't start strongly in this respect, and I think a lack of consistency from episode to episode is noticeable and to the game's detriment. Aside from the gameplay, my biggest issue was with the story itself. I've never really been a big superhero fan. I've spent more time with Batman than any others, and I realise there are different stories and different versions of the character. The thing is, I struggled to take all of that in when I was playing this. There's Bruce Wayne and Harvey Dent and they sound remarkably like Nathan Drake and Sully. Fine, I can get past that. But I'm watching what's going on and spending the whole time thinking "this isn't Batman." It's not Christian Bale confiding in Michael Caine. It's not Gary Oldman trying to keep Gotham's police force honest. I really struggled to take the game and the characters seriously for about the first half while I adjusted to them not being the way I perceive them in my head when I think about them now. I realise this is my problem much more than the game's. The story and the characters are pretty much universally praised in reviews, so I assume they did something right. Is this a positive or benefit to superheroes as a character, being able to reinvent and reuse characters in different ways? Batman's origin story is altered quite significantly in this game and I spent most of it feeling the same way as Bruce, not being able to believe what was going on. Are characters and tropes stronger or weaker for being able to be altered and manipulated like this, from platform to platform, era to era, writer to writer? Maybe you need to be a more dedicated fan of them to appreciate them all appropriately in your head at the same time, or to switch from one to the other, but I'm not sure how well I've managed it. I see people talk about the trailer for the Uncharted movie having Spiderman in it and I'm just confused, thinking "that wasn't Tobey Maguire." Am I now old, Abe Simpson not knowing what 'it' is anymore? There you have Batman: The Telltale Series. A technical embarrassment which is enjoyable in the way most of their games are, with an added existential crisis thrown in at the end. There's another Batman Telltale series and I'm going to get that when it's next on sale, so I guess this one must have done something right.

Meanwhile, I've made it to the Pond era and I just keep hearing her whisper "have you ever fancied someone you know you shouldn't?" River Song is an arsehole

I wouldn't bother.

A very 2021 sentence, this.

Seems like he shat himself while at the Vatican How unfortunate