Miguel Sanchez

DomDom got the boot from @Tynierose because he kept saying the mods were allowing something or someone to do something by letting someone keep making new accounts. I forget what the specific problem was.

Anyway, nobody has actually named the worst type of post on Pie and Bovril: Puns.

Don't care if I've been beaten to it Didn't you go into meltdown trying to deflect criticism of Rangers fans on a drunken rampage in Glasgow city centre because their team won something by saying the people doing the criticism were middle class snobs who didn't understand the significance of football and sectarianism among the working class?

It's come to my attention that Tetris Effect is on Xbox Game Pass. I know there are some Xbox punters here, so I am absolutely begging you to give this a try. Whether you like Tetris or not, whether or not you've played it, this is completely worth it. The Connected mode that was exclusive to Xbox and PC has now been released on all platforms this week and it has crossplay, so there's lots of opportunity to play against/with people too, and the multiplayer modes are just as engaging as the single player Journey mode. Give it a try.

If you've left the work you've complained about for years, can you tell us who it was? I've always wanted to know.

Rise of the Tomb Raider (PS4, 2016) A few months ago I played the 2013 Tomb Raider reboot and I didn't write it up. I had nothing to say. I didn't think anything about it. I'd played it before on PS3, I remembered bits of it but the whole thing sort of passed me by the second time. Looking at the reviews of it from the time it seems to be well-regarded in pretty much every aspect, which I find a bit surprising. Maybe playing it several years since made it feel generic, because there wasn't much that really stood out. I mean that literally - the environments and characters are all drawn from the same palette of browns and greys. Fast forward a bit to Rise of the Tomb Raider and... shouldn't she rise in the first game? Is it because she seems to go up a lot of mountains in this? I don't know. Anyway, Lara Croft is on the hunt for something her dad was looking for before he died - the source of immortal life. It seems he was getting close, so Lara sets off to Siberia to look for the lost city of Kitezh, which I've just discovered is actually a real place of legend. What follows is your standard third person runny jumpy shooty climby crafty adventure. After something like two hours of Rise, I was delighted. That period alone was better than anything I remembered from the first game. The platforming was extremely Uncharted and the presentation was still gratuitously cinematic like the first game, but it all felt and looked better. In the first semi-open world area you have to scrounge together some resources to make some poison arrows to get past a bear that's blocking your path. Great, I think, as the crafting system is going to be more convincingly survival-focused this time, rather than the last game where you just collected bolts from boxes and then made stuff. You need to collect different plants and resources to make different types of ammo or health, so I thought it was going to be an interesting challenge as the game went on. I'm speaking in the past tense so that probably tells you what happened after that. Weapons went the same way as the first game. Crafting went the same way as the first game. You're still swimming in materials. Apart from when you try to upgrade a weapon, then there's always one thing you're missing. As a result you might struggle for that first hour or so, then you have more than enough ammo for the crossbow and you can safely neglect everything else. The game even seems to acknowledge this, as upgraded weapons make little difference outside of adding silencers to guns to allow for proper stealth. That's only for human enemies though, you can have a fully upgraded military rifle and still need to empty the magazine and more into a bear's face to stop it charging at you. Or you can upgrade Lara's climbing axes, with four upgrades to unlock where three of them are "unlock locked boxes even quicker". I'm not kidding. The same goes for Lara's upgrades, with her Skill Points ending up only unlocking slightly more convenient ways to do things that already work fine. Gunplay is okay, but not amazing. The crossbow is ultimately the best weapon, with poison arrows taking out almost every enemy silently and instantly. There is a real option for stealth and it's fun trying to sneak around and get headshots, but enemies aren't really much of a challenge either way. It's also often quite difficult to separate groups of enemies, so you're going to have to be lucky with an area effect attack or else everyone within a hundred feet is going to be after you. This being a Tomb Raider game there are some tombs for you to raid and this is one area where the game notably improves on its predecessor. There are lots of tombs and caves, and there are actual puzzles to solve with a range of gameplay mechanics used to solve them. They're not overly complex, but it's the only times where I really felt engaged by Lara and what was going on. The plot is absolute nonsense which contributes to the under-developed characterisation. Lara is searching for 'The Prophet' and 'The Source' somewhere in unspecified Eastern Europe. She's being chased there by the mysterious organisation known as Trinity, who've tried for centuries to do what a girl with a rich dad managed to do in about a week. They're led by a guy named Konstantin who thinks he's Jesus, and his sister Ana, who romanced Lara's dad for a bit to find out what he knew about The Source. She's got a cough which is supposed to make her seem less evil, even though she was the one who gave her brother stigmata to make him go looking for The Source, so who can really say? I really don't understand why I'm supposed to care about either side in this. Trinity are the generic corporate military group who have an unending supply of bad guys and body armour, Lara is Lara Croft who teams up with the local rebels who've lived in the area for centuries and continually defended it from invaders. It should be easy to see which side you want to win but Lara kills so much and causes so much destruction it all rings hollow. There's a post-credit scene (I think it was after the credits) that sets up the next game and is presumably supposed to add to the mystery about what Trinity is and how it connects to the Crofts' lives and just... no. I'm not bothered about what happens up until now, I'm not going to care after a few minutes of cutscenes thrown on at the end. There's a lot of DLC for Rise of the Tomb Raider, and the one I want to talk about is Endurance mode. In theory it's a perfectly focused example of the core gameplay. You get dropped into randomly generated terrain and you have to survive, collecting as many artefacts as possible. There are hunger and warmth meters you need to keep filled by killing animals and finding/making fires, and as time goes on enemies get harder and resources get more scarce. There are tombs dotted around for you to raid, and while they don't have any puzzles in them there are traps you'll need to avoid. There are also shelters which are effectively enemy outposts - do you go searching for supplies, or do you avoid the ten tooled up guys with rifles and armour? This is a mode which is, to a point, enjoyable. If I really liked (or thought anything about) the main game I'd probably love it. It suffers from the same problems though, in that the pacing isn't very good. Run about a lot on your first day and you can find plenty of resources and weapon parts. You can earn enough XP to upgrade all the important skill points, and if you unlock enough things you'll be able to see enemies and traps and pretty much anything you need to with her instinct skills. That's if you didn't use any of the game's token card system to start you off with skills and upgrades, which can completely remove all challenge from the game. This is definitely the sort of mode I would have loved when I was younger and didn't have many games. I would have found the repetition of areas helpful rather than unstimulating, and I would have really tried to score as highly as I could. Now though, there's just very little to care about. I didn't really think about the Uncharted games as I was playing this, but I've been unable to shake them since I've been writing this. I didn't really like the Uncharted games for various reasons I wrote about at the time. I don't remember the finer details all that well, but I do know that certain things were clear - the characterisation, the stakes, and the visuals. The characters were all dreadful, but there was some variety in them. The games were centred around mythical treasure which doesn't exist, but what you were doing felt like there was a tangible connection to the real world as it existed in the game. This was reflected in the depictions of the areas you visited, which all looked spectacular. None of this applies to Rise of the Tomb Raider. Lara Croft is an iconic video game character who exists here as a posh accent and some breathy exertion noises. She sets off to find The Prophet and The Source in some hidden part of Europe, and a group of bad guys goes to try and get there first. Any challenge in the gameplay is mitigated early on, and I even forgot to mention I played on the second-highest difficulty (which I think is the same as the highest but without perma-death) and had no problems at any point. There is nothing challenging about this game on a mechanical or intellectual level. As I reach this point in writing it up which admittedly is some time after I played the game, I realise why I had nothing to say about the first Tomb Raider reboot. Here is some more of it. The end.

Just coming to post this. Perhaps there's good in what Puma have done after all.

I'm not sure stopping delivery cyclists from getting pregnant is a very efficient way of doing what you're doing.

Are you suggesting he's killing them himself? This would be his 7th hit of the year.

That specific bit was. Or at least should have specified the ones who go on killing sprees are the especially mentally vulnerable.

tbf when I said that I was being extremely broad and ignorant. I know there's going to be different layers/examples of how different people are affected and different reasons behind it.

It's not a shot on goal if it goes wide. Then it's a shot at goal that goes wide. Considering "on" is usually followed in this context with "target" - and considering some of the other nitpicks that get posted in here - I'm surprised this one's being pulled up. It seemed obviously awkwardly written as soon as I saw it.

It absolutely is. The guy in the BBC article I linked to mentioned porn addiction, and it's easy to see how/why that warps guys' view of how sexual relationships work. Impeccable man and woman meet. They take off their clothes and start fucking. Rinse and repeat as the only sexual outlet/knowledge these people have.

You're a bit weird, mate.

(there may be more dodos than Liberal Democrats)

Ned to surely seal a win this year if an obituary appears.

Also f**k off, BawWatchin.

Lots of people here with extremely sheltered internet experiences. While there are lots of differing individual circumstances, I'd say anyone who does or ever has identified as an incel initially suffered from mental illness(es) of some sort and through the internet found a self-perpetuating echo chamber filled with other people like them to support and justify the way they think about themselves and the way people in the world perceive them. Here's an article from someone who by the sounds of it wasn't that far down the rabbit hole, but who got involved enough to be aware of it: ‘I used to be an incel’ - BBC Three I'd guess everyone on here knew somebody at school or in their twenties who was like this - a bit weird, a bit weird looking, someone who wasn't very social. It might even have been some people here. That sort of thing can build up for people, and in addition to whatever mental issues they have they add various feelings of loneliness, insecurity and hopelessness. Incel forums really don't offer anything other than reassurance and blame-shifting, which is effectively the easy way out for people who feel like this and doesn't offer any meaningful solution. Even if it's someone who doesn't suffer from depression or anxiety or comes from a broken home like the guy quoted here, if you feel lonely and ignored by your peers and don't have a social life, what's going to be easier to hear from strangers on the internet? That you need to be pro-active and change something to improve yourself, or that it's everyone else's fault? As with any sort of internet subculture the concept spiralled over the years and some years ago ended up in some post-ironic hell, where what might have been a flippant "oh yeah I can't get my hole because everyone else is so shallow and pointless, it's all their fault" eventually mutates and becomes things like Chads and Staceys and the sincere belief that if you aren't over six feet two that no woman at all will ever want to talk to you. If someone smarter and with a better attention span than me went through the forums and stories I think there would be valid comparisons between people who actively grow to identify as incels and people who are radicalised into terrorism and the like. There used to be a subreddit on Reddit called r/incels which I believe that Canadian who went on a killing spree was formed from. It got deleted a few years ago for being too hateful, but there are references to it elsewhere: [Serious] Former Incels of Reddit. What brought you the ideology and what took you out? : AskReddit Ex-Incels of Reddit, What caused you to go down that path, and what helped you change? : AskReddit There are various stories here and if you google "former incel" or similar you'll find similar. If a person goes back far enough when they're telling the story you'll start to see patterns emerge. From what I've read about the guy in Plymouth, his mum knew he had problems (but probably didn't know/realise the full extent of them) and had continually did what she could to support him. I've not seen any mention of the guy's dad in the news though, I don't know if that played a part in his life. In terms of what can be done to try and stop this... I don't know. Maybe the older posters here who remember a life before the internet was as ubiquitous as it is now can tell us what the lonely weirdos did to stave off murder sprees. I don't know how that will help people with these problems who live in an age of 24/7 echo chambers though.

How do you have an effort 'on' goal that misses the target?

Quality grasp of the English language from whoever's responsible for the BBC's Rangers/Alashkert live text:

The day I realised shirt sponsorship was a waste of time was when I, somehow, was watching a Cardiff game on the telly. Might have been around the time Kenny Miller played for them. They got a penalty. The camera showed the player taking it placing the ball then walking back, showing VISIT MALAYSIA on the front of his shirt. It switched to a wide shot, showing VISIT MALAYSIA above his name on the back and VISIT MALAYSIA on the back of his shorts, while VISIT MALAYSIA VISIT MALAYSIA VISIT MALAYSIA VISIT MALAYSIA VISIT MALAYSIA VISIT MALAYSIA circled round on the electronic advertising boards. There might have been an electronic board up in the far corner with VISIT MALAYSIA on it.

Phil Foden literally has the worst face on the entire planet

Good thread, this.

Sean Lock was a Solo Shot for @peasy23 in 2019.