Miguel Sanchez

Jigsaw's protege from the Saw films is in The X-Files: Liam Neeson's best pal from the Taken films is in The X-Files:

I was thinking more blindfolded and a 45 to the back of the skull. Can't miss that.

Can't they just shoot them?

I need some more details on this one. Ad Lib?

He had a rare eye condition you utter trumpet

It'd be quite funny if Graham wasn't picked for the game.

New thread: Which P&Ber is Private Pyle?

This is apparently a thing: Britain must train citizen army, military chief warns - BBC News Any thoughts? Looking forward to World War Three? Wondering why Russia sending hundreds of thousands of its young men to pointless, horrible deaths means we should do it too? Looking forward to the inevitable heat death of the planet due to climate change before this happens? Wondering which one of Putin's body doubles will be in charge in twenty years' time when this actually happens?

Better than the American version where they get cosplayers to dress up as anime girls and draw them in like Sirens.

Jaws (1975) What is so captivating about fiction about men who go out to sea to capture some impossibly large and inhuman beast? I don't know what it is, but it am. Music could have been better. Immaculate besides.

Replacing it with a Madrid industrial estate by the look of the overhead

He could have combed his hair before he went on the telly.

This guy you've seen in about five other things is in The X-Files Roland (The X-Files) - Wikipedia

Week 3 update I love these lazy Januarys.

Jonners also said there will be a feature about the Bonnyrigg game tomorrow.

Jonners hasn't always been this bad. Is he alright?

Shadow of the Tomb Raider (PS4, 2018) Shadow of the Tomb Raider begins, as many AAA games do nowadays, with an on-screen message declaring that the game was made by a diverse team of people of many genders, ethnicities, backgrounds and sexual orientations. I think the first time I saw this in a game was Mafia III. In a game set in the American deep south in the 60s where you play a black man, a message saying "there is racism in this game and racism is bad" is at best, patronising. What, then, could Shadow of the Tomb Raider possibly be apologising for in advance? The Tomb Raider formula isn't altered much here. You play Lara Croft, one of the few video game characters ubiquitous enough to exist with little in the way of introduction or development. The game picks straight up from where Rise of the Tomb Raider left off. Off the top of my head I remember finishing that and not having the slightest recollection of anything that happened. Shadow goes one step further, as I had almost no interest in what was happening the entire time I was playing. Lara finds a dagger in a temple in Peru. Then she sees a mural carved into a wall that tells her to go somewhere. She and her sole remaining friend in the world (the last one she hasn't got killed) head off to find it, and so does a guy called Dominguez who is bad and shouldn't get it because he'll do bad things with it. The story and characterisation in this game are extremely bad, but as I think about it, every area of this game is lacking in the same way. Do we learn anything about Lara? Not really. She was an annoying, extremely privileged child. She goes Rambo mode at one point. She cares so much and just feels like she lets people down. Do we know anything about the bad guys? "We can reshape the world." Oh can you, okay. Do we learn anything about the extremely forgettable extras we meet along the way? Not really. Nothing of the story and nothing of the characters will live long in the memory. Does the gameplay compensate for this? No. Standard third person runny jumpy climby affair, although in arguably the most impressive turn of events the third game in a trilogy manages to have the absolute core gameplay mechanic be vague at best and outright broken at worst. Trying to shoot an enemy? Better pick a gun with good damage because you're only hitting on ten percent of your shots. Combat is limited compared to the previous two games and there's a focus on stealth, but this is clunky and let down by how awkward it is to move Lara around. Eventually you'll unlock arrows that turn enemies against one another and it becomes a foregone conclusion anyway. Platforming is even more infuriatingly imprecise. When you're climbing along a wall and trying to jump to another section it's often a lottery whether or not Lara will actually attach. This quirk was at its most irritating during my playthough on the hardest, stingiest with checkpoints, difficulty. I jumped, Lara got stuck on the side of a cliff and couldn't move, I then had another twenty minutes of platforming and swimming to redo. And while I'm here, how can she climb sheer cliffs, or even overhanging cliffs, while wearing sandals? While things like that are irritating, it's not as immersion breaking as the times Lara has to jump or swing to a ledge. Good platforming is centred around an instinctive understanding of how the player character interacts with environmental elements. The player understands how the character moves, jumps and climbs. The player understands how to interact with different surfaces and objects. Every now and then in Shadow you'll be going along a (completely linear) path and come to a stop. You'll see a ledge or another bit of rock or something that's definitely too far away. Lara can't jump there, that can't be where you're supposed to go. So you look around for a bit and wonder if you're missing something. If you're on the easy difficulty you press R3 and a big glowing thing tells you that yes that is the way you're supposed to go. So you take the leap of faith that's definitely too far for Lara to reach. Several extra frames appear during her jump and she sort of floats in mid-air until she reaches wherever she's going. It's like Wile E Coyote jumping off a cliff. Considering one of the game's central premises is about what Lara does to survive when faced with a private military contractor that's slaughtering hundreds of people to try and find the same hidden treasure she is, the fact that she reaches these pivotal moments by effectively floating through the air undermine this somewhat. The game is largely linear, although there are three main areas where you can explore a bit and do some side-missions. Each of these is basically pointless. The people inhabiting them are irrelevant to anything that's going on. Trying to navigate them is also a nightmare, the main area of Paititi is particularly bad for the Borderlands problem of having areas built on top of other areas with an in-game map which doesn't differentiate between them. And you don't have a mini-map, so you have to bring up the menu every ten seconds to make sure you're going in the right direction. Things get worse if you're actually looking for something like a collectible, you can be standing on top of one and not realise. There's a greater focus on the raiding tombs aspect of the series here compared to the previous two games, but I don't think it works very well. These sections effectively see the game switch from platforming to timed platforming. There isn't much in the way of puzzles, and I'll let you imagine what a game with less than fluid platforming becomes when you need to time jumps to avoid being crushed or stabbed or burned or drowned. The greater focus on these sections is at the expense of combat, but both parts of the game are so unremarkable there's not really any occasion to favour one over the other. The game isn't very good from a technical standpoint either. Playing on PS4 Pro with the HDR on and performance mode activated turned my console into a jet engine. Realising I could prioritise frame rate and turn the brightness down turned my console into a jet engine going ten miles an hour slower. I don't know where all the performance goes either, the game only exists in green, brown and grey and everything looks exactly the same. It's not loading times either, you constantly run into those tight squeeze sections that only exist to waste some time. Actually there are some sections which are thick mud instead of a small gap, but the point stands. Come to think of it, I lied. Despite these various tight squeezes you can still hit a loading screen if you go quickly enough. And this brings me on to the most disagreeable part of Shadow - the amount of times Lara gets stuck somewhere in apparent mortal peril. I tried to keep track but lost count of the amount of times she's underwater and ends up having to struggle through a small gap in the rocks, where you have to spam a button to push or climb through. Where you hear her making muffled straining noises. It's not only underwater either, there's one part where you're in a temple used for human sacrifices and she has to climb what seems to be a waste chute filled with blood, limbs and other gore. Same format applies. This happens so often I honestly started thinking it was a poorly disguised fetish from someone involved in development. Someone who just liked watching Lara get stuck somewhere. I'm not claustrophobic but I've had dreams where I get stuck in the kind of spots Lara goes through where I can't move. I don't know why it happens so often here. Come to think of it, I lied again. The most disagreeable part of Shadow of the Tomb Raider is the sheer scale of it. There is absolutely nothing remarkable about this game. Combat, platforming, performance, characterisation, plot, it's all pointless. I can't imagine a world where this is anyone's favourite video game. It just feels like a solid lump of stuff, with no more specific detail than that. "Would sir like a video game? Certainly sir, how much video game would sir like? Ten hours? Here you are, I'll get it wrapped up for you." So a modern AAA video game is a bit bland. This isn't unique or new. What is unique however is something I discovered once I'd finished. According to Wikipedia, this is the tenth most expensive video game ever. At least for games that have actually released. It seems like this cost over one hundred million dollars to make. I don't know how much of that went into development or how much into marketing, but just let that actually sink in. One hundred million dollars. On the third game of a trilogy, so surely the basic framework for it existed already. And what do they have to show for it? The most uninspiring, unremarkable, boring, pointless game imaginable. Remarkably, having finished the PS3 versions of the first Tomb Raider, then both Rise and Shadow, Tomb Raider is now my second-most played series in the post-2008 PlayStation trophies era. Lara Croft is an enduring, beloved, original video game character and my experience with her has ranged from generic to aggressively forgettable. Perhaps there's a message in all of this. All I know is I'm glad I'm done.

I'm honestly impressed this programme is on for over an hour.

Got an interesting video in my suggestions:

The most Box Office man in the league is back, baybee

I like it when people take some time to figure out that I'm a fraud rather than having an immediate visual indicator.

It's probably easy to say Hearts look toothless without Shankland but there's quite clearly no idea what to do when they're within 20 yards of goal. Unless they get a corner and there's a tall boy in the box, of course.

Queue up Richey's WHAT A FUCKING STRIKE post.