forameus

I have no problem with what he thinks, but saying that he'll definitely be world class is a bit much at this extremely early stage. I'd also imagine labelling him as such would do more harm than good. He could turn out to be that good, or he could be shite. Or he could turn out to be just very good. If he's at least that, I'll be delighted. But I'm not going to proclaim him to be the second coming, just so I can wail and gnash my teeth in a few years if he turns out to be something else.

And if it's knickerwetting to worry about Cerny missing a large amount of the season when the alternative is Scully, I'm going to need new breeks Did he not get caught against ICT though? I thought I noticed them leaving the foot in towards the end and him limping a wee bit. Has it been said what's up with him officially? I just assumed that Archie was doing his usual and not giving a single f**k about the cup and giving him the opportunity to rest

Can we wait just a wee bit before we do an England-style heaping of pressure on a player? I'd be fairly comfortable in saying he will never be "World Class". That's no bad thing.

Always wondered when we re-signed him whether there was concrete interest, but the other clubs were all scared off. Looks like the case now - wondering what kind of contract we've given him too, given that surely they were looking at a considerable layoff when he signed it. Still, he's our best option as long as he comes back at the same level he left at. At least Welsh has looked better than last season, otherwise it'd be an even bigger issue. Plus should mean we get to see more of the incredibly handsome Ryan Edwards

To some people it will be. It's certainly a far better reaction and review than people who are going to rate it 0 on metacritic (or 10 from that matter, they're just opposite sides of the coin). I can't remember if it was you, but someone said a while ago that it was borderline unreviewable. I can see that point, so does it really matter what someone else thinks of it? As long as the review is well-written, which I believe that one was, then there is no issue. Also worth noting that the scoring system Jim Sterling uses is slightly different to a straight 1-10 that some sites will use. He outlines it on the site in a lot of detail. Not to mention that putting a DDoS attack on a site because it holds an opinion you don't like about a game is an incredibly cringey thing to do from those sweaty VLs that did it. One parallel I'd actually make is with the Division. In both of these games, the location is very much the star - NMS for its procedural generation, and the Division for its painstaking mapping of New York. Both are great in their own way, but the Division struggled to not fill gameplay with repetitive grinding tasks, and it looks like NMS will go the same way too. Completely different games, I understand, but there is a comparison to be drawn.

With three weeks between Summerslam and Backlash, they might actually be able to get some good focused build in. That made me happy. Then I realised that it gives RAW five weeks of build for Clash of Champions. That made me sad.

So just because it was bad or average, it's attention seeking? I read the review this morning as his site's back up, and you can't really argue with anything he says. It fits with his tastes in games, and there's nothing hyperbolic about it. After playing it for 3 or 4 hours last night, I have to say I agree with him in most points, although I wouldn't mark it as low as 5. Maybe 6-6.5 at the current point. I put the game in while I was working from home to get the update downloaded and installed, and when I came back to it I was greeted with a white screen prompting me to press square. I did, and was booted straight into the game, in a little ravine needing to fix my ship. No real intro, no real tutorial as to what I was supposed to be doing, just go and dae it. Went into a nearby cave to try and find materials and got lost several times. Being a cave, it was pretty dark in points, and short of a hovering icon on the HUD, there was no real indication as to where you were supposed to go. Then I got killed by sentinels. Admittedly at the second attempt, because I provoked them after the first, but hey ho. Got back to the ship and headed down again, this time found my way through the cave and back to the surface. When you see that, the planet spread out before you, all kinds of new stuff and creatures charging around, then you have to admit the game is impressive. Graphics-wise it isn't mind-blowing, but the colours make up for that to make a very vibrant world. I managed to get the ship repaired, and then it was off into space. I was supposed to go visit a space station to advance the story, but instead headed to the huge planet I'd seen from the surface of the first one. It looked a lot different - hot instead of snow - but aside from a few new species, there wasn't that much different. Went back to the first planet because I'd missed a quest point and met my first alien. Which doesn't move. And shows off the absolutely woeful writing. I'd say they were going for corny 70s Star Trek, but I don't think they were. Still, it's a minor thing, not as if the game relies on its writing. Headed to the space station to meet another stationary alien, with more absolute nonsense to say. Did what I needed to there and saw another ship fly in. Ooh, exciting, maybe it's another...no, it just sits there. Apparently you can interact with them if you go to the ship directly, but there was no indication to do that. I repaired the warp drive and headed to the next part of the galaxy, and that's where I switched it off. So my thoughts so far... Pros + If you look into the sky and see a planet while you're on the surface of another, it's brilliant to think that you can get in your ship and go and visit it. + The soundtrack is varied and atmospheric + While it doesn't have the polish of a "hand-drawn" world, it does look good. Immensely colourful and very clear. + The scale of the game is vast, but it's a double edged sword, as... Cons - It's shallow. There's absolutely no getting away from it. Scale is brilliant, but there's a reason that more developers are moving away from the "look how many square kilometers I've got" and concentrating on depth. There's a reason Bethesda moved from Daggerfall having a map "the size of Great Britain" to Skyrim having around 10 square miles. People complained that Fallout 4's map was too small, but it was probably one of the best examples due to how densely packed it was. Witcher 3 has an absolutely enormous map, but there's vast swathes of nothingness in it. That detracts from the experience. When you boast about how there's a squillion planets to explore, you better hope that they're distinct enough and have enough interesting things in it to actually matter. - The procedural generation isn't mature enough to achieve what they wanted to achieve. There's a limited palette the game has to work with, particularly in the creatures (from what I've seen so far, and read in reviews). - The world as it stands doesn't seem quite "there". You clip through most things, particularly the creatures. I clipped through the world a couple of times by going into gaps you shouldn't be able to fit in. It all just seems like they concentrated on building the world visually and then called it done. - The meat of the game at the moment seems to be "venture to planet, gather resources, feed resources into charging your suit, gather more resources, leave". This may change as you go into the game, but even if it does, that's a poor choice to make. They'll end up losing a lot of people in the early hours of the game because it just seems incredibly shallow. - I get the impression - purely personal perspective - that it's trying to be a little smarter than it deserves. The lack of any real intro or tutorial made the start of the game a bit jarring, and it doesn't stop there. They tell you which buttons do what in popups, but there's very little other than that. It could be that the game is a lot more deep than I'm making it out to be, but with such a huge game, you perhaps need to prod people in the direction of this depth, otherwise they'll never find it. - Combat is paid little more than lip-service. The sentinels are just annoying, and really the only things you'll get to fight. I know there's space battles, but I'm yet to experience any. From reading reviews it looks like it's much the same. The game isn't bad, but it's not particularly great either. I'm going to keep playing it, and will probably end up putting many, many hours into it. There's definitely the core of a great game there, so it's all the more disappointing that this is what was served up.

The big issue nowadays with demos being super-rare. Remember when you could just download a version of the game for free to form an opinion yourself? Now you either buy the game - a significant price too now - or you trust reviews, which is a minefield in itself.

Archie fucking hates the cups, doesn't he?

I've just ordered it, and it'll arrive tomorrow via Amazon Prime's loveliness. If it's pish, I'm coming for you Fide.

Sounds incredibly on the edge of me loving it or hating it. Even the Witcher 3, which I ended up thinking was the best game ever made, I almost gave up on early on because it didn't engage me. One of my favourite parts of Skyrim, Fallout, games like that was always the exploration of new areas, so could well be my sort of game. At the moment my home internet's been dead since Friday night (fucking Openreach) so wouldn't be much point ordering it now. Think I'll get it Thursday or Friday though, have it for the weekend. Unless I see something horrendous coming out in the reviews, which seems unlikely at the moment.

I don't think there is either, I was more meaning generally with day 1 patches. Given the possibility that said patch can still have issues, why not just start the whole process earlier so you can have that day 1 patch in place in the weeks before release? Especially with this one, as the update appears to be adding a sizeable amount to the game rather than just bug fixes. The game will probably be pretty well reviewed - probably not exemplary, but pretty solid. Most will be pretty happy with it, and some will absolutely bomb it. As is the way with games and the hype train they travel on. I'll see what the early reviews are like on Wednesday/Thursday, then maybe pick it up in the days after if it's all positive.

It's more like an exception to the rule. Have there been any other examples where it has? There's been some pretty high-profile games where they've been desperate to embargo the shit out of everyone so their game doesn't get seen for the turd it is. Not saying that's the case here, at least not entirely. I imagine it'll come into every developers mind in some way - why would you let reviews out early if you can get away with it? One thing that annoyed me about it, they said they wanted the review to be of day 1 code, because there was going to be a day 1 patch. Why not just make sure beta testing happens early enough so that there doesn't need to be a day 1 patch? They're by no means alone in this, in fact every game now has that.

That's down to the procedural generation. No need for loads of textures to model a huge world when most of it is just done with formulae. It's certainly sounding more positive than I expected, although I'm sure the hype train will crash for some of the less balanced in their community soon. Tempted to order this now...

I usually think a lot of the stuff in this thread is stretching, and that some just like to pick up on little things and blow them out of proportion. Then I saw that. That is truly awful.

Absolutely. I find watching it incredibly dull, and last season in particular there was a lot more excitement in watching the cooncil telly Scottish Cup games.

Watching CWC now, and have to say I agree with ZSJ being a bit meh. He seems very talented obviously but the match just seems so slow, like duxe has been told to let him get his spots in with little going the other way. Plus he also sounds incredibly dull in the promo segments.

He did genuinely look like he had no idea what was going on. Like he'd been told the finish, and that he'd be heading up the ramp as normal. Then this screaming mess of a man comes down. Anyone would've been visibly upset by that.

Come on Giles, didn't you see him screaming at Rusev? Guy backed down. He's a stone cold killer.

Technically, it could never be a flop or a disappointment, that's for sure. But then that's part of the problem. Is it just going to play like an extended tech demo with the developers always pointing to the technical marvel that it is? That's only going to go so far, especially these days when a good bit of imagination in development with indie games is often trumping those that have spent millions and millions on the superfluous. I realise I'm coming across really negative on the game, and not meaning to be. I really hope it is a big success for the developers' sake, because by all accounts they've had a brilliant idea and have spent a hell of a long time realising their dream. It's something completely different to what has gone before, and while it wouldn't really change anything industry-wide, it's always good to see things that are different being successful.

Looking very likely. Steph will do a heel promo saying something like they don't need the WWE title, because...wait for it...we've got our own title! Cue tiny pop, because it's pretty predictable. Still, decent way to raise intrigue ahead of Summerslam. Make it a bigger tournament too, let every singles star go in and have a proper long tournament. Obviously Rollins and Reigns can be the finish, and maybe that's where we finally get the heel turn,

Really? I suppose it depends how you define failing. Unless it's absolutely perfect, which is unlikely given the hype it's received, said hype is going to mean people will be disappointed. And it seems these days when people get disappointed with games, they turn into absolute VLs. When a delay was announced for this game, they threatened the developers' families, what do you think they'll do if they find the game itself disappointing? I'd take back the first line I said though, change it to "I can't see this game living up the hype it has generated, and it'll be disappointing"

We never really looked like it, but Germany were less than impressive for the most part. Had we gone and done something mental like beating them at Hampden - which could have happened given how out of sorts they looked defensively in that game, and how they let Ireland take them - then dropped more points to Poland, the group could have really backed up. Had we beaten Georgia, Germany and then Poland, we'd have probably gone into the Gibraltar game with a chance of that. It's massively stretching, but there was a point where it looked like Germany's troubles were opening things up for the rest of the teams in the group And, I can't believe I feel like I still need to say it, that points total was enough to mean had we beaten Georgia we would have been in the playoffs. Take out Gibraltar from Ireland's results and they got three points more than us. That's not exactly great either. Our group had no side going all out, so the points total were relatively close. If you ranked the 4th placed sides, we were comfortably ahead of every other side, because our group ended up all taking points off of each other. If you're wanting to take away results against the bottom sides, Netherlands got 7 points from 8 games, as did Israel, Bulgaria and Macedonia. Estonia had 6. Finland got 8, Montenegro got 5. Serbia got fucking 4. Of course we need to do better, but then I never argued about that. We could have easily qualified automatically the way this group panned out. But that doesn't change what I originally said. If we had bea...nah, I'm honestly sick of saying it, because you're clearly not getting it.

And yet none of that changes what I actually said, which was, again, if we did beat Georgia, we would've been in a playoff spot. How is that so hard to understand? I never said anything about the rest of the campaign. Although for the record, it's nowhere near as bad as people make out with hindsight. You talk about Poland like they were no-marks - a draw in Warsaw was a good result, and I completely agree we should have closed it out in at least one of the games - probably Hampden. But Poland have proved this summer that they are a good side. And we didn't "choke" against Ireland, we got it back to 1-1 after they scored first. The only reason I go on about the Georgia game in this context is because had we won it, and got through the playoff, then no-one would be saying a peep about the rest of the campaign. But we lose that one, end up not qualifying, and suddenly the retcon is that we were absolutely shite. We weren't. We were fair-to-middling for most of the campaign, and shite in one game. Ireland were pretty average for most of the campaign, and amazing for one game. That's the way it goes sometimes.

Yeah, realise that now. The season ticket holders behind me told him to GTF while Abzy was being club captain getting his photies taken.