Community Round-Up 01/10/11

Oh, excellent. I’ve got another week to give you a suitably filtered and vetted stream of news and happenings from around TSA. Now eyes forwards, we wouldn’t want you seeing anything you shouldn’t. That can lead to undesirable consequences for your future life prospects, if you know what I mean.

I’m not sure I mentioned it last week, but Resistance 3 is kicking off our autumnal multiplayer competition romp. Posted yesterday, you can read all about it here, but in short it’s a 30 minute score-fest next Saturday evening.

There are five insanely desirable Resistance 3 T-shirts and one copy of the Resistance: A Hole in the Sky novel up for grabs. The top 3 players and two randomly picked from the rest will be winning, so all the more reason to sign up for it!

Email those entries in to me by the 11PM BST this Thursday, and get practicing for battle on Saturday 8th at 8PM.

On Monday we had the pleasure of announcing the winners to both the F1 2011 and Gears of War 3 competitions. The latter saw PoolieMike correctly identify all the music from the four Gears of War trailers we posted to get the game and a Gears of War 3 360 Vault, whilst Samb5293, Adamguest1985, Corbula, Hazelam and Eatmylead each predicted enough correct race finishes to nab a copy of F1 2011.

This, then, is the perfect opportunity to tell people to keep an eye out in the near future for more about F1 2011 and what awesome things we have planned for it on TSA, if you catch my drift.

Moving swiftly along to some meets I’d like to highlight from the next week, first and foremost Battlefield 3.

The beta hit town this week, and has a surprisingly mixed reaction. There’s been some issues with server load and a few bugs spoiling the party, but despite all that, it seems quite a few people simply can not put this one down for a minute! Most, if not all of these kinks will no doubt be ironed out by some patches to the servers and a day one patch for the full release.

So, along comes Death_in_Flamez with the “Whatever’s on Beta” meet for Battlefield 3, tonight at 7PM. Parties are restricted to 4 players in the Beta, so you’d best also head to the forum thread to see what exactly he has in mind, and be prepared to endure the odd hiccup in the game.

Sunday night sees a nearly fully stocked F1 2011 meet, at the time of writing. So that looks like it will be completely crazy first corner fun with 16 TSAgents (better than TSAsians) squabbling for position.

Fun might not have been the word I was looking for. Carnage, perhaps?

Monday has the return of the Killzone 3 Boot, with the hosting duties handled once more by Spooferbarnabas. It’s been gone for a while, but all the more reason to dig it out again and give the series a little more love.

My final highlight, I’m sure you can all guess, is… Drumroll please… Resistance 3! Thursday hosts our weekly meet, and if you fancy a giggle, you can use that link to see a little blooper I made. Thursday is the one you want, not Saturday, since that’s the day of the competition.

We have our regular WeView feature. This week we have the surprisingly unanimous positive reviews of the WeView Verdict for Batman: Arkham Asylum results posted, and the new game for review is Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit. Head to the forum thread and drop you opinions!

Of course, EGX might have wrapped up last Sunday, but TSA’s coverage has gradually unfolded over the last week. Kris is in fine form in front of the camera and on the microphone. No, he’s not doing karaoke, but rather interviewing those fine fellows that actually make the games we so love to play.

If you fancy watching some of those interviews we have Robin Meijer with Awesomenauts, Adam Vincent with Batman: Arkham City, Tim Willits for Rage and Chris Rhinehart talking about Prey 2. There might be something I’ve missed or glossed over, and I’m sure there’s a nugget or two yet to come. You should be able to catch all of TSA’s EGX based coverage over at our hub page.

EGX also played host to the launch of OnLive, and it’s quite a polarising experience. Some love it and have had a great time so far, others dipped their toe in and object to it on performance reasons and also because you don’t have total control over your games. TSA tackled this from two angles; it was briefly addressed with the TSA Talks feature, which was followed by a more in-depth look with Dan’s hands on and Kris’ EGX interview with John Spinale.

Who doesn’t love the TSA forums?

That was a rhetorical question, so no need to answer.

As always I need to warn you that General Chat is only open to signed in members of TSA, and may contain some mature themes from immature people.

• In Gaming Banter, Asparagushunter asks what your best week of gaming purchases was. Can be a selection of new games, or perhaps you picked up an older console with a whole raft of games included, like I did with my N64?
• There’s also the inevitable Battlefield 3 Beta discussion thread. Beware, we love a good whinge about things.
• Crazy_Del is rather melodramatically cutting off all ties with gaming. Well, he’s still going to play games an hour a day, but he’s clamping down on his gaming quite heavily it seems. Messages of support and empathy are welcome.
• Christmas is earlier every year, so they say, which means it’s time to organise the Second Annual Home Photo Meet. Memorably, this slightly freaked out Peter last year, and it’ll be a good opportunity to jump in and see what’s happened on Home if you’ve not been on for a while. Of course, this is all exceedingly early planning. We’re talking December, but mark it on your advent calendars. Good times are mandatory.
• Steven keeps pestering me about something or other. Nope can’t remember what he wanted me to link to at all… (I am, of course, winding him up. Don’t tell him that though!)

Will my reign of rubbish puns and awful plays with words be ended by Gaz’s return next week? Well I guess you’ll have to come along and find out won’t you?