Community Round-Up: 18/01/14

This week just seemed to whiz by – well, for me at least.  There was loads of news this week too, it definitely looks like the industry is stuck into the swing of 2014 after the holiday break.

Anyway, let’s ignore the news and focus on TSA’s featured content for this week’s Community Round-Up!

Thanks to community member, Tony Cawley, this week saw the first Plus Point Challenge being announced. Taking the form of a grand leaderboard, this monthly championship will feature challenges based around the PS4’s Instant Game Collection offerings, with the overall winner receiving a 1-year subscription to PS+.

The first game is Resogun, so if you fancy winning yourself a £10 PSN voucher and getting your first points on the board, then get practising for that high score!

This is the busiest we’ve seen the Meets in a while, which is great to see!

Tonight sees Vandix hosting at meet at 8pm for Warframe, while Yogdog has a Killzone meet tomorrow at 7pm. Muskyy is also hosting a Battlefield meet at 7pm, if you’d rather have a more modern setting to your shooting. Finally, Monday night’s usual GT6 meet kicks off at 7pm, hosted by Teflon.

If you don’t see something that takes your fancy, then you should create your own meets, to rouse a ready rabble of gamers of your own.

The lone Preview this week is for Planetary Annihilation, which Teflon says “already has the foundations in place to be an outstanding evolution of this style of RTS”. The game is currently on sale under Early Access on Steam, if you want to get in on the action right now, but he says it’s important to remember that it’s still quite early days of development.

From the Reviews, Peter gave 5/10 to Max: The Curse of Brotherhood for Xbox One, and was joined on that score by Mario Party: Island Tour for 3DS, with Dom saying the game simply “doesn’t translate to a handheld title”.

There’s no points for guessing what NES Remix received either, in Dan’s 5/10 review, as he felt let down by some of the games included. Thankfully there’s a more positive note for Broken Age: Act 1, which received an 8/10 from Teflon, so clearly there’s nothing to worry about after that silly embargo business.

Jim wrote about The Room as part of Mobile Watch, before he talked about the best and worst bits of Tomb Raider in PlayBack. Blair then got busy blogging away, first talking about about the hilarious Stanley Parable, and then the power of story telling in Gone Home. Aran’s regular Matter of Perspective turned to look at the real world themes behind Killzone Shadow Fall.

Onto the Community articles now, where the Chronicle was crammed with trophies, achievements and hot topics such as Playstation Now, while Teflon also asks the community if their DS4 sticks are beginning to wear away. GTA V unsurprisingly brought in 15 ‘Buy It’ votes in its Verdict, as the bonkers Saints Row IV becomes the next WeView game for you to share your thoughts on.

Newsdesk may still be on holiday, but that didn’t stop the gang getting together for Episode 125 of the Podcast, or Greg bringing us What We Played #139.

The Forums haven’t been especially busy this week, but plenty of old threads have seen continuing discussion:

• Wick15 has set up a Clan for Call of Duty: Ghosts – it doesn’t matter which console or platform you’re on, you can still contribute XP to the clan!
• With the F1 pre-season starting in just a few weeks time, Camdaz asks if we can believe the rumours that we might see a Playstation branded McLaren car in 2014.
• And lastly, the What Are You Playing thread? has seen plenty of updates this week, why not post yours?

There we have it for another week. I’m hoping to get a fair amount of gaming in this weekend after being bogged down with coursework for the past couple of weeks, here’s hoping you all have a good weekend too!