One thing that I discovered this week is that paving slabs can sometimes act as places for puddles to live under. I found this while it was raining quite heavily a couple of nights ago, when I was suddenly assaulted by water from both above and below.
My feet got wet, but let’s not dwell on that too long.
One of the major topics that we’ve brought up this week is with regard to the DualShock 4 and if the analogue sticks are made of durable enough materials.
The votes to the poll we’re holding are still coming in, and I’d like to ask that as many of you vote as possible and share your own experiences, please.
AddictedAndy did just that, offering some simple advice in the process as he said, “They start to wear after a week! One of mine has completely come off and Sony said I could send the one from the PS4’s box back to them.”
If your analogue sticks are wearing to an unacceptable degree, then you too should get in touch with Sony for a replacement under warranty.
SimCity’s launch last year was something of a debacle, with server overloads hampering players’ attempts to even just play the game, and many wondering if the game couldn’t have seen an offline mode. Maxis and EA denied the possibility at the time, but have now revealed that there will be an offline play patch in the coming months.
While Eldur said, “The whole Simcity saga was perhaps my favourite story of last year,” 3shirts had a more critical analysis to share:
This whole thing has been a total PR disaster. You can’t just lie to people like that, don’t you know how smart they are?
Within hours there were wireshark results all over the net showing how little data was actually being transferred and then there were hacks to play it offline. Now EA have basically admitted it was all BS.
It was good news for Game and the retail sector at the end of last year, as they reported an 83% increase overall and more than doubling their online sales. Naturally, some of this could be down to the new console launches, but it’s also partly because of a change in attitude, trying to get more competitive online pricing and offers to spur on sales.
Kamokazi-UK has more good things to say about them, citing the “lock-ins” that allowed people to sample next-gen consoles, and that “even though they don’t open till 9AM and I finish work before 8AM, if I’ve had a pre-order, the manager and staff are more than happy to open up and let me get my games!”
StonyK wasn’t quite as kind:
Game always makes me smile when I walk in there, so thank you Game.
Like when I bought Battlefield 4 for £50 from Argos next door and seeing them sell it for £60 made me smile, or when I bought AC4 digitally for £28 and you sold it for £55, which also made me smile.
I think we’ll file that one as a kind of schadenfreude. How have you found Game’s pricing of late?
Well, it’s been a very busy week of playing games, not least because many of your have gone back to Resogun for the competition.
We’ll start off with bunimomike, who doesn’t make too regular an appearance in this article, but has spent his week playing a heavily modified version of Don’t Starve on PC. Admittedly this makes it quite a bit easier, but he’s reached the end game, managing to open a portal to let him leave the world. He’s clearly enjoyed his time with this one.
Moonpie also took to play a little bit of Don’t Starve, as he took a break from Madden 25 Superbowl runs. He then spent time with Battlefield 4, but his main accomplishment this week was to finish the Racer side of Need for Speed: Rivals.
The Xbox One got in on the action, as eldave0 finished off Dead Rising 3 before jumping into a co-op run on Nightmare and also ran through the short but enjoyable Ryse.
Elsewhere, R1MJAW then finished his play through of Wind Waker HD on Wii U while mrfodder polished off the Killzone: Shadow Fall campaign. Lyts1985 is also homing in on a completion, but with Assassin’s Creed 4, with just a couple of trophies left to go.
It’s all football, football and football for Youles and DanToo, though. The former got his FIFA 14 platinum on the PS4 while the latter brushed of weeks of painful sackings and misfortune, to finally win the Champions League.
Ron_mcphatty took us back a few years, as he kung fu fought his way to the Sleeping Dogs platinum, and blackredyellow joined him in the back catalogue, to finally grind his way to the Darksiders 2 platinum.
Finally, BullyBurton gave us some fresh shouts for the Battlefield 4 and Resogun platinum records on PS4, even if he did iniitially say he got them back in 2012!
We’re nearly done, but you can head over to page two for the full trophy leaderboards. To finish off this page, we have the usual submission form for photos and accomplishments.
If people want to keep sending photos in, I’ll be happy to post them, but gaming places is no longer a regular feature. If you fancy it, just use the submission form below, get in touch with me on Twitter at @teflon, or just send me an email out of the blue to [email protected].
TSBonyman
I read the sub-heading as “Anti-starvation twerks” – i’ve possibly been watching too many Playroom broadcasts.. :/
If only you had been wearing toe-shoes Stefan, you might have enjoyed that puddle more ;)
Stefan L
The toe shoes I own have a very thin and porous upper layer. If it’s raining, I wear foot mittens equivalents instead. (normal shoes)
I do want more element resistant toe shoes, though. Then I could have an absolute blast, jumping in puddles what have you. :)
gazzagb
“element resistant toe shoes” toe shoe wellies? Hmm, when does the next series on Dragons Den start?
Lyts1985
Cheers for the mention Tef :-) AC4 is now complete and put to bed… Thank god! Single player is nothing short of fantastic and I enjoyed every moment. But multiplayer… Urgh! Really didn’t enjoy grinding that at all :-( to be fair reaching level 55 wasn’t *too* bad but unlocking all the abilities and ranged weapons is a real pain what with not earning enough credits to buy them all by prestige 1, and very few decent players in the different modes.
Anyway, time to move on to GT6, Knack, and maybe a bit of Mario :-) I’m not enjoying Knack all that much to be honest – maybe starting on hard was a mistake but it’s feeling very repetitive… I will persevere though!
Wardy-77-
Sorry to hear your not enjoying Knack much chief.
McProley
Well done on AC4 mate. I too found Knack a complete bore fest! its just the same thing for every level: start small, collect rellics, get a little big bigger, clumsilly swing at either robots or goblin things, get a bit more bigger, reach the end of the level, lose all your relics, get small again, rinse and repeat.
Lyts1985
Spot on McP. A shame really as it has the potential to be so much better. I was thinking it’d be a nice diversion from the seriousness of COD, KZ, and AC4 but it’s anything but that. I’m finding it such a chore :-(
Cheers Wardy, me too, but not to worry :-) I kept telling myself it can’t be as bad as the reviews say, and I do love platformers… But hey ho, one mans crap is another mans treasure eh! Besides, I got it cheap off ebay so not too worried. I’ll certainly see it through to the end of my hard play through but I very much doubt I could bring myself to add it to my plat collection.
AddictedAndy
Thanks for the mention!
gazzagb
I’ve always found Game to be overpriced, normally I only go in there to browse, and then order it off Amazon. Only time I actually bought something from there was when they had the closing down sale and we’re flogging off all their pre-owned games.
ron_mcphatty
My feet also got wet, Converses don’t offer much in terms of water resistance. More upsettingly my car seats got wet, turns out I have a small hole under the back seats that my gave my 50 mile work commute in the pissing rain plenty of opportunity to force water in and soak the seat. It got so damp inside that last week I had to scrape the inside of the windscreen, proper first world problems!
Sleeping Dogs was excellent, marred only slightly by the weird driving physics (tough to live up to GTA these days) and the annoying hunt for Triad XP at the end.
McProley
Well done everyone on their acheivements!