The last two days have been another smorgasbord of entertaining rugby, marking the midpoint of this year’s Six Nations championship. Quite astonishingly, the Grand Slam is off the cards for all the teams this year, but this weekend’s results leave England, France, Ireland and Wales all with a shout of winning on points difference, at least.
It’s all finely balanced for a fantastic conclusion!
The most shocking news of the week was Ken Levine announcing that Irrational Games would be wound down after they release the second part of the BioShock Infinite DLC. Stating a desire to pursue new ideas in gaming, he’s splintering off with a small team of 15, which will be a new studio at 2K. What happens to the Irrational name isn’t exactly clear, but what’s sure is that a lot of talented people are losing their jobs.
Echoing the thoughts of many, xdarkmagician said that “There might not be a great way to lay people off, but there are alternatives to laying people off. Lay offs should be a last resort to save a business, not a way to shift focus or change directions because someone is bored,” and that “Hopefully Take-Two immediately hires everybody back and starts a new studio to keep making BioShock games, as the series deserves better.”
Meanwhile, Mini-Lipscombe quipped, “Personally I find this move quite IRRATIONAL!”
This past week was also the point at which Sony decided to share more details on The Order: 1886. Some places fumbled their embargo time and leaked footage ahead of the planned release of a new trailer, but what was shown looked quite incredible in terms of graphics.
Some people were quite disappointed by the gameplay mechanics on show. Taylor Made was one of them:
QTEs and button bashing – I see what they took away from their God of War making days. In all fairness this could have been co-op! I hate when the computer AI is my partner shooting all over the place not helping me.
Jonny_Bolton opined that “This is the sort of game people who have been slating as pap if it was on the XBO,” and Phizzy kept things on topic as he noted the aspect ratio.
“21:9 with black bars?” he said. “I suppose that would make it look more cinematic. It also cuts down on how much the game has to render to the screen. Sneaky!”
Which brings us neatly to our running segment on resolutions and frame rates, where we discovered that Metal Gear Solid 5 is running at 720p on Xbox One, while Thief will be at 900p. Both will be 1080p on PS4.
We’ll keep it nice and light this week, I think, and turn to bunimomike, who said, “If Kojima has Eidos Montreal’s number, he should give them a ring and ask for some help with the XBO version of MGS.”
Finally, there are fresh rumours flying around about a virtual reality headset that Sony might be readying to compete with the Oculus Rift, to be revealed next month.
NotSmartEnough went against those who described VR as a waste of time:
Call me naive, but I’m keen on VR. I can’t be bothered to mess around with Oculus Rift, so a ‘works out of the box’ PS4 solution would suit me fine. Price it at sub-£250 and give me VR versions of Wipeout’s zone mode and updates of Colony Wars and G-Police, maybe see if they can get Elite: Dangerous to support it.
People make a big deal of the performance constraints and how PC is the only true path to VR, but it’s too soon to count Sony out yet. At least let them announce it before discounting it!
Fingers crossed that whatever Sony are working on will blow our proverbial socks off!
We’ll kick things off this week with Crazy_Del‘s continuing post-200 platinum collecting, where he has blitzed his way to yet another platinum trophy. This time he’s got his grubby mitts all over Tomb Raider Definitive Edition for his 203rd. Youles is also on his way to the latter, having grabbed the last of the Tomb Raider online trophies, as well as reaching level 100 on GTA 5’s online component.
R1MJAW has been keeping his own platinum collecting pace quite high, getting a little help from Forrest for Pure while also speeding his way through Gran Turismo 6’s trophy list in just 10 days!
Lyts1985 returns to a golden oldie, purloining the fairly easy platinum for the first Sly Cooper game. Taylor Made also grabbed what I consider to be a fairly straight froward platinum, with Tearaway, while the other end of the difficulty spectrum saw hornet1990 complete Spec Ops: The Line on FUBAR difficulty for his 5th platinum.
But we’ll round off this section with the obligatory mention of Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag. It’s element666 this week, as he’s churned his way through what he felt was a quite tiresome multiplayer for the platinum.
We’re nearly done, but you can head over to page two for the first refresh of the 2014 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].
Taylor Made
Believe it or not, tearaway wasnt a straight forward platinum for me, the between the pages was quite annoying & also finding all the paper bits ah don’t get me started Stefan aka Teflon about straight forward! :)
Harm Rehal
Wuh, I’m on the leaderboard?! Wasn’t expecting a Level 5 to be in the top 50! Well it’s definitely a pleasant surprise. :D
zb100
I finally got a 4th platinum for Far Cry 3 on Saturday morning. What a great game. Going back to it for the remaining trophies has actually given me a hankering to try the HD remake & grab Blood Dragon!
ron_mcphatty
Good work! I know exactly what you mean about wanting more, it’s almost a shame there weren’t a few more hours of bases and collectible for the FC3 platinum but I’m sure Blood Dragon will do a great job of scratching the itch.
zb100
Cheers Ron – think I’ll grab BD at weekend. I know you can reset the bases now but it isn’t really the same.
Stefan L
D’oh! Lost track of what leaderboard it was meant to be. I’ll update with the 2014 Leaderboard in place.
DividSmythe
I see the new PlayStation site has your friends and the ability to sort them into favourites. I should imagine that makes AIR’s job a bit easier to collate the charts. My main point is will this be coming to Ps4? As it is something quite needed and notifications to tell you when favourites come online. We just will have to wait and see.
freezebug2
So with the new leaderboard 2014 it actually pays to have as few trophies as possible therefore making it easier to get a higher percentage increase by just earning a few tophies…in the short term of course until their trophy tally builds. Strange, but should be interesting ;)
As an aside someone get a screengrab quickly and frame it, Del’s not at the top! :P
Avenger
lol didn’t expect to be at the top. Meh, makes me want to earn more trophies now.
tonycawley
Wasn’t aware trophy cards now automatically update. Just signed in to the linked site so that should be me sorted for the future, nice one!