Community Chronicle: 10/08/14

By the time you read this, I’ll probably already be in Germany, ahead of this coming week of Gamescom. It’s going to be pretty crazy, starting with Call of Duty tomorrow, then the press conferences on Tuesday, followed by days of appointments and games all over the shop.

Oh, don’t worry. There will be partying, drinking and lots of sausage too.

We’ll start on a lighter, Gamescom themed note, with a teaser video released that points to a comeback for the Sierra brand in game publishing. Naturally, there were requests for sequels to old games like Space Quest, Metal Arms and the like, but ron_mcphatty’s suggestion was pretty out there:

Jim, how could you not suspect Half-Life 3?! Sierra published the first game and some of the expansions I think, that’s got to be a solid lead. My moneys on Half-Life :)

Of course, he realised his mistake and quickly stepped away from it, saying, “Oh, wait a minute. Activision… er, sorry, pretend I wasn’t here.” It gave double-o-dave the perfect opportunity to flex his comedic muscles, as he asked, “Anyone seen Ron lately? I’m getting worried about him.”

The filling to our sandwich of news this week comes as Twitch have made rapid changes to their streaming service. Justin.tv was shut down with little warning, changes to archived stream storage have been wrought and a Content ID-like system has been implemented. The reaction has been so bad that Twitch have already backtracked on certain points, apologised for the abruptness and are working hard to improve the system. However, the continuing rumours of a buyout from Youtube certainly coloured peoples’ opinions.

“Google continuing their proud tradition of ruining everything they buy then,” wrote Starman, while Gazzagb found and amusing point, that “the system has already muted one of Twitch’s own videos, and has also muted some of Valve’s Dota 2 International matches for having music belonging to Valve. It definitely doesn’t sound like it’s had the smoothest of launches!”

However, Mr Blighty raised a fair counterpoint to the need for a system in general”

Pretty reasonable stuff really. Did you really think Google would have opened themselves to to lawsuits by allowing copyrighted music on gaming footage?

It’s sad that the world doesn’t understand ownership of content and copyright, and just thinks everything should be free to copy.

The problem, however is with how eager it is to block sound, and in 30 second blocks. Blarty wrote, “It is horribly flawed in that regard, even when music is licensed for use in the game and the music is being played correct within the game and thus within the terms of the license granted to the developers, it will basically flag it, as the automation will in no way tie into account the context under which the music is being played.

Rounding things out, Microsoft have pulled another point out over the PlayStation 4 with the reveal of a digital TV tuner for the Xbox One. Now, there was the PlayTV box for PS3 – “Welcome to 2007”, said Mr Blighty – but there’s no counterpart for the PS4, and this new USB dongle certainly plays into the Xbox One’s original purpose as the centre of media consumption life, especially in an EU market where satellite and cable television aren’t anywhere near as dominant.

However, it’s not perfect. Beeje13 noted, “If it had this at launch then it really would have been an all-in-one box. Still, a great piece of kit for the price, considering you’d be lucky to get a HD box for that price,” before asking, “Doesn’t mention if it can record? I understand that this would need RAM and HDD access which is probably not available. A pity.”

I replied that DVR support could be added via software, especially since the provision to pause TV is already to be built in and you can save gameplay videos at will, but that a greater issue would be the lack of aerial passthrough. Blarty pointed out, “It’s the same issue with passthrough for HDMI – not everyone wants to run their Sky box and their Xbox at the same time.”

Even with the limitations, £25 quid for a little dongle to add HD TV over the air to your Xbox One is a pretty sweet deal. Fingers crossed some clever clogs gets it working with Windows, too.

Unsurprisingly, the release of The Last of Us: Remastered has seen a ton of people jump in and play the game. Double-o-dave has quickly found his way through both the main game and the Left Behind DLC, while TSBonyman went back to the PS3 version of the game and finished his New Game + and Left Behind, but played with a DualShock 4 plugged in!

Unsurprisingly, it was Crazy_Del who was first to post that he’s got the platinum trophy, adding another record to his tally, but he and several others have become hooked on the multiplayer. Del, Youles, ThreeLions and HarmRehal have been hammering the game and apparently have gone over 20 matches without being beaten!

The recent Summer Sale has seen tactical20 embark on a playthrough of Assassin’s Creed Liberation HD, but found his journey to the platinum stalled by a few trophies that demand he take no damage while on a mission. Similarly, R1MJAW has finished Rogue Legacy twice through, but feels that the platinum trophy is quite a way off for him.

Element666 got a little more Wolfenstein in, to finish off the game’s storyline, while Steelhead polished off the last two acts of Puppeteer. Ron_mcphatty’s returned to the infographic world of Metrico to hunt for trophies (with the help of the internet).

In a battle for who can earn the oldest platinum, Lyts1985 wins out by finishing Heavy Rain the seven or eight times necessary to see all of the endings, but that’s not to knock blast71, who had to rely on the help of a random German player to get the final online trophies in Driver: San Fancisco! Oh, blast71 also finished off Brothers.

We’re nearly done, but you can head over to page two for the return of the Fastest Platinum boards, after last week’s hiatus. 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].