Community Chronicle: 07/09/14

All the eyes of F1 fans should be on Monza as this post goes live, as this could be a pivotal race for the championship fight between Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg. After that spat that they had a fortnight ago, Rosberg has potentially a commanding lead over Hamilton, and if comes out on top today, that will put some serious doubt in peoples’ minds as to whether Lewis can genuinely stage another comeback.

So fingers crossed for Lewis to win, and for the championship to go right down to the wire, eh?

It’s almost like this week’s hot topics were destined to be, you might say (or not, depending on how much you like puns), with Tuesday’s release of Destiny putting it front and centre.

Yesterday saw a double whammy, as Microsoft took matters into their own hands when they weren’t allowed to mention Destiny in the same breath as Xbox, setting up the definitely-not-an-advert destinyfragrance.com website. I quite enjoyed their witty little twist on proceedings, but couldn’t help but not the hypocrisy to it all, and comments generally leant in that direction too.

Double-o-dave stated that “the fact that Microsoft have done a similar deal several times with certain games but then retaliate like this when the shoe is on the other foot is really childish,” while hazelam said, “I could be more charitable about this ad, if they hadn’t just paid god knows how much for exclusivity for the new Tomb Raider.”

But others did find the funny side. Bunimomike thought it was a “Lovely sly ad,” and gave Microsoft “Top marks.” Starman also said it was “Nice to see some humour in this industry.”

Destiny also got headlines on Friday for announcing a cross-generational upgrade offer, intended to ease the blow of upgrading in the near future. Simply put, if you buy the game digitally for Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3, you get a free upgrade to the Xbox One or PlayStation 4 version respectively.

RudeAwakening noted that “Seeing as the PS4 games are ridiculously priced, this could be a good work around for getting the game cheaper.” In the UK, this is the case, with the PS3 version saving you £5, but colmshan pointed out that those on the mainland aren’t so lucky, saying, “It’s €69.99 for either version on my Irish version of the web store.”

Even with the offer, many are grabbing the game on disc, though. CR8ZYH0RSE was already cornered by the late announcement, saying, “Physical copy for me. Money got taken out this morning so it’s just a matter of waiting till Tuesday.”

Super5tar is nice and certain that “however much you paid for this and on whatever console, it will be worth every penny!”

It’s not long until we’ll all be able to find out.

It wouldn’t be a week if there wasn’t some talk or other about software updates to our latest games consoles, though, and Sony’s TGS press conference on Monday revealed a new little nugget of information about the upcoming firmware 2.0. This update is going to see the return of dynamic themes!

Quite enthusiastically, Youles proclaimed, “This will be a great update – themes and YouTube upload compatibility. Just need game folders now and I’ll be very happy!” Kjkg joined in to say, “I miss the themes from the PS3 so this is good news. Some of the dynamic ones released were nothing short of fantastic.”

Plenty of others joined in with rejoicing, but that desire for more core functionality is always present. Andrewww, for example, said, “Seems to me there is much more basic stuff still missing,” while rSp8 stated, “I’d much rather have custom game folders than themes. That long string of game icons isn’t a good aesthetic.”

Of course, we still don’t know when firmware 2.0 could show up, which got Lyts1985 in a little bit of a spin on Tuesday morning when he booted up his console.

Got rather excited this morning when my PS4 said it needed to be updated to go online… only to find it was just 1.76.

The waiting game continues…

Having announced his taking of the Lego The Hobbit platinum, DividSmythe capped off his comment by saying he’s also “been playing Minecraft on PS4 and Velocity 2X, just like everybody else.” It’s true, as a lot of the replies on What We Played this week have mention either or both of these games.

But people have found plenty of time to do other things as well, with R1MJAW taking the record for the platinum of Diablo 3 on PS4, helped ably by “Pixel_name” amongst others.  Element666 also seems to have a record, as he’s already polished off the inFamous First Light trophy list, and too his own platinum.

Forrest_01‘s dug back into his trophy list and got dibs on Need for Speed: Rivals on PS3 and Overlord 2 records, as well as supplanting an existing record for Dynasty Warriors 6 Empires on PS3. He’s also taking votes on what his upcoming 100th platinum trophy should be.

It’s not all about that particular tier of trophy though, as blast71 finished off the single player mode in Split/Second and JustTaylorNow rounded out The Walking Dead Season 2 on PS Vita. However, the lack of platinum trophy has put him off a third season, if it doesn’t come with one, and he’s struggling to get into the right mindset to play The Wolf Among Us, so it may just be that he’s fallen out of love with Telltale Games…

However, we finish off with a newcomer to the dark art of earning platinum trophies as pdannysan13, who we had a little progress report on last week, followed through on his ambitions and earnt a first platinum trophy with Hotline Miami. Well done!

A inferior race has been busily tapping your latest trophies into his tables, and you can head over to page 2 to view the latest 2014 leaderboards.

If people want to keep sending photos in, I will be happy to post them, but gaming places isn’t a regular feature. If you fancy it, just use the submission form below, get in touch with him on Twitter at @teflon, or just send an email to him using [email protected].