Community Chronicle: 15/03/15

I managed to sleep through several alarms this morning, and missed the first half of the F1 race this morning as a consequence, before dozing my way through the second half on the way to what seemed to be a relatively predictable race, if I can say that without spoiling things for people.

The best bit for me was when Arnie showed up with a microphone to do the interviews at the end. He might not know the ins and outs of the sport, but he did ask some insightful questions about training and concentration.

It was also quite amusing to see Lewis almost starstruck from meeting the action hero.

Alongside EGX Rezzed this past week, we also had the BAFTA awards for video games. This year saw a lot of indie talent highlighted in a series of quite surprising wins. Roll7 won Best Sports Game with OlliOlli, for example, while Far Cry 4 grabbed Best Music and, most surprising of all, Destiny was Best Game.

TURRICAN-808, summed up my overall sentiments, as they said, “It’s actually encouraging for the industry that annual gush isn’t being awarded for the sake of being awarded. It’s good that indies are getting attention for original work rather than the cut and paste drivel of COD & FIFA.”

However, Destiny winning Best Game led to some incredulity amongst the commenters. “Most disappointing game of the year gets awarded best game of the year,” said Lieutenant Fatman. “Whether you enjoy playing it or not, the story is quite frankly awful. Sounds like favours for favours to me, makes the BAFTAs look a complete joke.”

A few people jumped to its defence though, with Forrest_01 countering that it “Didn’t win ‘Best Story’ though did it? It won ‘Best Game’. For what it’s worth, it is a damn good game & the mechanics are spot on. It’s just a shame that it shipped without a story is all.”

What do you feel should have won Best Game?

The cat’s out of the bag, Respawn’s vince Zampella this week stated quite clearly that yes, Respawn are quite obviously working on a sequel to Titanfall, but that it’s also going to no longer be an Xbox exclusive game.

Starman put his perspective simply, stating, “Nice, was hoping this would be announced soon. As long as they just expand on the game and don’t add single player I’ll be happy.”

But his thoughts went against the grain to a certain degree. Foxhound_Solid said it “Got boring, fast,” and “Needs a solid campaign and more layers.” Similarly, Lieutenant Fatman popped up again to say, “I like mechs, but I want a decent single player game or I probably won’t bother with it.”

Oh, and of course there was the cynicism you might expect surrounding cloud processing and the first game’s platform exclusivity.

Finally, on a more… buoyant note, so to speak, it turned out that hidden within State of Decay’s assets were lots and lots and lots of penises. Hidden penises which only became visible once Undead Labs revisited the asssets for the Xbox One remaster of the game, thanks to the work of one particular contractor.

The Lone Steven snappily remarked that “Someone in QA cocked up.” Funkyellowmonkey chipped in with, “What a load of balls!” and TSBonyman lamented that “all that contractor’s work was in vein.”

Kennykazey meanwhile was more impressed by the contractor’s gumption, saying, “It’s actually a bit impressive that the contractor managed to pull this off without being noticed until now.”

And I really hope Kenny sees what he did there…

A rather quiet week in the achievements this time around, and it’s largely centred around games from people’s back catalogues.

Youles finished The Wolf Among Us on PS Vita in order to pick up his platinum trophy, as well as finishing Never Alone with his son. With a similar story-based theme, Carrot381 finished off the quite lovely Valiant Hearts.

A little less relaxing, Freezebug managed to save those last humans and beat those voxel-based aliens to finally bag the Resogun platinum, while Crazy_Del continued with his relentless trophy hunting with The Amazing Spider-Man 2 and Dust: An Elysian Tale.

R1MJAW‘s busied himself with finishing The Crew’s story and grabbing a few other trophies for his platinum, while he’s put his oar in for a record with The Golf Club’s platinum. But finally, Hornet1990 is quite a way away from a record with his latest, but he’s nabbed the platinum for Uncharted 3. Next up, Uncharted 2…

A inferior race is back this week with the latest update to the 2015 trophy leaderboard. Head over to page 2 to see what it’s all about and how you can be counted.

Aside from that, I leave you on this page with the usual submission form.