Community Chronicle: 27/09/15

Well then, that was on hell of a rugby match last night, wasn’t it? England held such a steady and consistent lead for so long, but Wales were able to stay just close enough that a handful of moments of excellence were able to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. Considering it was starting to look like they’d have to start picking people from the crowd to cover all of the injuries that were wracking up, it was a scarcely believable turn around…

Better luck next time, England.*

It was a rather quiet week for major news and talking points, but when Shuhei Yoshida took to the stage at EGX, there were always going to be some interesting questions asked of PlayStation’s figurehead. One of the big ones was whether or not we’d see a PlayStation Vita follow up, with Shu sadly saying that the climate simply isn’t right for one.

Avenger felt that this was far from the whole story:

What a bunch of douches they can be sometimes. I seem to remember them saying ‘Console gaming in the palm of your hands’, and if only they backed it and backed it properly it could have done well. I don’t remember mobile gaming ever really coming into the equation, except with PS Mobile, and ironically they ditched that. I wonder why they would ditch that service in a ‘mobile dominated’ market.

PSP did well in its time, as has 3DS now, so I can’t help thinking the old ‘mobile dominance’ argument is getting lazy and boring. Sony could make a new handheld that could dog’s bollocks of handheld gaming and it’ll still fail because barely anyone would trust Sony to maintain full support for it. PSP started to decline, but Sony kept with it and revived it enough to carry the console to the end of its life cycle. As soon as things looked bleak with Vita, they passed crummy comments like ‘PlayStation Pets is a AAA game’, and otherwise ignored it during the past few E3 conferences.

If only Sony just came out and admitted they didn’t do a good job of it, and they let down those faithful buyers of the console down. But PR, continuing to sell the console and all. Rant over.

Ron_mcphatty agreed with this sentiment, saying, “Avenger, I’m with you, Sony didn’t try hard enough and every time they make any comment about the Vita’s failure I feel so frustrated and need to rant too! I’m rubbish at good rants though so here’s a mini one: Needs more console ports, two big Sony games a year, support for micro sd, to be £99, appealing for indies to band together and release physical collections and to come in pink here in the west. There, fixed it.”

Flatspikes, meanwhile, felt that they might have aimed for the wrong audience:

I love Vita. However it seems pitching a console to a more mature audience (as opposed to kids) does hit smartphone users. Nintendo has done well not just due to its support but it’s much higher appeal to non smartphone owning kids.

Vita had an amazing launch line up but suffered from a high price, a poor memory card strategy and the launch of next Gen within a fairly small window. Sadly Big Screen experiences on the small screen aren’t really a thing of mass appeal…

The only other major talking point – aside from how god awful the Black Ops 3 PS4 looks – was with a 15 minute Rise of the Tomb Raider video which leaked online.

JR. wrote, “It isn’t Tomb Raider but it looks great. They’re still hindered by the limitations of the 360 so I’m not expecting anything groundbreaking. It will probably play exactly like the reboot which I really enjoyed.”

Youles was similarly optimistic – after pointing out an amusing bug – as he said, “I like the look of this, albeit it looks very samey (gameplay and visuals) to the previous game – although no bad thing, you’d think they might be able to improve the visuals somewhat.”

Not everyone was so generous though. MrYd said that “It all looks a bit meh,” while double-o-dave thought that “It looked like a mixture between Assassins Creed, Uncharted and a turd.” Admittedly, Dave was skimming through the video while at work, but his thoughts weren’t far from the general consensus.

TSBonyman probably summed it up best by saying that “The leaked footage doesn’t inspire me but I’m still looking forward to the actual tomb raiding.”

It was another rather slow week for achievements, but R1MJAW, Forrest and Pixel have kept pluggin away at Borderlands 2 and finished off the Tiny Tina DLC. R1M then turned his gaze to Mad Max, and cleared all the camps, scarecrows, snipers and plenty more from the map, as well as finishing the main story. He’s still a fair old distance from the platinum though, it seems.

Andrewww has also been knee deep in an open world game, and he’s far from the only one to still be playing The Witcher 3. He is, however, the only one to reach a major milestone, in finishing all of the contracts in the game so that he can move on to the main story.

Speaking of which, Eldave0 has finished off his first play through of Bloodborne and is now returning to it for a second go with a new character, which will hopefully tide him over to the release of the DLC later this year.

Finally, ron_mcphatty has been playing a game of “Box Tetris”, as he’s moved house to one with a proper kitchen and even a garden. Fancy!

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 trophy leaderboard. Meanwhile, I leave you with the usual submissions form below: