Community Chronicle: 27/10/13

Well that release schedule is heating up a bit, isn’t it? Batman just a few days ago, with Assassin’s Creed, Battlefield, Call of Duty and countless others ready to drop. There’s a lot to be getting on with, and on top of that, the noise outside indicates that people have decided they already want to start playing with fireworks…

First off, we take a dive into the newest feature in the Chronicle, which was introduced last week, Hot Topics.

As before, I poke around TSA and have a look at some of the most discussed news stories and articles from the last week.

Call of Duty: Ghosts got a fair few headlines this week, as rumours and conjecture bounced around on NeoGAF that the Xbox One version would be running at 720p, whilst the PS4 has since been confirmed to run at a native 1080p. The Von Braun stepped in with some good points about such early releases and how things develop.

“Oh, silly internet, how quickly you forget COD and its screen resolutions this generation. COD (up to and including BLOPS) was running at 1040X600 on 360 and 960X540 on PS3, it was what you tech-heads call ‘sub-HD’. […] That old devil resolution didn’t worry you then, my little lovlies, did it?

“[…]BLOPS 2 had resolution going upto 880X720 on 360 and 864X720 on PS3 and by then series, for my good self, felt bloody stale. Putting things like attack dogs in 1080P at 60 FPS, does not a great game make…”

Game resolutions will continue to be a major talking point, I’m afraid, but TVB rightly points out that optimisations will get better over time, and that there’s a lot more to a game that can have a much bigger impact.

Elsewhere, Sony kicked off a new part of their PS4 marketing campaign, with the “Since ’95” advert. Cue a whole host of people reminiscing about their PlayStation experiences once more, with RudeAwakening sharing that it “Brought back so many good memories. I was 13 back in 1995 and that Christmas I got the PS1 and to this day love the start up noise for the PS1, I even have the noise as my message tone on my phone.”

However, these are things that go much deeper than just the games and consoles, and as Peter shared his own thoughts on how the PlayStation consoles and brand had affected his life, Tarbun84 also shared quite a poignant story.

“My best Playstation memory would have to be with my Dad (who died when I was 15 on the same year as this story) coming home with Actua Soccer and a second controller and saying, ‘Come on then, show me how this works.’ We played loads of footie together on it and I had to play intentionally poor to keep him from being thrashed most of the time. Great memories.”

I’ll be back next week with more snippets from the community.

After last week’s shuttering of this feature, I had Duffybox decide to send us a picture of his flat’s gaming lounge.

A 360 to one side, but a PS3 is clearly tucked away out of sight somewhere, with games and a controller in view to betray its presence. Simple and effective!

As I said last week, if people want to keep sending things in, I’ll be happy to post them, but this won’t be a regular feature any longer. 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]. Pretty please?

I think I missed this first one last week, by virtue of collecting all the achievements before he posted it, but Crazy_Del has taken the GTA V platinum! An incredible effort to get that, and do so in the fastest time on TSA. Blast71 also joins him, in some regard, having finished the main story, and getting on to some of the collectables.

Yoshi!! has been slowly working through Uncharted 1’s trophys to finish off a lengthy three year wait from his first to the platinum, and puts this alongside his Uncharted 3 trophy, which he also took this week.

However, it’s not trophies which dominate this week’s achievements section, as Youles finished a run through of Dishonored on High Chaos, leaving him on the home straight to the platinum. Tactical20 also says that he finished Dirt 3, which I’m assuming means the single player campaign? I’m really not sure!

KennyKazey had a play through of the first episode of The Wolf Among Us, something which I need to get around to myself at some point, while TSBonyman took to a second run of Beyond. He said that he’s trying to do the exact opposite of what he did the first time, but regrets experimenting by leaving the controller alone during the final QTE scene!

That little anecdote made me chuckle.

We’re nearly done, but you can head over to page two for the full trophy leaderboards. To finish off this page, we have the usual submission form for photos and accomplishments.