Community Chronicle: 31/08/14

It’s strange how it already feels like Gamescom was such a long time ago, and yet I know that the last fortnight has simply flown by. Of course, the games industry never really stops moving, so we’ve been inundated with new trailers, more announcements, betas, previews, reviews and on and on.

There’s no rest for the wicked, eh?

Monday night was originally planned to feature PSN maintenance, and I’m sure you can all remember how annoyed people were at that, but it was preceded out of nowhere by a DDoS attack that took the entire system down for pretty much the entirety of Sunday and caused Sony to postpone their plans until later in the week.

Amidst the general annoyance at those behind it and the subsequent twists, like the flight the SOE president was on receiving a bomb threat, The Von Braun spoke at length on the matter, saying, “Sad to say that these sorts of attacks are now common place. I’ve seen forums closed for days because of them, plus lost count of number of companies since Sony/PSN hack occurred that have had database’s hacked into, customers had to change passwords etc. What I’d very much love to see the media do, when reporting on attacks like these, is simply report a service being down, possibly due to a DDoS attack, but not publically name the [bleepers] behind it, as by naming them the media is simply playing into their hands and giving them publicity.”

Do you agree with TVB on this point? It certainly seems to be a course of action worth considering, at least.

In a surprising turn of events, it was announced on Monday that Amazon had purchased Twitch for the sum of $970 million. This came after months of speculation and rumour that Google were in the picture to buy the service for a similar sum of money as well as a number of changes to their service which seemed to back an eventual buy out. However, with neither Amazon nor Google the most beloved company in the world, was this turn of events the lesser of two evils?

Kennykazey certainly seemed to think so, saying, “Would have preferred them to remain indie, but hopefully this won’t turn out quite as bad as I feared it would with Google, as this means there’s still some competition.” Noting that Google already have ample ability to handle streaming through Youtube and Google Hangouts, thus keeping Twitch and Youtube as competitors. It also seems that Twitch will remain a fairly autonomous part of Amazon’s empire.

While this seemed to be the generally held sentiment, Nocure-fd didn’t see any silver lining, as he remarked, “Glad to see they’re wisely spending the money they should have paid in taxes to the UK treasury.”

Nintendo rounded out their week with the announcement of the New 3DS and New 3DS XL, continuing their theme of upgrading portable hardware mid-cycle, as the new machines add a second analogue nub and extra buttons, a faster CPU, more RAM and head tracking technology for much improved 3D. However, their naming scheme threw people for six, especially considering how confusing to the general populace the distinction between the Nintendo DS and Nintendo 3DS was.

Gareth put it bluntly, that “Nintendo needs to fire whoever is naming their consoles,” with Tienpawa wittily replying that “Apple will hire him afterwards.” However, Eldur saw a lot of potential in the hardware changes, saying, “The second analogue stick (love the C-Button throwback to the N64 controller!) looks like it’ll need a decent hands on before I commit. If it’s well calibrated then it could be a work of genius.”

It’s just a pity that, with certain games set to be exclusive the the new hardware, this will come to divide the userbase. Dominic was so annoyed that he didn’t realise he was writing his letter/email in the comment box and not actually sending it to Nintendo.

And so, while the hardware is clearly a good step up over the existing 3DS and 3DS XL, it seems that Nintendo could be harming their loyal fanbase, just when they need them the most.

Watch Dogs seems to be the game of the week, as I have returned to it recently, as have a few others. Amphlett, seeing the recent patch news, is giving the drinking games another try, so that he can platinum the game and trade it in, but element666 has beaten him to the punch, grabbing the platinum in the last few days. I’m not sure if I’ll get that far; I’ll just be glad to finish the story!

This week also saw the release of The Walking Dead Season 2 Episode 5, which saw Youles and element666 both hopping in to finish off the story. Dividsmythe, however, is left out of the fun because the episode hasn’t made the jump to PS Vita in the EU just yet, despite popping up in the US. Pdannysan13 has also been enjoying some Telltale gaming, working his way through The Wolf Among Us, before honing in on the Hotline Miami platinum, which will be his very first when he manages to get it.

Plenty other are getting close, but aren’t quite there just yet, as gazzagb hit 99.2% single player completion in Red Dead Redemption and TSBonyman has reached the final frustrating section of Killzone Shadow Fall. Youles is also just a single mission away on both PS4 and PS Vita from getting 100% of the trophies for both platforms in CounterSpy, but, standing in contrast to the others, B_Cambo has managed to cross the line and grab the platinum for Iron Man 2.

Finally, a shout out for Crazy_Del, who is looking for a partner to work with and get a 5 win streak in Marvel vs. Capcom 3. Make sure to give him a shout if that sounds like something you’d like to do.

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