Chindie

True Detective is absolutely spectacular. It stumbles a little right at the end but until then it's a beautiful, grim, intriguing watch with brilliant performances. Even it's framework is brilliant - 2 story lines a decade apart involving 2 cops who, right at the start of their partnership, came across a bizarre murder, and then are interviewed years later. If you haven't seen it, put it right to the top of your list. It's a short series as Xela said, but I couldn't tear myself away from it. Edit - It's testament to how good that first series is that the show is just about to start a second series, completely unrelated to the first, and even before an episode has aired everyone knows it won't hold a candle to the first.

Just on the idea that more guns means safer citizens, the FBI itself did some research into the state of firearm related crime and discovered, amongst some other interesting stats, that unarmed people are 3 times more successful at stopping someone with a firearm than armed individuals. And in most cases of an armed individual resolving the situation, they in most cases were armed security officers - i.e. trained people. The 'the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun' narrative is nonsense, perpetuated by those with an interest in having it be so, be that politically or just because they damn well love their guns.

GameSpot gave it a 7. Criticised the Batmobile and how much the game uses it, and how tired and predictable it becomes at the back third of the game. I've not read any spoilers but, as everyone's been saying all along... .

Reviews out today. Generally? It's another good Rocksteady Batman game. In news that will shock no one though, the Batmobile sections are bollocks.

It's impossible to argue that the number of guns in the US doesn't affect the number of gun related crimes - ultimately the less guns there are, the less chances that one will be used. Unfortunately, that is a dead end for this discussion. There are too many guns in the US, and gun culture is too engrained, and the gun lobby subsequently too powerful, for guns to be significantly reduced in number. You can't un-invent the bomb, as the saying goes. You have to tackle what is wrong with the US and it's relationship with firearms. You can try to stem the flow of guns to people that shouldn't have them - it's absurd that laws to prohibit sales to people are undermined by the ability to purchase firearms at gun shows without the hoops to jump through (famously utilised in part by the Columbine killers). But ultimately you need to make steps towards fighting the concerning attitude towards them that means day to day people die. Even if you do that, this doesn't make this kind of thing go away. You will always have the nutter with a rifle.

There are different 'schools' of witcher armour, Griffin, Bear, Cat etc. These are high ranking armour sets that you can upgrade to different levels and provide certain stat boosts (Griffin armour for example improves sign strength iirc). Finding these armour sets involves treasure hunts for the diagrams. I'm currently wearing enhanced griffin armour but the cat school probably suits my play style more so working on getting those on and off currently.

The US will never solve it's gun problem. The genie had been out of the bottle since it's foundation as a state and it's impossible to out it back in. What it therefore needs to do, and this is no easy answer either, is tackle why it's people seem quite so keen to blow each other away. In this particular case... Most likely maladjusted youth with identity issue latches onto false narrative to justify his existence with a crusade, gains identity to right thinking folk of cruel murderous word removed as a result.

Its been a bloody long time since I've read it but I'm very much looking forward to American Gods but with it clearly in my mind that it'll be very much an adaptation of the source. There are things in that book that no TV studio is going to broadcast. And the book is at times probably not ideally suited to a switch in medium, so the show will tinker things to develop into a more arresting experience for the viewer. It's not Gaiman's best book, IMO, though. His best is Good Omens . Which, when someone finally manages to film it, will inevitably ruin it.

This might be one of the best trailers for anything I've ever seen, game, movie, you name it. The use of Elegia is just... inspired. Please don't let me down Kojima.

Believe they're on record saying these are all at Gamescon. I've a growing interest in Scalebound, the more I hear the more I'm interested. This time last year I couldn't care less.

You can ignore the other 2 and jump straight to World. The other 2 aren't a patch on the first but are a laugh nonetheless so worth a watch if you're not burnt out on dinosaurs.

Does that make it more or less accurate to the movies? As stormtroopers famously couldn't hit the broad side of a barn with a blaster.

You could probably pick worse places to start. Although it's hard to say that with the Final Fantasy series. The main games (the numbered ones, we're upto 15) are all completely seperate. They don't share characters or worlds and the only things that carry over are some of the details (the chocobos, moogles, the enemies, and there always being someone called Cid) and the basics of the combat system. Beyond that, each is a new thing. They all add bits, minor things to the overall structure, but ultimately each is turn based combat building a team of 4 characters increasing their strength over hundreds of hours until you defeat the world threatening thing. 7 is the greatest hit of the series. It had the story, the characters, the setting, and perhaps most importantly it was released at the right time and to the right audience. I personally prefer 9 but I'm in a minority. You'd be jumping into the series at it's usually considered high point. Saying that, if all they do is update the game to modern standards, it'll be a bit of a culture shock, and they are big commitments. Part of the apparent decline in JRPGs has been the time investment required, back when these games first came out I was a kid and had all the time in the world to complete FF9 4 times. Now it'd take me months if I didn't play anything else.

Curved screens are a gimmick to show off an element on the new levels of LCD tech (that they can bend). Theres some talk that it's possible to have an immersive benefit but in the unlikely event thats true, it would need to be a huge screen and you'd need to sat in exactly the right spot. Go for a good quality screen over curve every time. The curve also has the practical problem of, if you are going to hang it on the wall, it'll look stupid. 3d is a coin toss. As said earlier theres no significant TV content for 3d. Its become the preserve of movies, and to a lesser extent games. It remains a gimmick, certainly, but it isn't as bad as it once was. Still has the same problems it's always had though - depending on the technology utilised it can effect picture quality, if the source does the effect badly it can make things hard to follow, and can be actively anti-immersive. When it works, it can be quite impressive. If you're a big movie fan and you like 3d, it's worth going for it. If not, pump the extra money saved into screen size or picture quality. 4k is an utter waste of time at the moment. There simply isn't any content as The_Rev says. BT are offering 4k sports this year, apparently, beyond that you start to run out of reasons to bother. By the time the technology is widespread your TV will be comparatively ancient. It also has a grater affect depending on how big the screen is and how far from you're sitting. If you set miles away from a 40inch screen, 4k or not you're not going to see the difference. If you sit 6 inches from something that could replace the walls in your house you'll enjoy the benefit - if you can find the content. In short - don't bother with curved screens, 3d is personal preference (theres a chance you'll just end up with a 3d set regardless), and 4k is a fools game for a the foreseeable unless you've money to burn.

Apologies, I only saw it last night. When you're talking about a franchise that is based around reviving dinosaurs from extinction to create a theme park, using pop culture science plausibility, it's hard to avoid being on the 'daft' scale. The first movie, 22 years ago, overcame that and made what many believe to be a modern masterpiece of the blockbuster action movie field. Groundbreaking effects, a tight storyline, good performances, it captured the imagination like little else, tapping directly into the inner child that still would quite like to slam a T Rex into a toy car. The series quickly got increasingly daft, even if there are moments that glimpse the heights of the first in both 2 and 3 (and I actually have a soft spot for 3, in all honesty) neither holds a candle to first, and ultimately meant the series was made extinct for 12 years. So it's hard not to be cynical of Jurassic World. A long time coming sequel to a franchise that hadn't covered itself in glory. Early rumours of the plot talking about hybrid genetically modified dinosaurs. Some underwhelming effects in the early trailers. A sneak peak for some reason picking a scene where 2 characters just talk to each other with bizarrely stilted dialogue and not one iota of charisma between them. With all that on my mind, going into the screen last night I was thinking 'If it's fun... I'll be happy. It's not going to be a masterpiece, it's not going to be near the first, just be fun'. And it is fun. The movie opens with a glimpse of the new exhibit at Jurassic World, just hatching. We cut to crashing T-Rex esque feet... that turn out to be a sparrows. 2 kids, a teenager and his younger, dino obsessed brother, are off to a weekend at Jurassic World. For next 40 minutes or so we are introduced to Jurassic World, the culmination of the dream of John Hammond in the first film, a modern theme park with petting zoos, rides, fast food restaurants... We meet Claire, the parks manager (and the young boys aunt), Owen, a former Marine who now acts as the keeper of the raptors who has developed a bond with them similar to a lion tamer, and a few others bit part players. Jurassic World has been a success, but is starting to realise that people grow bored of things quickly, something every theme park in the world knows - hence the need for a new rollercoaster every few years. For Jurassic World, a theme park that has the Seaworld style killer whale show replaced by a mosasaurus show, a crocodile like monster able to swallow a great white whole (it's better and badder than Jaws, geddit?!), that means something, bigger, scarier than a T-Rex. Enter genetic modification kicked a stage on from the first films frog DNA filling the gaps in dino's atomic makeup. The end result? The Indominus Rex, a creature with a name picked by committee, a corporate sponsorship deal in the wings, and immediately the meanest creature on the planet. Owen, the raptor tamer, is invited to check the safety of the creatures paddock, and soon chaos engulfs the park with 22,000 visitors inside... Jurassic World is an inherently silly movie. It's a film that asks you to believe a man could position himself as the alpha in a pack of raptors. A film that asks you to ignore the fact that creatures and characters alike seem to pick up the skills necessary to whatever the narrative needs on a whim. A film that says raptors really could be the future of military campaigns. There are whispers of plots that are thrown in for no reason. A woman manages to mount a rescue mission in a jungle, but never fails to be wearing her heels. It's a dumb movie with a plot you could scribble on a postage stamp and have room to spare. Terrible thing escalates to terrible things. That makes it one of those movies where you can spoil the entire plot and lose none of the film's attraction. You will know already if you fancy seeing it. Looking for depth, meaning, thoughtfulness? Save your money and save your time, this ain't the movie for you. The characters are thin enough to read through, at best archetypes pulled off the shelf, wound up and allowed to rattle through the expected motions. Bryce Dallas Howard is the cold female exec who may have a heart in there somewhere but has barriers up. Chris Pratt the man's man quick with a joke but serious and capable when needed. Vincent D'Onofrio the slimey guy with an agenda. And so on. The effects meander from quite impressive to pretty ropey, and seem to do this on a whim. Even some of the 'hero' shots of the dinosaurs occasionally look subpar to the standard we expect today. You look back at the practical effects from something like the third movie and can't help thinking that it looks better than some of the shots here. Equally theres shots that grab you - the mosasaur leaping from the water as part of the show in the films opening act, for instance. Some good cinematography helps this no end. So it's to the films credit that none of this matters. This stupid movie, with a tired plot a sentence long, filled with the usual Spielberg tropes (kids in danger, etc), dumb characters, dead end subplots that do nothing, characters you could read the plot sentence through, is fun enough that it doesn't matter. I cringed to the edge of pain when I saw that shot of Pratt's character riding along with the raptors. I shook my head when 'GM dinosaur' reared its head in the rumour mill. It felt like a tired franchise chasing a quick buck on nostalgia. And yet it works. The GM dinosaur feels 'legitimate' to the films rules - it feels like something a corporation chasing the dollar would do, and it calls back to Goldblums 'you haven't stopped to think if you should' speech from 1993. You buy the rules of the game Pratt has with the raptors. In the opening hour you buy everything in truth. That park feels real. The stupid gets ramped up as the film goes on, culminating with something that verges on the absurd (if you haven't guessed whats going to happen you're not paying attention). But it is so much fun. A lot of this, I think, is down to Pratt. He has a character made of wishes and tissue paper. He has a character that does nothing you've not seen a thousand action heroes do before now. But he does it so well you go with it. He has a personality that shines through the framework of the character and enlivens it. Bryce Dallas Howard does ok with her deadweight of a character as well. The film is dragged along on the back of this and works even when it starts to lose the foundation of that real world theme park feel of the opening hour. The Indominus Rex doesn't have the... charm... of the original dinosaurs and it comes to embody the problem the film has of giving abilities and skills to things whenever the plot needs it, but it works as a creature to threaten the movie and ends up in a number of nice set pieces. You almost instantly forget the itch of dislike that comes with the idea of an invented creature made up to scare the kids. It's still daft, but it works - and I actually enjoyed a little throwaway line that straight up states 'in all of these movies we've been basing things on the idea that the dinosaurs are hybrids, we just kicked it up a gear', which may as well have the character turn to the viewer and say 'understand, right? Now shut up your whinging'. The film is a fun ride in a way that only blockbusters can be. It's dumb, even for a blockbuster of recent years. But I keep coming back to the fact I enjoyed it so much. I'm convinced theres other problems with it - it seems to suggest some dinosaurs are really, really stupid while others are quite clever, but doesn't really explain why, for instance, and I'm sure there's plot holes - but I don't care. We get the obligatory nostalgia, the film even has some subtle digs at the other films in the franchise. It might be the most fun mass market blockbuster I've seen for a while. It's certainly stupid. Beyond stupid even. Stupid is in it's DNA. But theres more than a little fun in there too and it outweighs all the problems and all the concerns tenfold.

As if it wasn't clear already, that conference just confirmed the demise of the Wii U.

360 backwards compatibility has been confirmed, as expected, as a software emulator. Impressive for sure.

EA's conferences are always shit. The company relies on consistent franchises which don't change which means the conference is the same every year. Occasionally they have a single title to add a little interest bit at the end of the day there's always the EA Sports identikit half hour, NFS, the latest Battlefield rerun... Yawn.

Jurassic World has become the first film to break a $500m global opening weekend. It's in spitting distance of taking the US record as well. This year will end up being a record breaker for box office takings. Jurrasic World looks set to be top 5 for all time takings after this weekend, Fast and Furious has made silly money, Age of Ultron has done well, and we've still got major franchise sequels to come (Mission Impossible, Bond, Terminator) and obviously Star Wars at Christmas. We're approaching the point that billion dollar takes are a box office expectation.

I will say this against the game, the bugs and niggles are an ever increasing pile of shame against it. Even the free DLC is bugged. The Fools Gold DLC mission has a bug I've just come across where you can't speak to someone to progress the mission. Nothing I can do improves this, even a reload to earlier save. It's a glorious title but there's some really shoddy stuff in it.

If it's anything like the Legend of Korra game they did, I wouldn't get too excited. Confirmed as a Platinum joint. Whilst they have had some duff releases, they've had plenty of acclaimed games for their mechanics - Bayonetta, Metal Gear Rising etc etc. I'd lean towards this being decent. Looks spectacular too.

If Red Dead gets announced I'll declare this the best E3 ever instantly (unless it's an IAP riddled piece of nickel and dimed shit. Or a HD remake, although even that would be cause for celebration, if very unlikely). As you say though, isn't happening.

G1 Transformers brawler due to be revealed. Apparently called Transformers Devastation, there's some very very thin speculation it's a Platinum developed title, in which case it should play very well.

That was announced alongside Lego Jurassic World a while back wasn't it? Hyrule Warriors has been announced for 3DS, which I'd imagine must be N3DS only.

I've watched one episode of Sense8 and couldn't help but be struck by the feeling that it felt exactly like out was made by some film studies graduates. It felt like it was made for about a fiver, with some Am Dram guys drafted in to act around a few pros, and edited and filmed on stuff they got in Currys.