BitterToad

I absolutely love The Car. I think it's really really funny that they made a fairly pretentious album about a Hotel in space and then followed it up with an album that's basically all about pretentiousness and that if anything is more slow and difficult and loungey than TBH&C. What a band, to come from an era of music where basically all of their contemporaries are touring the four songs that hit from their 2006 landfill indie album and just keep building their sound from album to album getting more adventurous and interesting is such a win. I think Body Paint, which takes a Humbug song and drags it through pretty much everything else they've done since, might be their best song ever.

Which is why they’re targeting younger people through their social channels. A bit of a shame if it means we don’t get more of the really good Rab Gamesmaster reboot but kind of makes sense given how little gaming stuff has worked on tv and how well it goes down on socials.

The first one is clearly the best solo movie in the MCU. It's actually about something and that something is threaded through the plot, the character motivations, everything. It is a thematically interesting film in the MCU. That's madness. It has a great villain who you can reason with but also see the downsides in and Andy Serkis absolutely chewing through scenery left right and centre having a great time. It looks fucking amazing too. I came out of it thinking it was fine mid tier fare but during a lockdown rewatch it clicked and it's the best. It's certainly the closest Disney have come to making a film that works on its own merits outside of... what... Guardians 1? Yeah the third act ends with a lot of quite poorly directed punching but... well... MCU. Obviously the franchise has since completely swan dived up its own arse and is now constantly pumping out shite after shite after shite but I trust Coogler to have done it again.

The idea of not immediately muting everyone the minute you install the game is madness to me. A bit of a shame to miss the fun feature where you hear a few seconds of an enemy dying saying "FUCKING BASTA-" but worth it for long term sanity.

I just want you to know you're not a bad person... it's just... oh no wait it is that. You're a bad person. You suck.

That’s... That’s a joke that is.

Really exciting stuff. From what I've read they've matched the storytelling of the reboot with the scale of the old series which is everything I wanted from a sequel to God of War. This will 100% be my Christmas break game and I cannot wait.

I think it looks absolutely incredible and you're all mad.

I heard the bloke behind us at the cottage go absolutely mad when someone called it “big club bias.” ”EVERTON ARE NOT A FUCKING BIG CLUB.” Worth the ticket price alone to be honest.

Ground War was amazing in the Beta. Properly Battlefieldy, a good squad could really roll from base to base and help out. In the final game it feels very snipey. I was getting taken out left right and centre on the maps I was playing this morning. Hopefully just teething issues and not a balancing issue.

The gun progression is mad right? I have to use other guns to unlock bits for the M4!? That seems completely insane and not fun?

So?!? It’s worse now.

They've ruined third person mode! In the Beta you ran around in third person, giving you more of a view of your surroundings and letting you check for bastards a lot easier and then when you hit aim it would go to ADS first person view. I assume because of feedback from arseholes everything appears to be in third person now. I have no idea why you'd do this. Before it was a really nice mix of tactics and great feeling COD and now everything's in third it's just underwhelming. When playing the Beta solo third person was all I played but now I doubt I'll go near it again. Luckily the maps I've played of the regular arena multi feel a lot bigger than those offered up by the beta so I'm having a pretty good time with that but yeah... a shame!

After loving 2019 and only really getting on with third person and Ground War on the MW2 Beta I loaded this up this morning and won my first Free For All. It was great! I had my headphones on and could really lock down a location and use people's footsteps and sprinting against them. I'm sure over the next few weeks the sprint at 1,000mph and constantly jump crowd will complain about using actual tactical play and that'll all be patched out but early signs are good!

For me this makes for a much more satisfying TV show overall though. It's obviously subjective but I much prefer watching one story that the writers both know the end of and want to finish than 15 that they don't. You also lose that thing where if there's one story you're not into (a man can't think of any that come to mind...) you're bored for a bit of every show, or even worse if one story doesn't have enough to be featured as much as the rest they just have to pad them out for a whole season. GoT's best asset was how big its world felt but we kind of already know how big everything is so it's nice to be able to settle on a few locations in HotD and just let it tell its story. And when you do see that map at the end with your Starks and your Lannisters etc all over it in a way the world feels big because you've not seen those places in this period yet. "Oh shit the Starks will have been having their own issues and conflicts miles away!" I don't know, I'm in a weird place with this show because I really really liked it and felt that GoT just kind of went in circles with occasional big moments after its excellent first season. I much prefer the focus of this story and using the time jumps to let the characters have all of their boring moments off screen than having to see every single walk from one place to another from a massive cast of characters for years.