Video Games

oral history of the creation of tony hawk pro skater
https://www.theringer.com/2019/8/30/20838769/oral-history-tony-hawk-pro-skater-soundtrack-les-claypool-neversoft-activision

esports really is a bizarre scene

Yeah I'm significantly worse than I remember being at this game, but also I smashed through nearly the whole THPS1 in the first sitting, just some Epic Scores left to do. I remember it taking me absolutely ages previously.

I've 100% THPS1 and am going back to find the Alien plushies.
Finished 2 but need to clear up on that still.

Gone are my twitch reflex 10m+ combos, sadly

I'm struggling to get 50k combos at the moment but have only spent about 2 hours playing it so far.

Work to do.

Flip, grind, flip, grind, flip, manual, repeat.
Don't stay grinding, get those multipliers up!

I mean, i know how to; I'm just old and don't get enough time to play games anymore.

Confirmed £449 for the Xbox Series X - launching November 10th.

Seems like ridiculous value to me considering 12 Tflops, NVME SSD etc.

EA Play / EA Access also now part of Game Pass at the same price which is nuts.

Yeah, literally lol. Last one I played was American Wasteland on PS2 I think and I guess it was a very different game to this. Do miss the ability to get off deck but I guess that would make some of the challenges mindlessly easy.

Wow. Didn’t know that about EA Play. Mental.

Microsoft must be doing this as a loss leader, I can't see where they're planning on making profit from apart from games sales.

Not sure why that matters apart from that it's great for the consumer.

Microsoft are the most cash rich company on the planet right now so...

So.... They're not a charity, if it's not money, it must be something else...

Yeah I know I just find it odd

It's market share, surely?

They lost the last generation in straight console unit sales so they're pricing aggressively this gen. They're also offering service integrations with Xbox All Access to tie people into the infrastructure which makes sense.

£449 is bonkers. I'm pretty sure I paid more than that for my one X a couple of years back.

I'm interested to see if the pay monthly options come across from the US too, if you can get a console + live+ game pass for £30 a month that's a great deal.

Just to add I've seen they are now offering the pay monthly prices over here. Looks like such a good deal.

£28.99 a month for 24 months.

£20.99 a month for 24 months if you just want a Series S.

Only through Game / Smyths Toys though. They're bound to fuck it up.

29*24 = 696

Console is £449 and 24months of ultimate is £240 so basically the same price combined? Or am I missing something.

Nope - that's the point. It's an identical cost to pay monthly or buy the console outright.

You also own the console at the end of the 24 months...

They seem to be gradually bringing their gaming offering closer to Windows as well (game streaming, shared subscription, etc) and I'd guess at some tie in with MS365 accounts at some point (extra storage maybe).

I suspect they may be less worried about sharing with Sony than the impact of Google Stadium or whatever it's called taking off. If they can keep that relatively unpopular by offering a subscription service themselves then there's another benefit for MS.

Really tempted by a Series S, seems too good to be true. Dunno if I'll bother with Game Pass though, every time I stroll through the titles they're largely not particularly enticing

Nope - that's the point. It's an identical cost to pay monthly or buy the console outright.
You also own the console at the end of the 24 months...

This will get me upgrading sooner rather than much later, I'm still pretty happy with my Xbox one but with deals like that it kinda just makes it easy.

So I have a counter situation to buying a console and ditching PC. I am 99% going to buy a 3080 instead and continue gaming on PC at higher FPS/quality. I get that the 3080 is a lot more money, BUT the Xbox Game Pass for PC is such good value, and with Sony now saying they will release on PC as well, I'm not sure why I'd do a console

@sumo getting back into the swing of 50,000 point combos now. Never understood why a simple revert gives you a 2x multiplier 🤷🏻‍♂️