Accident Prone

Bit of a weird'un, but can anyone recommend some online games that won't set off the IT department alarm bells at work? I'm back at the office now and can't just grab my VITA or fire up Worms Armageddon anymore, so this newfound boredom is killing me. Pre-pandemic, I used to play Geoguessr until they introduced the pay-to-play mechanic, and there was a cool version of Sim City lite that got dodgy when they started asking for your Google Drive account to save games.

So yeah, I'm bored and need games that I can come and go to without being hauled in for a meeting, please.

'Pretty Like Drugs' recently got added to Spotify and I couldn't be happier.

Symposium is one of those bands that I just never saw the appeal of, and I was in that target audience as well. I will be playing my Inme CD's today in nostalgic unison though.

21 minutes ago, Keith Houchen said:

Symposium were fucking awful, lads. One of those band that NME used to champion who were absolutely dire, like Terris, Ultrasound, and Campag Vellocet. Plus at least one of them was a right pro lifer. The aforementioned “A” were shocking too, mention them to anyone of a certain age from Cov and they’ll smile at the memory of a hero shooting an air rifle at them when the left the colly. 

Really glad someone had the balls to crash into the Symposium lovefest with the correct opinion. I had to re-listen to a few of their songs to make sure that it wasn't just my hazy memory, and it only confirmed that they were the pits.

That video has become a BritWres holy grail as it seems to have been deleted and scrubbed from every corner of the net. The thread on here about it was fantastic, as the early posts were all "yeah gud on ya, m8" in favour of Fludders before it derailed into pages and pages "This is actually hypocritical, bullying shit".

1 hour ago, Merzbow said:

I just bought one of these for 18 quid, anyone else use them for emulators? It looks to be a pretty decent pad and probably much better for 2D games than my Xbox controller.

Can't go wrong with an 8bitdo controller, especially the pro versions. Probably the best third-party controller when it comes to balancing quality with price. As Pat pointed out, it works great with a Pi set-up but also works real well on phones too. Where did you get that one, if you don't mind me asking? £18 is a good price!

I'm 'easier' on Ospreay than most of you here, but even I'm not looking for any AEW involvement from him. I think his heel schtick is awful and he's totally fucked off the art of subtle communication with his opponent. I watched him vs Mox this week and he's just shouting commands and spots at him. The two were having full-on visible conversations that totally took me out of the match, with no degree of trying to hide the fact. It's a real bad habit that he's picked up and he needs to drop it, along with character work and every single social media account.

Well KENTA has been teasing on Twitter that he wants Punk for the show. Ishii seems like a good fit for BCC scouting (and they've probably squeezed Suzuki for all he's worth for the time being) and it plays off their MOTY contender in 2019, and Darby feels like a good fit for White seeing as his best matches on US soil have been with smaller opponents (plus they're both goths, innit).

I'll admit that I'd love to see Mox vs Ishii II, and the quality of Darby vs Jay White could be great given they don't go too long with the HEAT. PUNK vs KENTA does nothing for me as I've not enjoyed KENTA's run at all since leaving NOAH, and Bucks and Aussie Open could have an excellent match with their eyes closed.

Unfortunately for much of the UKFF, unless Tony Khan is very convincing, that's what the first show will probably look like in my opinion, especially as it's New Japan's first show with AEW. Hell, even ROH and Rev Pro had to gain the company's trust before they were allowed the bigger stars and the bigger matches.

The formula for these irregular New Japan shows is pretty standard by now, as Louch alluded to. You'll get two or three big(ish) singles matches and the rest of the card is filled with multi-mans. Given that they have the NJPW-STRONG guys too, and they want to push the Bullet Club/Elite/Undisputed Elite angles with House Of Torture and The Empire, I can't imagine we'll get much of the real New Japan upper-card on the show. 

Considering all that, it might be something like Ishii vs Moxley, Punk vs KENTA, White vs Darby, a Bucks tag (Aussie Open, maybe?) and everything else is 6-mans and 8-mans.

16 hours ago, gmoney said:

People saying "Twitter, do your thing" when asking for advice or a recommendation on Twitter. I don't have an issue with asking for something, but specifically that phrase. 

Similarly on Reddit, people will ask questions in the comments that can be Google'd within seconds. I don't know why it gets on my tits so much.

Apologies for the double-post, but what's also had me back off an immediate £45 purchase is myself on pg.1 of that 2K19 thread, reminding myself why I stopped playing the games in the first place;

On 9/21/2018 at 11:19 AM, Accident Prone said:

I stopped buying the 2K games a few years back. As Ralphy pointed out, I would wait a couple of months for the CAWs to get created and for the price to drop. Then i'd nab it for about 20 quid and just fill it with my indy wank and Japan lads.

I think it was 2K14 when I stopped. The gameplay erred on awful but it was also the little things that cracked me; commentary was annoying. There were restrictions on what moves you could do where. The crowd reactions were unnatural and alien-like. The new mechanic where your wrestler would roll outside of the ring during multi-man matches was devastating. The online mode was unstable and took me ages to navigate through the menus. Then the whole business of people updating their CAWs with the new DLC meant I had to buy the DLC if I wanted to download CAWs. 

I've not bought one since. What's great about the advent of YouTube is that I can see what a game is like before putting the money down. It's all shockingly bad and no improvements are being made. Now they've introduced loot boxes? Get fucked.

Thanks 2018 AP!

Cheers! To be honest, that's pretty much convinced me to back off a little. I've not played a WWE game since I gave up out of sheer frustration in 2014/2015, and I just fancied another crack after all the 2022 hoopla. The DLC is essential as most of the best community created items use bits and pieces from it, so it's all or nothing. 

Haha, fair point! Well I welcome any reviews from you lot of course. All I'm going by right now is that the game scored higher on Metacritic than any WWE game since 2K14, and is the second highest ranked game on there, right below the new one. Am I being bamboozled and hoodwinked?

Got a bit of birthday cash and was eyeing up WWE 2K19 with all the trimmings for £45. I've heard really good things about it since I gave up on the series in 2015, and it's half the price of 2k22 (which I'm not utterly convinced by, especially at that price).

I've been trying to find out when the servers will be going down as it was meant to be in March, and I'd like to load up the game with all my favourite wanky non-WWE wrestlers before everything goes caput, otherwise it's not worth the purchase. Do 2K usually give a decent period of notice before pulling the plug on the community creations?

10 minutes ago, Chris B said:

Also, Regal is clearly enjoying this enormously, which just makes it all better. The only reference I ever want to this is along the lines of Regal on commentary, and the next time Danhausen is mentioned, audibly shuddering and saying that he's told the BCC to leave him alone until they understand more about his dark powers.

18 hours ago, Accident Prone said:

If we tune into Dynamite next week, and Regal still sells the leg whenever Danhousen walks past, then I'll be shitting on it from a great height, but right now it's on-par with Tony Khan battering Shawn Spears and HHH taking a dozen stunners.

No, Chris. Please do not will this into AEW canon. AEW is the only weekly wrestling fix that I get.

I can't stand Danhousen. His skits and comedy have real office break room "Look at this YouTube video, it's so funny!" energy. I'm desperately trying to find the humour in anything he does but there's nothing. It's not even 'wrestling funny'.

But even I can see that this is just the usual non-canon post-show jokes and japes that you usually get from AEW and WWE. It means nothing, it will amount to nothing, and it was there purely to send the crowd home happy. If we tune into Dynamite next week, and Regal still sells the leg whenever Danhousen walks past, then I'll be shitting on it from a great height, but right now it's on-par with Tony Khan battering Shawn Spears and HHH taking a dozen stunners.

1 hour ago, CAREBEAR LUVVA said:

The second Saints Row is really the only one you need. The first was one was an absolute mess and the third and fourth were far too goofy for their own good (especially 4, fucking hell), but SR2 got pretty much everything right. Now that I'm thinking about it, I might install it this afternoon and spend a few hours throwing innocent pedestrians into the sea. Great fun, that was.

I really loved Saints Row 2; it's the game which practically sold me on the 360 after Yahtzee gave it a tremendous review. The soundtrack also gelled with my music tastes at the time, which meant spending ages flinging shit at people to the sounds of MCR, Taking Back Sunday, As I Lay Dying, Agony Scene and The Used.

And The Mix radio station too, of course.

1 hour ago, Tommy! said:

I loved SR3 but on replaying it it was striking how repetitive it was, like a 1 hour game on a loop. 

That's probably why it's the SR game that I remember the least about. I can't remember anything that I hated about it, but then again I can't actually remember it. For the record, my Saints Row code is 2431.

The little one is getting into a regular, normal sleep pattern now (at least by his standards) meaning I can finally cram some gaming time into my evenings. After looking at all the wonderful and exciting games that I haven't played yet, and seeing more than enough of them on Game Pass, I went ahead and bought the Arkham Remastered Trilogy for £14.99 instead. This will be my third time playing Arkham Asylum and my second time playing the next two games, and it's just what the doctor ordered.

Arkham Asylum looks fantastic on the Xbox One, and still gives me the same thrills and chills. The controls are noticeably looser and clumsier, but I don't know if that's an error on the remake's part or if the game always felt that way. Also I'm playing through on hard after going the medium pace route the first two times, so I'm dying A LOT. I've found the best strategy is to solve every Riddle possible on the way and focus the upgrades on health and combo-attacks, then I'll grab the enhanced decipher upgrade as soon as it's available to unlock even more riddled-XP.

It's good to be reunited with the Batman again! I'm thinking I'll continue the late 00's/early 2010's reunion tour by revisiting the Saints Row games afterwards. New games? Who needs'em. Pish.

Coach TK's only crime is not logging off of Twitter enough.

Well, that and the dogs. Otherwise he's A-OK in my book.

For me, Rise Against peaked with 2004's 'Give It All', a staunchly pro-workforce, pro-working class, pro-leftist, pro-revolutionist song that was made for the staunchly anti-George Bush, anti-Republican 'ROCK AGAINST BUSH' compilation album.

After that they kind of petered out into more middle-of-the-road radio rock territory that I'm not too keen on. In many ways, Comeback Kid are the working man's Rise Against (and they're all the better for it);

Don't know why everyone is complaining about Adam Cole. He's over as fuck, and gets a massive reaction from even the most tired and worn-out Rampage crowd. You can have a go at him for looking weedy, his utterly dreadful Panama Sunrise, and his reliance on NXT am-dram tropes, but you can't blame AEW for going with an established and popular main eventer as a contender for the top title during a PPV gap. This idea that Cole is just some mid-carder with nothing to offer on an upper-card level is very silly.

I always justified the KO Punch as a finisher because, technically speaking, closed-fist punches are not allowed in pro wrestling. Therefore, having enough skill, accuracy and power to knock someone out with an open-fisted punch felt like a big enough deal for a finisher. Not that WWE ever played up to this feat though, mainly because they don't give a toss about those sorts of details so it meant most of the fanbase didn't appreciate the move for it's real creative and psychological merit.

For a while in the mid to late 00's, it felt like every new/re-packaged WWE wrestler had to choose from three finishing moves; swinging neckbreaker, flatliner or the Overdrive, and it immediately made them feel generic, inessential and not worth the fuss. Some would add a little leap, twist or flourish (see John Morrison and Shelton Benjamin) but it was still the official stamp of disinterest.

To flip the topic on it's arse a little, Tyler Reks thinking that he could just barge onto WWE Superstars and breakout a Burning Hammer variation as his finish was fucking hilarious. John "Number One Kobashi Fan" Cena telling him to cut it out under the guise of it being too similar to the FU (also an obvious no-no) was bound to happen. I don't usually side with Cena when it comes to his backstage rug-pulling, but this was well deserved.

Today was my first proper day back at the office since going full-time WFH during April 2020, and around noonish I went for a BANGING shit that I had been building up all morning. I like to drop the dime on company time and not during my break, so I always wait for a quiet period.

Well, it was MASSIVE, and MASSIVELY SATISFYING. It took a small forest of TP to clean away the debris and there was a mighty skid mark left on the bowl (but, importantly, no brush to clean it away).

I exited the stall, proud and light-footed, and right into the waiting gaze and folded, impatient arms of a female cleaner who had been waiting to clean the stall. We locked eyes and I gave a nervous "You alright?" as I quickly slunk away to the sink, washed and fucked off.

I miss working from home.