Topic: The Chit Chat Thread

@JohnnyShoulder I spent most of my uni years working at Littlewoods/Index in the warehouse. Things I learnt:

1) You can carry boxes when drunk
2) Never package toy lightsabers in a manner that allows staff to still play with them
3) Don't give same staff the ability to send back to stockist claiming they were broken in delivery
4) Microwaves hurt when they fall on you.

@nessisonett That had to be very late in the GB's lifecycle as they were way more expensive. Also Super Metroid for £20? Steal.

@Th3solution Thanks; yeah, those sales are a semi-welcome nightmare! They haven't just expanded my backlog, but they've also softened my "physical only" position this past generation, too. When we all start discussing the biggest impact of the PS4 era, I think those PSN sales are gonna be high on my list.

I've actually returned wanting to start the original Final Fantasy VII and try some Tomb Raider PC ports but, as you say, I'd have felt obligated to start Ghost of Tsushima right away. It can wait.

Sorry for making you worry. A thing happened. I trust you've been otherwise okay?

@RogerRoger No problem. Just glad to see you’re alright. I’ve been a bit ‘on again, off again’ recently just due to real life. I think COVID has things in a general state of perpetual instability for most of us. There’s no predicting one week to the next. I’ve strangely had days where I had more free time to game and then suddenly no free time. It’s hard to get in any sort of groove that way. And Ghost of Tsushima has suffered a bit because of it. I really like it so far, but I had to take a small break from it since I got busy with extraneous stuff.
I’m finding it tough to be in this reality of “welp, this is the new normal” as far the pandemic life style. I didn’t think it would affect me this much but after 5+ months of it, my brain is shredded.

@Arugula My sentiments exactly on Persona 5. I can’t explain why, since it’s objectively a more sophisticated version of the P4G base, but I’m not sure why it hasn’t grabbed me as tightly as that did and I haven’t been able to finish it.

@Th3solution I'm sorry to hear that social unpredictability is having a negative impact on you. As a creature of habit, I can fully sympathise with your situation, and understand how a lack of structure or routine can totally throw a person. You can't settle to enjoy anything because you're in constant fear of the phone ringing, or your door being knocked, and your spiking anxiety levels are kept held high as a result. What's that old Chinese curse? "May you live in interesting times." Yeah, 2020 should adopt that as its motto.

For better or worse, people seem determined to return to normal, so it will happen eventually. May take a little longer than we'd all expected (or hoped) but until then, I hope you can regain control of some structured, predictable free time, and that you'll be able to enjoy more Ghost of Tsushima soon. It's the weekend tomorrow; fingers tightly crossed that brings you some breathing room.

If things get really desperate, just start periodically coughing. It isn't perhaps the most noble thing to do, but it could get you isolated at home for fourteen days. Plenty of time to get your samurai on!

I got Conan Exiles and Conan on PS4 and PS3 today. Conan Exiles seems a little difficult to navigate but Conan on the PS3 is a great GoW clone.

Anyone watch the British Grand Prix? Crazy ending! Entertaining race.

good on leclerc to bring that ferrari to a podium place.

it's been a while.

@Arugula Love that little graphic they have now of the track with coloured dots for exactly where every driver is. Think I was mostly watching that on the final lap as Verstappen's purple dot got closer and closer. Another final lap overtake for Lando too (technically).

@Arugula Next weekends race with softer compounds should be good. I've not played an F1 game in ages but getting very tempted to give this years a go.

I didn't know where else to post this so thought I'd do it here. I don't know if anyone else is into Picross, particularly themed picross but Konami has a free (with ads, no in app purchases) picross game on the Google play app store (and I assume the iPhone equivalent).

It's called PixelPuzzle and has puzzles themed to their really old games (that I've never heard of) along with some bomberman, gradius, parodius and castlevania thrown in for good measure!

There seems to be no limit on the regular picross and four puzzle mid boss mega picross but the "boss" puzzles can only be played every 3 hours. These are just mega picross made up of quite a few smaller picross. All the puzzles are chosen at random and I think there is about 500 in total.

It's actually really good, I think it's the music that makes it awesome and I do love me a themed picross. I just wish Nintendo did more after their twilight Princess picross on 3ds!

Oh yeah and the ads are fairly unintrusive. There's a banner at the bottom of the screen and you have to close the occasional pop up for pes mobile but that's all. As usual the Google play account stuff can be skipped by pressing not now and clicking off the pop up when the app opens. Occasionally the app crashes too on my phone at least. But overall I do love the game!

Might post this on NL and PX too in order to spread the word!

@ralphdibny I do enjoy Picross, and have actually played Konami's PixelPuzzle before. For a completely free smartphone game, it's a fun time-waster for when I've got a few minutes to spare.

@crimsontadpoles Nice! I also used to play nonograms katana on the app store but the puzzles just got too big (and the boxes too small) for my fat fingers. Do you ever get the hanjie/super hanjie magazines from whsmiths? Some of those get really hard, like logic bendingly hard

@ralphdibny Yeah, I do have a Super Hanjie magazine somewhere. As the picross puzzles in there are huge (I think 50x60 is the biggest size in it), it naturally takes me a long time just to complete a single puzzle.

For puzzle magazines, I'm more into Beyond Sudoku at the moment, which is also at whsmiths. That's got a wide variety of numerical and logical puzzles, such as picross, kakuro, and even the occasional sudoku. The puzzles in there are very difficult though.

@crimsontadpoles super hanjie is ridiculous. I've found a few puzzles where the logic is working out what boxes won't be filled in when no boxes are filled in so you can then fill in some boxes if that makes sense. It's a really advanced hanjie technique which I had no idea about when I got hooked on the apps as none of them actually use this logic. Normally I just bolt through them when it's counting the boxes but super hanjie has kicked my ass a few times because of that really un-obvious technique.

That beyond sudoku sounds good but I only know how to play picross and sudoku and I'm not great at the latter. I normally have to be shown how to do them in person before I can get on my way, least that's how it was with hanjie before I got hooked on it!

I thought about subbing to the puzzler magazines but instead I just went on eBay and to Smith's and bought as many back issues as I could and I probably have enough to last me a few years now!

The recent thread about reselling games got me thinking — and this is a random question that I wasn’t sure where it belonged, so here into “chit-chat” it goes!

Are there any platforms where you can give a used digital copy to someone else?
I mean like, is that possible on steam or Xbox? I know I heard you can gift a purchased game voucher or code to someone on Steam and Xbox but I assumed that’s a new copy, not one already used. Could I buy digital a copy of.. say Control and play it for a few months, and then give it to a friend after I’ve completed it? I mean in a similar manner to just giving them a disc if I had it physically.

If such a thing exists or was implemented for PS5, I think that would be really interesting. I have a large digital library that has several games I will likely not play again, and if I had physical copies of these then I’d be inclined to give away those games that didn’t have much resale value. Transfer of ownership for something digital is a little trickier I realize but it seems plausible.

@Th3solution I use family sharing on Steam so that my brothers and I can share digital games between us. There are limitations since you can only play the other person’s library if they’re not in the middle of a game but it’s really useful.

@Th3solution @nessisonett Think you can family share on PS4 too. I've never done it, but i think a few people on here do.

Strangely can't find the 'TLOU2' thread, was it another Kratos one we haven't replaced? Anyway they are adding a permadeath mode in an update.

@JohnnyShoulder @nessisonett Family sharing is better than nothing, but I would like the ability to just relinquish my rights to a digital game and transfer it to someone else, even if they aren’t in my same family. Any likelihood of that? In the push toward digital gaming I really think the consumer may lose out on the ability to give away (or sell) their games. Fortunately PS5 has a disc drive (well, at least one SKU does) so that the transfer of ownership for physical games can be kept simple.

Anyways, I didn’t mean to bring up digital vs physical here. I think we have a thread for that. I was just wondering if other platforms were doing it since Steam (and to a lesser extent MS) tend to be ahead of the curve on some of these things.