Topic: The Chit Chat Thread

@graymamba
@GirlVersusGame
Really enjoyed Infamous 1 and 2 back in the day, loved the good/evil paths and the way the people changed their attitude depending on how you were playing. Generally felt like a game that was worth playing through twice which is quite rare (RPGs aside).
Fingers crossed for a remaster and a Resistance remaster, I streamed the latter when I upgraded to Premium a few months back. As I’ve said before Resistance would also be fantastic in VR, standing behind the shield, ducking below the pop up mines....it would work so well which can only mean that it won’t happen.

@CaptD yeah Sony really should’ve made a concerted effort to develop VR functionality for every classic first person game possible… particularly ones they own like Resistance and Killzone… and how they ever developed Astrobot as not being VR compatible is beyond me.

@GirlVersusGame Memory unlocked!!! For my sins, I was working in GameStop (weekends and holidays) to pay rent while I was at college. I was there for the launch of both main inFamous titles, and remember this!

Mad that Sony would do such advertising for such a small market, but I also recall that Ireland at one point had the second highest per capita ownership of gaming consoles. Only Japan was ahead.

Was long out of game retail when Horizon Zero Dawn released, but pretty sure they did one with a Stormbird perched on top of the GPO.

@Jimmer-jammer Hey dude. I'm sorry to hear you've been feeling a little rough recently, can't have been too good, but I'm glad to hear you're on the mend now. Hope you enjoy the rest of KCDII, playing Split Fiction with the kids and hope that Indy meets your action-adventure needs if you don't go the Clair Obscur route instead. Either way I'm sure it'll be an enjoyable playthrough for you!

@Jimmer-jammer I was quite intrigued by Virginia and have Alfred Hitchcock's - Vertigo downloaded but yet to play. Karma might be nice to play as well, thanks for the rec!
I think I lean more towards the Hitchcockian sort of game though, where, as far as I know, you get a little action thrown in as well, but I tend to be a little more narrow-minded than you in my gaming choices, though there obviously multiple genres where our paths converge.

@Jimmer-jammer I also thought, as I think you mentioned before on here, having at least one son, their handle on here, if they ever use the website in the future, could be: @Jimmer-jammer-junior 😂 Idk how you think they'd feel about that? Haha.

@GirlVersusGame Yeah it honestly wasn't the worst place in the world to work. And yes, there were definitely err, "issues" with my wages going back into the till! I worked for a year full-time before starting college, and remember waiting for the 80GB PS3 to launch before buying one. I bought five games for the thing the week before I even had the console! As you've noted elsewhere, I'm also into music (honestly even moreso than videogames), and there was a decently-sized across the road. So I'd get paid on a Thursday, maybe pick up a new game on Friday, go for a mooch in HMV when I finished that evening for the weekend, leave there with six or seven new records... then have to eat noodles for the next week lol. Happy times though, not entirely care-free, but when your main financial issue was "college and rent are covered, can I get away with buying those two Decide albums I don't have this week or wait until next", life was pretty good.

Shirts - yeah! We had GameStop, HMV, and Xtravision all within a two minute walk, most of the staff knew each other, and they'd all see different promo tees for customers, and we'd compare and contrast what we got (usually over a pint or two). At the staff level, we'd get the same stuff from the publishers. I had some cool ones - a really nice PlayStation Move one, Devil May Cry 4. I also had a reprehensible Turok tee (mainly because it had "ASK ME ABOUT TUROK" in massive letters on the back), and I recall covering the lunches on Modern Warfare 2 launch day - I was 9-1pm, then 5-7pm in college that day. Covered 1:30-4:30pm, landed back in college wearing a MW2 t-shirt I had to wear at work, and had two guys chase me up the corridor from the library for it...

We had a fairly relaxed policy about POS/merch. If a customer wanted a standee or poster we'd tell them if they call to the shop after the promo period ends (usually Friday) and before our recycling goes out (usually Tuesday) they could have it. And we'd have a few regulars who were big fans of particular series who we'd stick the stuff aside for anyways as they'd be almost guaranteed to look for it. So we'd try to get the stuff to people who'd like it rather than see it off with the bins. I'd say at least something was salvaged every week. Plus as a business it made sense as it generated a bit of good will (amazing that we - the minimum wage till donkeys - had to explain this to the "don't you know I have a business degree" area manager).

Makes sense for the promo work to focus on one place. Even if you live in the outer reaches of Donegal, you still know what Dublin looks like... though if you're a Dub head you don't necessarily know what the rest of the country looks like.

GameStop Ireland are sadly kaput. In fact, they closed up for good only three weeks before Argos Ireland (in June 2023). That was a dark day for Irish game retail, though the writing was clearly on the walls for GameStop for a good while before that (they really fluffed things over the pandemic). Most strikingly, when I was there, it was wall-to-wall videogames, with about 20% of the floorspace dedicated to DVDs/Blu-ray (as an aside, I was working there when HD-DVD was very briefly a thing, and remember landing into work one Monday morning to an email effectively saying "HD-DVD is dead, long live Blu-ray"). Before they closed, the majority of the shop was taken up with Funko Pops, then game merch, and a sad and miserable third place was the games themselves.

Funnily enough, GAME has come back to life, albeit in a not-so-great form via Sports Direct (as they're all the same parent company). It's basically two shelves and games are dumped on them. Sure, you can buy a console or controller as well, but the staff wouldn't have any specialist knowledge (outside of their own personal interest - I know GameStop used to make playing games a pretty important consideration when someone applied for a job). CEX is indeed something of a retro store now too. I bought a mint condition black label copy of the original WipEout there recently for all of €20 - was pretty happy about that. Their PlayStation and Switch stock is fairly robust too, but Xbox is understandably diminished.

Also remember the special promos with games! Think we gave a Bret Hart DVD out with a WWE game once. LA Confidential with LA Noire too. But even doing our own things in-store to generate a bit of buzz. I remember when Street Fighter 4 came out, I spent most of that Saturday playing people on the big TV behind the counter (as I was the only one in the shop who could play fighting games!). We definitely sold a few copies off the back of that, and it was just an all-round good buzz that sadly doesn't seem to exist on the high street these days.

Here's to the good old days of physical media, and everything that went with it.

@GirlVersusGame Xtravision was originally a VHS rental chain, and then pivoted to renting games (which was such a boon in the 1990s), to selling them as well. Which was also great as back when they closed at midnight, I'd occasionally be sauntering home from the pub with a new game in tow as well.

I'd imagine that's exactly what happened with the retro stuff. Had very similar in my early days of GameStop - was digging through our storage (not the stockroom, rather the literal stairhole of the ground floor, where we'd usually keep excess packaging, shipping totes, and bulky things like Guitar Hero) one day and I happened upon a box full of GameCube and original Xbox games. This was in 2008. They weren't on system, so we put them on as miscellaneous items, sold them 3 for 2 at a tenner a go. Sold them all within the space of three days.

That's pretty much word for word what happened with WipEout as well. I asked them how much the black label copy of it was (as it was in a display case with the spine out), and they said they only have the Platinum version for €20. I said there's a black label copy in their display... the lad fishes it out, sure enough their own barcode says it's a Platinum copy. Turns out the guy who took it in thought it was a Platinum copy due to the colour of the corner! I mean, fair mistake to make when the guy wasn't even alive when the game released, but probably should have gone off the colour of the spine and the fact that it doesn't say "Platinum" on the box anywhere. I was extra happy with it as not only is the box and manual mint, but the disc is too, and I bought it for the Red Book audio. It sits quite happily on my shelf beside the WipEout Futurism book.

Sure even GameStop were well wide of the mark with their pricing - back when Metroid Prime Trilogy was going for tidy three digit sums, GameStop were offering €€3.20 credit, and selling it for €6.50. Worst thing was some fella handed in a stack of Wii games to trade - including the trilogy - and took the credit. I asked him a few times "are you sure, you're getting very little". He just wanted them gone. I bought the game myself at close that day. After my staff discount, I paid all of €4.55 for it. I simultaneously felt delighted and a wee bit guilty.

Asian restaurants are like that alright - up a stairs where you barely know what you're walking into. The best Asian restaurant I was in in Cork was exactly that. And then you got upstairs and it opened out into a properly swanky set-up.

Haha, yes I've been there myself a few times (the Burren). Also had a few pints in the bar where they filmed the episode where Ted is a racist. And was on a bus passing the Craggy Island Parochial House - could feel it lurch as everyone hopped up for a proper gawk.

Growing up in 1980s Ireland, I cannot fully articulate just how on the nose Father Ted was. There was an air of almost disbelief that the Catholic church was being so roundly mocked. RTÉ (the national broadcaster) rejected it, so thank fudge Channel 4 swooped in to pick it up. I can just imagine the reaction the church had to the popularity of it.

I attended school with a nephew of the actress of Mrs. Doyle at the height of the show's first run. We used to wind him up by saying "did you see Father Ted last night? Mrs. Doyle is such a ride"... like we all thought it was cool as ***** that his aunt is in one of the best comedies ever seen on television, but it was a class full of teenaged boys ripping the ***** out of each other nonstop, so that one was almost too easy.

I'd imagine The Hardy Bucks will need subtitles for those countries! Heck, I lived in Cork myself for a bit and almost needed them.

@Jimmer-jammer .As a fellow 'Silent Hill Head' ,I thought you might be interested in this?

@Herculean 😂

@Th3solution How are you, my friend? Did you finish Outlaws yet? Playing anything else? I am planning to squeeze in a little Gangs of New York (Scorsese flick) in between reading and finishing Sekiro (hopefully, at the final boss currently). Then hope to move on to Nine Sols and then hopefully do a Sekiro Build in the Elden Ring DLC later.

Doing well! It’s impressive that you’ve made it to the final boss. Well done, sir. I’ll be looking forward to hearing how it all turns out. Also with Nine Sols and the ER DLC.

Be sure to post some impressions of Gangs of New York if you have any thoughts on it. Scorsese is one of those filmmakers who I always hear about and then realize that I’ve never really seen many of his movies. Goodfellas might be the only one. I tried to watch The Irishman but I grew bored of it halfway through and never even finished it. I’m starting to wonder if he’s overrated. 😅

As for Outlaws, I’ve been making steady progress, albeit slow. The game has become better the more I’ve played it. It’s not very good at explaining and tutorializing early mechanics and world set up. So there’s some aimless wandering and getting into trouble with the different factions in the world. If you don’t play it the way they intend, you’ll end up with very few allies and many enemies and that’s no fun. They’ve built a really nice representation of the SW Universe and so the game really shines when you can wander around it and explore some without constantly setting off alarms and getting manhunts sent after you if you wander into an area where you have a bad reputation. So I’ve finally got the intended approach down and am getting into each syndicate’s good graces. I’ve also been mainlining the game a little more, because it’s one of those games where all the side content tends to bog down the flow and detract from the more quality main quests.

@AgentCooper lol… good to know. So on-topic, apparently Sony upped the limit on the PlayStation wishlist recently. Trouble is, now that I’ve gone over whatever it was previously (50 I think 🤔) the new games that I’ve added don’t have a thumbnail or title. I have to actively click into each one to see what it actually is 😡.

@AgentCooper I haven’t actually mate. I’m thinking of actually taking my wishlist back to below 50 just so I can see them all again tbh.

@AgentCooper I’ll check it out 👍

@GirlVersusGame Taking a quick break, to focus on reading (The Manuscript Found in Saragossa, good book so far) and playing jazz guitar, at the final boss for the Shura ending now. Thanks for asking, I've almost got the first phase completely down, last time I played. How about you?

@GirlVersusGame I do mostly read fiction, specifcally in the form of Penguin Classics or Penguin Deluxe Classics, the latter of which you may be unaware of, but have nice covers and hand-cut pages, and can be quite pleasant to own, if you like the physical versions of books in today's primarily digital age.

How about you? What kind of books do you like to read?

@GirlVersusGame That's a shame. I've been pondering jumping back in, I find it to be a very relaxing "timewaster" when I need to clear my mind, but now I'm unsure. Maybe they'll fix with a patch?

@Cup you mean @khaylforrester87… yeah it’s been a minute 😏

@GirlVersusGame Seems like the game pass model can't pay for proper QA testing I have no idea how they've managed to sustain that one for so long, they must be haemorrhaging money. Oh well, they are hardly alone in putting out untested products, but, yeah, broken saves should be caught before release (at least if it's general problem, if there are specific scenarios in a given save that will cause a crash, that will be harder to catch. You can't have saves of every permutation of the game to test with, after all).
I'm in software development myself and I have had colleagues who hardly bothered to try to run the code before handing it over to QA, which makes it that much easier for QA to miss stuff. Personally I never hand off code that I haven't tested for every scenario I can reasonably come up with, which will cover a lot of bases. That leaves QA to use their time looking for more obscure problems and edge cases, typically leading to a more solid product. We never ship by date, though, so we have the luxury of doing QA for as long as it needs to meet our quality standards. Games usually have tight deadlines dictated by marketing and higher-ups and when corners need to be cut, QA is usually the first to go.