ScouserInExile

Yeah, this is my take on it as well. It's really entertaining throughout, has some great performances, it's funny, poignant... Just a great film. One of the best I've seen in a while.

I've never been a collector, per se, I've only ever bought and kept games that I either want to play or have some form of nostalgic attachment for me. Mostly notably I bought all the SNES games I used to own and regret selling. However, I'm now with @dumpster on this. I never used to like emulation on PC, for some reason. Still don't for console stuff, mostly. But having a Wii with a classic controller just feels right for 16 bit stuff. I have every SNES ROM there is, but have a policy of only copying across the games I actually want to play, to avoid that trap of spending forever scrolling through thousands of games and never actually playing any of them. So now I look at the physical copies of games and think "why am I keeping these?" There's games from the 16 bit era that I feel have never been bettered, so I keep coming back to them. Stuff like Zombies (Ate My Neighbors), Rock and Roll Racing, Speedball II, Streets of Rage (all of them), the Final Fight series and so on, that just didn't survive the transition to 3D.

Have to nominate: Jon Voigt as Mickey Donovan in Ray Donovan. I accept that he is supposed to be an arsehole, but he was such and utter arsehole that I stopped watching the series. He was just unbelievably irritating. The very definition of X-Pac Heat for me

Child acrors in films aimed at adults (took me a while to get a non paedo phrasing of that) can be problematic. I always hated Ed Furlong in T2. And Newt in Aliens. And the kid in Near Dark...

It's worked with every drive I've tried it with. The one I mostly use needs plugging in to both USB ports, but it works well, as long as I have it plugged in the right way round. If you don't need anything that big, the Toshiba Transmemory U202 pen drives work really well. 64gb are a tenner, 128gb are twenty quid, both on Prime.

Been a while since we've binged on a series. Have just watched the last four episodes back to back. Loved it. One of the best series I've seen in a while.

There's an episode where Ross is due to make a really important speech at an event that the other cunts are due to attend. All the others act like utter, utter pricks - Joey and Chandler argue over a seat, then dick around with each other's clothes; Monica mopes around on the phone with her ex; Phoebe arses about with her dress after she gets food on it and Rachael has a big strop when Ross asks her to hurry up so they aren't late. The whole episode is making Ross put to be mental because he gets annoyed at all this fuckery. That sums up the characters and the series as a whole to me. Yeah. I was going to nominate this little shit.

I was playing Mortal Kombat 9 on 360 last night. Playing the arcade style Tower on medium difficulty wasn't a challenge per se, but was a decent level of difficulty to start with. Then I reached the end boss, Shao Khan, and he is just ridiculously hard to beat. He spams unblockable attacks, most of which have him being invincible during the move and at least one of which can stun you repeatedly. His "super special" type move drains more than half your health in one go as well. Now, this is just no fun to play. It's an exercise in frustration and winning is often more luck than skill. After I rage quit and walked away, I started thinking about how pretty much every fighting game I've played uses the trope of a final boss that is much, much harder than the rest of the game. And often uses the "brings a gun to a knife fight" device to make them even harder. I seem to remember Tekken 5 being especially bad for this. And it's a trope that needs to fuck right off. Developers just need to stop thinking it's somehow fun. What other tropes / ubiquitous game design features would you like to see consigned to history? Escort missions immediately spring to mind...

If it makes you feel any better, I was 16 in April 1994, working in the games industry (do should have known the weighing down the cart thing was nonsense), and I tried it for a good half hour or so.

I had almost exactly that experience with one of the Baldur's Gate games. Started a game, talked to some NPCs for a bit, wandered in the direction I thought the game was directing me, got slaughtered by the first hostile I encountered. Never played it again.

Was considering using a 1tb drive that's just become free. Is the best bet to fill the USB drive with games, then copy them across as and when I want to play them? I tend to stick to one game at a time anyway.

Mortal Kombat XL As with all fighting games, you never really complete it. But I've now beaten the traditional tower with every character, to get all the ending videos, and got everything out of the Krypt. Working through the characters shows there's some amazing imbalance and shoes why you see the same characters over and over when playing online. I'm calling that done. Just in time for Mortal Kombat 11.

These Final Hours (2014) James is a troubled young man on a mission. He's desperate to join his girlfriend Vicky at the 'party to end all parties' and numb any feelings as the world comes to an end. On his journey however, James is greeted by a lawless and chaotic city, facing a cataclysmic event that will end life on the planet, and he discovers that getting to where he needs to be will not be easy. Along the way, he saves the life of a girl named Rose, frantically searching for her father. Out of options, James invites Rose to join him. Together they discover how they would truly like to spend their last moments on Earth in this world gone mad. Ha, the IMDB blurb actually says "in a world gone mad". Didn't Terry Pratchet take the piss out of that trope? I'm a sucker for a post apocalyptic world. I think that's why I like zombie films, it's the end of the world thing, not the horror thing. And this is a good one. When we're introduced to Jimmy, he's abandoning a girlfriend to die alone from a world killing asteroid strike that has already wiped out the Northern hemisphere so he can hook up with another girlfriend at an end of world party. It's made clear that he's an arsehole, essentially. He runs into trouble along the way and, against his judgement, rescues a young girl from a couple of paedophiles. The rest of the film is Jimmy's journey, literally and figuratively, to the end of the world. I really liked this. A lot. It's well shot, the music is great as is the acting - child actors can be hit and miss, but the girl who plays Rose is a great actress. The way it sets the scene and explores the differing reactions to impending death is remarkably effective and it's surprisingly poignant in places. A lot of places. What is it with Australians and running out of petrol, though? Just a great film all round, I thought. 5/5 for me

It's amazing how variable this can be. The pick up trucks episode was just a bit crap. Then they pull the Jim Clark feature out the bag. The rest of the episode was really good as well, it wasn't just that bit.

I've actually managed to get my wireless pad working now. I just need to work out the key maps for stuff like the C64. Are there guides anywhere?