Uncle Mike

I didn't. No Geography was released last week. I don't think it's an all-time classic album, but there's some great tracks on there for sure. No Geography is lovely and warm, so is The Universe Sent Me, Free Yourself is an old-school Chems banger, MAH would be at home on their earlier albums, and then Catch Me I'm Falling is a lovely quiet warm closer. Check it out!

We hit Crota's End and Kingsfall last night for a combo of nostalgia, and to take one of our D2 group through for the first time. They're still great! Crota was very brief indeed, we raced through it nearly as quickly as the old days. Kingsfall obviously takes a little longer (and the ships and dick wall are still hilarious) but the encounters are all still fun - even if a little too easy on normal when everyone's at 400 Light. I recommend everyone goes back and tries them.

Sorceror's House, probably. Short and easy. EDIT: Although I haven't read all his stuff by a long shot.

If there's a time to use BC as a selling point, I definitely agree it's at launch. It would likely have prevented some early adopters jumping from 360 to PS4 so easily. Whether it makes much difference, who knows.

It's definitely all to play for with the next-gen. MS have been doing a great job with their evolution of the Xbox brand as a more over-arching platform, so you can be confident that you'll buy an Xbox game and be able to play it on a variety of devices forever. That's a good sales pitch. You can expect them to learn the lesson from this gen, and produce a games-focused piece of hardware that has a good price/performance ratio. Sony haven't really had to learn any lessons this gen, and we know how that's turned out before. So they've arguably got a greater challenge in trying to maintain a challenger mentality - pushing and being ambitious is hard when you feel like you're in front. But I'd be reasonably confident that they don't PS3 again for a good long while, whilst the current team is in charge. On the games front, I think it's also more up in the air than it initially appears. Sony's internal (or semi-internal) studios have obviously knocked it out of the park this gen, but that's not been universally true - no-one's looking back at Killzone or The Order with much fondness - and represents something of a generational first in terms of all of them getting their ducks in a row. Previous Sony gens have been a lot more spotty in terms of in-house software quality. And there's a certain amount of saminess in that catalogue, too - Horizon Zero Dawn, God of War, Spider-man do all share some DNA. What do we know we're getting next-gen? Sequels to those. Does that run the risk of looking tired? Do they have other ideas? Time will tell. And then MS bought all those studios. We've seen from Sony that it can take a good while to get studios knocking out your big exclusive titles to the desired quality at the first crack of the whip, so what will they actually have for launch? MS also hasn't shown a lot of pedigree in understanding games itself outside of obvious box-ticking exercises, and might not know how to take enticing risks? Or maybe with the fire in their belly, the new glut of games developers and a better leadership, they can create a really compelling offering. I think it's all wide open. Which should be great for the customer.

3 minutes of Snoke.

Did they "build up a mystery" though? That's what I'm trying to ask. He's barely in the film. Does anyone even talk about him?

I'm not a behind the scenes guy, or a massive massive Star Wars fan. I know there's a lot of interview excerpts that suggest Abrams didn't give Johnson a huge outline of how the next movies should go (and I've seen suggestions that Johnson threw out what little he was given?) but do we know it wasn't always the plan for Snoke to be ultimately inconsequential? Like I said badly upthread, we've watched a powerful Sith turn a confused adolescent before. Isn't that backstory enough? We've watched it over 3 movies. The Sith plays to his ego, his frustrations, his sense of being held back and told what not to do. So I'm not much interested in watching that again, especially in flashback in the second movie of three. Where Snoke came from is perhaps a more interesting story, as Pob pointed out. But is TLJ the right place to do that? Is Luke all "where did you come from? We defeated all the Sith!!" and Snoke goes "I was hiding in the caves of Sithworld-6, gaining in power" and then there's a clip of Snoke sitting in the dark rubbing his hands? Maybe he came in on space-bus from a system further away? I guess I just don't care. We've had 6 movies that established what these guys are, how they work etc. Just kill him off and give me something new.

As has been mentioned, they've already got working emulators for PS1 and PS2, so they could. I don't think they've made any noises at all to suggest they're interested in any way. I'd quite like them to let me use the PS3 titles I bought digitally on a new console - stuff like Super Puzzle Fighter, or Outrun etc - but again, I just don't think they're bothered. I think we'll get PS4 BC and onwards from now on, and that's likely it.

I don't think TLJ was perfect. But I thought the decision they made on whose story the new trilogy should focus on was a correct one. Is the series about Rey and the old guard turning Ren back to the Light and defeating Snoke/The First Order general guy? I would argue we've seen that story already. Is it instead about a new type of conflict between Rey and Kylo, where neither of them are on a sure footing and neither of them understand where they're going to land? I think I would suggest this is more interesting turf for a new Star Wars story to plough, although I would readily grant you there are loads of issues with its execution to date. Throwing Snoke away was, to me, a legitimate decision. He was just plonked there, achieving nothing. Take him off the board, and put the interesting story up-front.

Being dropped into the middle of things is how Star Wars always was, isn't it? By design? This desire to have Snoke's rise to power explained, to watch Kylo grow up and get corrupted, isn't in TLJ's brief at all. That was in the past in the first frame of TFA.

Those all seem like criticisms of TFA, rather than TLJ, is I guess more what I was trying to get at. Snoke turns up in TFA for, what, 5 minutes tops? Sitting in a hologram chair, complaining that the other two aren't good enough. We get no idea at all how the First Order got re-established, or any of that. But everyone was fine with that!

How can you never have heard of him, ZOK? That makes no sense. I am not embarrassed to admit that I don't get the New Sun. It's really evocative of something, but I just lost grip of it all somewhere along the line. But I do have some stuff of his that's properly great.

Right, but that's all happened pre-TFA. What do you want, a movie of flashbacks about Kylo and Snoke? We've seen a Sith turn a confused adolescent before; it was boring.

An S Mini would, it seems to me, be quite likely to undo all the good work MS did in the thermal engineering of the Xbox. Be careful what you wish for.