Nick R

I THOUGHT OUR FRIENDSHIP WAS REAL

Embarrassing Bodies.

Yes, it's possible to complete every level on what the fans call Dark LTK mode, with all difficulty sliders to maximum! Here's Control: it relies on a lot of luck to get enemies to pull out grenades at the right time (explosions are still instant kills on enemies, even with Enemy Health at 1000%), and it also relies on the fact that the Enemy Health slider also increases Natalya's HP. Plus in this case he's playing on the Japanese version, which unlike the US/EU versions retains the extra body armour pickups from the lower difficulties (not that that provides a huge amount of protection when Enemy Damage is 1000%). https://rankings.the-elite.net/goldeneye/ltk Silo Dark LTK is particularly unforgiving due to its time limit. It was the last level completed on Dark LTK (with 1 second to spare, in true Bond style!), and still only four people have ever done it. This is the current record - skip to the 4 minute mark for some nice aiming through the gap in an opening door, and to 7:10 where he attracts a huge crowd of guards before killing all of them at once with a blind grenade throw!

You're thinking of the very first level, catching up with Clara on horseback. I borrowed it from a friend, managed to beat that level once out of many attempts, then somehow fluked my way through the second level first try. Then on the third level I think the game crashed or stopped responding to the controller or something. The five-minute video below is not a speedrun but a full-game longplay!

I'd never heard of Cinema Paradiso until it was recommended in @gospvg's LoveFilm RIP thread in 2017. But even though I missed having a disc rental service last year, I didn't get round to signing up for it until after Christmas, when we had the discussions about DVD usage in the HMV and "Does anyone still use DVDs?" threads. I prefer having a disc rental service alongside a streaming one: wider range of titles; much better-quality subtitles; occasional bonus features; no worrying about whether the thing on your watchlist will vanish from the service without warning. So far the disc turnaround time does not seem as fast as LoveFilm, and the envelopes seem much flimsier.

Dreamcast version of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2. Completed it with all characters, almost all gaps (just missed a few from Skate Heaven), and had set cheat-less high scores in the 3-7 million point range on almost every level. Though I was proud of those scores, they were well below the sort of videos being posted to Planet Tony Hawk/Jed's Videos back in 2001!

Could be worse. You could have said "docu-moo-tary".

McQuarrie seemed to spend half of his six-hour appearance on last summer's Empire's Fallout spoiler special podcasts (and before that, half of his interview on the Rogue Nation episode) protesting that he wouldn't be coming back to do more, because he feels sorry for whoever has to try and come up with set-pieces that will top the ones they did last time. The last time there was a series that kept swapping directors but then stuck to the same man for films 5 to 8 (with 7 and 8 shot back to back), it was David Yates with the Harry Potter movies.

I think I once somehow came first on Monza, my most-played circuit, with most of the driving aids on. No idea how I managed it because I don't think I ever came anywhere close at any other time.

Shadow Dancer on the Master System - I found lots of 8-bit games hard, because of my age at the time, and because as @Mr Cochese said, games from that era had loads of bugs that added to the difficulty. But there weren't many I got stuck on as early as this one! I remember the first level being really easy, but then the first boss, who threw bouncing bombs towards you, was a brick wall. Guilty Gear X2 #Reload on PS2 - the first and only GG game I've played. Playing solo, I went through the early missions then got stuck on one of the early ones with restrictive damage criteria (IIRC normal attacks wouldn't hurt your opponent, I think you had to do a long combo in order to do any damage). Not really understanding the combat system, I gave up there. (Probably my fault for treating it as a tutorial mode instead of as a challenge mode.) Meanwhile, the Arcade mode was good fun - but that final boss, the red guitar witch character, was rock hard! I think I later heard that she's one of the most infamously hard final bosses in any fighting game, which makes me slightly less ashamed. Eternal Champions on the Mega Drive - Another fighting game. The default arcade/story/tournament mode against the CPU was challenging enough in the first fight, but by about the third round, it became just a brick wall. Made worse by the fact that losing would send you back to the previous fight (or was it back to the start?), with no continue option. Maybe I'd have better luck with it now, with a 6-button pad and knowing more about fighting game elements like frame advantage, and being more willing to find exploitable moves to cheese my way to victory. But I doubt I'll ever get to face the Eternal Champion. Ecco the Dolphin: Defender of the Future on Dreamcast - Some infamously obscure puzzles that wouldn't be out of place in a "use everything on everything" point and click adventure. Even with a guide to the puzzles, the navigation and movement were awkward. I got fairly far in with the help of a guide, but still nowhere near the end.

Huge blog post and Twitter thread collecting together links to concept artists' and animators' work: https://onanimation.com/2019/01/13/the-art-and-making-of-spider-man-into-the-spider-verse/ That post is not just concept art, but also behind the scenes on recording the music:

I finally got round to watching Valerian and the City of A Thousand Planets. Has its opening montage been suggested in this thread? It delivers the optimistic and inspirational Mass Effect/Star Trek vision of spaceflight and first contact, and (like Guardians of the Galaxy and The Martian) knows that adding David Bowie - even his most overplayed song - can improve any space montage. Unfortunately it's then followed by the film itself, which is largely about a 15-year-old boy (well, he looks that age) doing his best Keanu Reeves impression, while his sensible female partner rolls her eyes at his immaturity. (After watching it I read through the film's thread here, and saw that @MrPogo was also struck by the Keanu comparison!)

Yes. They used to have a "last chance" section for stuff that was going to be removed soon (dating back to when it used to be the Lovefilm app), but that's gone. Also, in the past I've received emails from them saying that certain series in my watchlist will soon be removed - but only for programmes I hadn't even started watching yet, never for anything I was halfway through. Most recently happened when I was three episodes into Agent Carter season 2.

oh god

* Sega makes a fan-pleasing announcement involving resurrecting an old IP in a promising way. (Ultimate pipe dream: hiring Sumo Digital to make OutRun 3.) Three cheers for good old Sega! *... then around the same time, before anyone can get too excited, Sega does something inexplicably stupid, because Sega gonna Sega.