Nick R

The first of a three-part retrospective documentary series, Red Dwarf: The First Three Million Years, is on Dave tonight at 9pm.

I never played the original Saturn version of Daytona. Did it have a time attack mode without any CPU cars, and if so, were the framerate and pop-in improved? YouTube has plenty of videos of Saturn Daytona in arcade mode - but all the time attack videos I can find seem to be done on the Championship Circuit Edition.

Was your post prompted by today's photos of the Boris Johnson and Dominic Cummings puppets? https://m.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/spitting-image-boris-johnson-dominic-cummings-puppets_uk_5f2a7935c5b6e96a22ab8920

A while ago I wondered if any film had ever been released in two versions, as a conceptual project: one from all the best takes of each shot, as usual, and one from all the second choice takes. Obviously no mainstream movie would do it, but I wondered if it had ever been done as an art film project or something - an experiment in how a film is perceived, a bit like the Kuleshov effect comparisons but extended over a whole feature film. I asked about it here once - nearly ten years ago! You could take it further and release multiple versions: one from all the most energetic takes, one from all the most subdued ones, one from all the takes with fluffed lines and other mistakes (not a blooper reel, a full movie with the mistakes included)...

Switch being male in one reality and female in the other has been discussed by fans for a long time, but I think this is the first time one of the Wachowskis has directly confirmed it. Now if only one of them would confirm our deny one of the other longstanding pieces of unsourced received wisdom/IMDb trivia, that some of the film's sets were reused from Dark City... As for previous times when the film has been read as a trans allegory: Birth Movies Death published two pieces about that in the last few years: https://birthmoviesdeath.com/2017/04/10/the-matrix-and-dysphoria-blues https://birthmoviesdeath.com/2019/03/26/my-name-is-neo-transgender-self-discovery-in-the-matrix

Who's the Boss being resurrected? Shaft!

They've announced that this will be available to Disney+ subscribers in the US on 4th September... for an additional fee of $29.99:

From the Disney investors conference call: Edit: Not yet clear if that $30 price is for purchase or for rental. And their subscription numbers are doing pretty well...

Green Lantern: The Reynolds Cut:

Polygon is publishing a series of interviews with members of PSO's development team. They've done two so far. First was this one with Yuji Naka, conducted by email: https://www.polygon.com/interviews/2020/7/26/21332950/yuji-naka-sega-phantasy-star-online-20th-anniversary However the one I recommend reading first is their interview with director Takao Miyoshi, which is livelier and more interesting: https://www.polygon.com/interviews/2020/8/2/21348946/phantasy-star-online-director-diablo-cut-features-christmas-nights I've always thought that Burning Rangers had a lot of similarities to PSO (even before they released that themed DLC mission for PSO ver.2) - but I didn't know that it was once envisioned as a network co-op game!: Working with Yuji Naka: He also talks about the influence of Diablo ("I had heard that Dragon Quest was inspired by remaking Ultima with a Japanese audience in mind. So our concept was, “Let’s make a Diablo game that would appeal to the Japanese audience.”"), the role of Panzer Dragoon artist Satoshi Sakai, single- and multiplayer difficulty balancing, how MAGs originated as dragons that followed the player, and the Xbox and GameCube versions. He also talks about making Christmas NiGHTS:

You have to do the gift process through Humble, not through Steam. On the Humble site when you've bought the bundle, it gives you a long list of each individual game. Click the option next to Psychonauts to convert it into a gift link to share. I'm not sure what happens if you try to use the redeem code in Steam for a game you already own. Also, I didn't check this, but I assume that if you click the link to download the standalone DRM-free version of the game, it'll also stop you gifting the code.

Spider-Man will be a playable character in "early 2021", exclusive to the PlayStation version:

It's not a reboot. They've said that the demo level is from some way into Infinite's campaign. It sounds like the "losing the war" storyline are events that'll be told in the game's earlier levels (unless it's something that happens in 5 or the Halo Wars games, which I've never played). https://www.halowaypoint.com/en-us/news/infinite-inquiries

Are there currently any PC games that list an SSD as a minimum system requirement? The only time I can remember seeing HDD speed listed as a requirement for playing a game was back in 2003, when Enter the Matrix specified that you needed a 7200 RPM drive to play it!