Rsdio

Yeah, I know nothing about LoL really aside from how popular and well supported it is but you get the feeling this might be the game that finally forces the Japanese devs to sort out their netcode etc. ArcSys seem to really be nailing their character designs, the brief glimpse of that new character was great and both Axl and May look far more appealing to me than they used to. Obviously it's still anime as all hell so I can't quite put my finger on what the difference is (probably the collective effect of various smaller things) but they're definitely doing something right.

2005 1. Cache 2. The New World 3. The Proposition 2006 1. Inland Empire 2. Volver 3, Pan's Labyrinth 2007 1. There Will Be Blood 2. No Country for Old Men 3. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly 2008 1. Wendy and Lucy 2. Wall-E 3. Three Monkeys 2009 1. The White Ribbon 2. A Serious Man 3. Antichrist

Schulze stuff is a pain on vinyl as well, so many tracks get up towards 30 minutes (and some even go beyond that) and they end up crammed onto one side with practically no dynamics. Plus you have to crank your amp up which accentuates any surface noise or damage. If it wasn't for the fact that TD can sound incredible on vinyl if you get lucky I'd say that they're both artists who definitely suit digital better.

Stratosfear's a banger. Good luck getting clean copies of the old TD stuff on vinyl though, those synths sound fat as fuck on the original LPs but anything other than genuinely near mint and the experience can be pretty rough. I've never found good enough copies of Phaedra or Rubycon in 20 years of looking. I'd be surprised if they don't reissue them soon though and if they're done with as much care as the CD box they'll be just the ticket.

I was going to suggest TD and Schulze too. I think they also kind of tick the 'metal fan' box since they're pretty bombastic and often sound so huge. Fortunately the TD catalogue now sounds decent for the first time in the digital realm with the In Search of Hades box so checking that on Spotify or whatever would be a good port of call for the Virgin years. Ricochet might be a nice place to start within that as it has some rock instruments in the mix and the first half in particular is incredible.

Marvel's a weird one though, it almost felt doomed to fail no matter what since it came out at the absolute peak of 'Capcom sucks' online hysteria, plus the lack of X-Men and all that. The shite art style obviously didn't help but I think it would've died a fast death anyway. Which was unfortunate as it seemed to play well in my brief time messing about with it. It wasn't my intention to dismiss those who buy fighting games for a short-term fuck about by the way (I do that myself with enough of them), obviously in an ideal world you'd cater to everybody and do a great job of it but in reality these days it seems pretty tough to do that unless you sell NRS game numbers. Even Namco had to obviously cut corners on stage design/variety to get Tekken 7 out of the door. It's obviously all incredibly hypothetical but given the choice I think I'd rather them approach it as trying to absolutely nail a game for fans of the series then letting word of mouth do the rest rather than putting what's likely to be relatively meagre resources into trying to be all things to all people, which for me is often where things start to go wrong. Just do your own thing, do it really well and you'll find your niche (if you have one) in this modern streaming landscape but make an effort to appeal to the Tekken players for example and they're as likely as not to go 'Yeah, looks alright, but I've got Tekken and I haven't got time to learn something else.' I suppose I'm saying the series might be better suited to being a Guilty Gear type of thing. Those games don't have massive launches (not yet, anyway) but they seem to be steady sellers due to the loyal fanbase constantly bigging them up and they retain a consistent player base and tournament presence over periods of years despite being pretty complex and, in many ways, offputting to casual players. I'd be aiming for that sort of a solid foothold and then growing from there.

Yeah there's a happy medium for sure, I'm just not totally convinced VF would gain massively from putting a big focus on that above other things. People have been invested in Tekken and Street Fighter characters for so long now that I'm not sure VF could ever really compete on that front unless they pulled ten Leroy Smith standard reveals out of the bag but they could certainly jazz things up without totally losing the general style. I'd prefer to see it try and carve out a niche by playing to and enhancing its own strengths but maybe that's totally unrealistic. Like right now in Tekken, there's a fair bit of concern that in season 3 the combos and damage creep have got a bit out of control and too many characters can carry wall to wall, doing 100 damage off a launcher. Some characters have also had their weaknesses buffed to the point of losing aspects of what made them unique. If VF was around at the moment I think there'd be more than a few Tekken players willing to try it on gameplay alone.

Maybe I'm in the minority but VF's character designs and general vibe were some of my favourite things about it. I suppose Goh and Vanessa were probably put in to try and attract a different audience but for the most part it was a nice counterpoint to most other fighting games being largely comprised of tropeyness and edgelords. I think if they nailed the gameplay and online as well as supporting the competitive scene it'd do well as a slow burn in this day and age of esports. It feels like Tekken going from strength to strength is more because people see it on streams and think it looks fun and satisfying to learn, rather than them coming in a couple of years late desperate to see the end of the Mishima saga or because they really, really want to play as Lucky Chloe. I think, for the most part, those who buy fighting games primarily for characters/story buy the game week one then drop it once they're done with the single player. I'm not sure VF, of all series, would gain much from putting loads of resources into chasing that audience. I'd be down for them nicking Tekken's slo-mo though, that's something which could add a lot of hype without changing the aesthetic.

We.. We won a game of football? This feels new and frightening.

I recently began a new game on this, having done everything in the main game barring Nameless King on release. I intended to go back and do him when the DLC came out but felt rusty by the time it was all out so I ended up doing Ariendel up to the boss and basically nothing of The Ringed City. Since I've solo'd everything else in Souls and Bloodborne at least once it needed to be done! My default in Souls was always just two-handing the biggest sword I could get but going through them all again recently I've been messing around with other things and here it was a pyromancy build. Some of the spells were quite an eye-opener, like I had no idea rapport worked the way it does on so many enemies! I used it for a laugh a few times then had to stop because it just felt wrong. Fun, but wrong. Maybe I'll abuse some of the dafter stuff on a future run one day. Mostly I ended up using the Onyx Blade, Witch's Locks, Pyromancer's Parting Flame and, towards the end, Demon's Scar. Nameless King actually only took a few tries this time around, being able to lob a dark fireball at the dragon really helped as a lot of the issues I initially had with that were with the camera in the first phase before you could even get to the point of trying to learn the second. I very much enjoyed wearing his lovely hair for the rest of the game. As well as being out of practice when it came out, I think the nature of the Ariendel boss definitely contributed to my losing the motivation to mop everything up the first time around. Cinematically it's incredibly cool but I'm not a massive fan of the health bar creep that From have increasingly lapsed into. Slogging through two phases you can do with your eyes closed only to get absolutely destroyed by a boss who's playing Bloodborne while you're playing Souls isn't brilliant design to me. It's one of the few times where you feel like they're actively trolling you too since you get an item drop after that second phase just to make you think you're all done. I think the third phase is hard enough that it would've been fine separated from the first two. The Ringed City doesn't fuck about, eh? Those angels at the start.. The fat harald lads on the staircase of doom.. I think it's the first area in these games I haven't methodically cleared of every enemy I can find. Maybe it didn't help that pyro is apparently quite a bad build for this DLC but a lot of it felt like it was designed more for YOLO to me. That lightning knight fucker in the swamp was rough but at least you can fight him one on one easily enough. Demon Prince was a great fight. Bit of a random element to the first bit but it's nice in that you tend to know very quickly after getting down there whether you'll get to the Prince without burning through too much estus. Great difficulty curve on it: each phase feels impossible when you first get to it then there's a steady progession from there as you get closer and closer. Midir was an interesting one as I seemed to have about the worst possible build for it - my best weapons were doing like 50 damage per hit to an apparent health pool of 16000 . Made something (marginally) better but mostly had the pestilent mist strategy to thank for beating him, I definitely wouldn't have thought of that on my own since that's one of those spells you just immediately write off after reading the description. At least I hit him in the face a few times in the process. Gael I got to the last phase first time but he took me a good few tries after that, mainly due to his relentlessness when he gets to that point. Really hard to time your chugs. Most of my weapons were a bit crap again so I ended up just two-handing the demon's scar. Super cool boss as far as the lore and arena go. After all the muscle gains made from the DLC I ended up comfortably doing Soul of Cinder first time, I'm sure I found that on the tougher side first time around! Such a great game and the sheer amount of cool looking weapons makes it really tempting to just start again. Time for a break from Souls though.

Did this Yu Suzuki quote get posted on here anywhere? Struggling to decide which of those I'd prefer but I'd be fucking beaming either way. Fighting games seem to be doing a hell of a lot better than arcade racers lately so I guess that might make VF the more likely possibility.

The Supreme Court can do the full Daigo parry.

Discogs, basically. I'm not sure what exactly you're asking with the second part of your post but it's likely a massive can of worms with no short answer unfortunately. If you want the best possible versions of things at whatever price you're wanting to pay it can involve an awful lot of research at times: checking Discogs, the Steve Hoffman forums, miscellaneous Googling etc. You do develop a bit of an instinct for things over time but I've been buying records since my teens and I'll still drop bollocks every now and again.

Well, whoever would've thought that trying to sit back for the entire second half would work out like that? Town are currently on course for 5.75 points, if we can push it to 6 the season will probably go down as a success.

I've heard 84 It's a pretty boring list but that doesn't mean there isn't loads of good stuff on it. It would've gone down a lot better if it wasn't for the comedy Winehouse placements, but that does seem so very Guardian.