Steve

I've been playing a racing game called Trail Out. It's a budget game created by a core dev team comprised of just 4 people. It doesn't have particularly high production values, but it reminds me of older arcade racers like Burnout and FlatOut. It's just silly mayhem a lot of the time, ramming other racers until their cars blow up, and using nitrous to fly past everyone into first place. The story and voice acting are bad in a good way; the game feels like a parody, even if that was not intentional. There's a bunch of stuff to unlock, various different types of races and events, including demolition derby, and overall you get a decent amount of content for your money, with more supposedly on the way. A large free update to the game is supposedly coming very soon that will add new modes, a new map with dynamic weather/time of day, new cars, and various other improvements. The main focus is on the single player campaign, but there's also other single player modes and local multiplayer for 2-4 people. The game has no online racing at all, which kinda sucks cos I think it would be a ton of fun to play with/against real players, but as far as I can tell, they have no plans to add it. It's been out on PC for a while, has just come to Xbox Series consoles (although unfortunately, not on Game Pass), and is supposedly coming to PS5 later this year. If you're looking for a highly polished experience, you want a sim racer, or you want to play online with friends, this won't be for you, but if you want to reminisce back to the days of fun arcade racers it's worth picking up IMO. Trailer: - This is the original trailer from 2022. They have improved the game's performance a fair bit since then, although it's still kinda janky at times, particularly when there's a ton of stuff going on.

I understand the vision, which is going beyond the smartphone and replacing it, but I can't see the tech getting there any time soon. MKBHD's review led to a wider conversation about the ethics of reviews, given that people with his level of influence could potentially kill a startup, but to me, as long as there's no conflicts of interest and the reviewer is behind honest, I have no problem with a small company getting their product stomped on if it sucks ass. That's what reviewers should do - not make excuses based on what a future version of the product might be like (and probably never will).

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Not DJ-related, but a pretty cool, albeit expensive record player. Shame you can't swap the cart and you can only get replacement styli from Miniot though.

He passed away yesterday, aged 57. No cause of death has been given. R.I.P.

I posted this in the thread earlier, but I'll post it again. This guy was a pro player in the Overwatch League, so he's certainly good at video games. Check out how hard he finds beating this boss (she appears about 2 minutes in): - There are definitely times when I like games to be challenging, but this is just too much for me.

It looks amazing, but I just know I would find it frustrating. I'm not into super-hard games where you have to repeat the same boss fight over and over.

I finished my first play through of The Quarry, and it was great! The latter part of it I streamed on Twitch so a friend of mine could watch and take part in the decision making, which was cool. One major criticism I have is that if you're someone who likes to mop up missing achievements after an initial play through, the way this game handles chapter replays fucking SUCKS. Once you complete the game, you unlock the ability to replay it starting at a particular chapter, but it wipes out all of your progress beyond the chapter you select, including the chapter replay ability! For example, if you go back to chapter 5 to collect some items you missed, the game basically forgets everything you did from chapter 5 onwards, including the ability to replay chapters, so you can't grab the missing items from chapter 5 then back out and jump into a different chapter; you have to play all the way through the entire game again! That aside, I loved this game. As long as you're more into the horror-based story than challenging game play, you will likely love it too.

I've been playing The Quarry, which is an interactive horror game. You get to play as 9 different characters who are trying to survive their last night at Hackett's Quarry summer camp. The decisions you make along the way affect the ending of the game, and there's a whopping 186 different endings. It's primarily a single player experience, but it can be played in local co-op where you take it in turns to play different characters, plus there is an online mode where 1 person plays the game, and up to 7 other people get to vote on what decisions are made, which could be pretty cool if you're streaming. It takes about 9 hours to do a single play through, but there is obviously a ton of replayability due to your decisions affecting what happens in the story. On Xbox Series X, the graphics are excellent, particularly the character models and facial animations. The writing is also really good and draws you in pretty quickly. I would say the only minor negatives are that sometimes the camera can be a bit quirky, plus it would be nice if there was a run button so you could get around a bit faster when you're exploring. The game is currently part of Game Pass on Xbox One/Series consoles, and it's also available on PS4, PS5 and PC. I highly recommend it if you like story-driven games, particularly if you're into horror.

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IIRC, the first one I played was Super ZX80 Invasion, which was a clone of Space Invaders for the ZX80. It was shite, due to the hardware being so weak; a 3MHz CPU with 1KB of RAM and no sound chip!

If you're an old bastard UKer like me, when you were a kid you might have had one of several available home computers, the most popular for a time being the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, due to its low price. For many kids, it became their first time playing games that weren't on a console such as the Atari 2600, but it also opened up the doors for anyone to make and publish their own games. At the time, most games were produced by a single programmer over the course of a few weeks/months. Jet Set Willy was created by a guy called Matthew Smith, who had made a couple of games previously, including the legendary Manic Miner, which was the first game on the Spectrum to have in-game music; something once deemed impossible due to the hardware limitations. I remember Jet Set Willy fondly, but it was STUPIDLY hard, as almost all games of that era were. It was an action/adventure platformer, but to me it was more about discovering new rooms that your mates hadn't discovered than actually finishing the game, cos the latter felt so out of reach. Here's a good video about it: -

@djdiggla Are you sure that's new? Anbernic bought one out about 3 years ago that looks like the Micro, but is a fair bit bigger: -

I remember when those fake viruses were popular, especially this one: -

I only had 56Kbps dial-up for quite a while, so it would take about 3 minutes per MB to download anything. I had to pay per-minute too, so it would be 3p per minute at peak times and 1p off-peak, on top of the phone line rental charges. The first time I got "broadband" it was 300Kbps, which got doubled to 600Kbps, which is about 450 times slower than what I have now, but at the time it was amazing. "PimpDawg", haha!