gamingeek said:

What's worse is that we both then met up 20 mins later in the same lift of the hospital. Awkward. Guy wouldn't give insurance details, wanted to handle things off book. Grrrrrrrrr

Off the book could have been good. You might have gotten paid in blood diamonds or oil or slaves or something.

robio said:

Off the book could have been good. You might have gotten paid in blood diamonds or oil or slaves or something.

Fucking insurance company. Now my renewal is due in Jan and I wont be able to change insurers while the claim is ongoing, which means financial rapage for the new year. And they suggest I repair the car on my insurance paying the excess of $900 for a few small scratches/scuffing (which should cost alot less IMO), without getting any guarantee that they can pull the money back from the other guy - who hasn't given the name of his insurer and his licence plate isn't recognised in the UK - fake/foreign plates? They can't get the other insurer to guarantee to cover it, as they have to claim for their costs, so if it isn't fixed they can't claim from the other company in the first place.

So I have to pay $900 to repair something which should cost far less - simply because that is my excess. And then hope on a wing and a prayer that the insurer can claw it back from a foreign citizen/temporary resident - with an unrecognised number plate and no given insurer.

So the only way for this to work is for them to get an admission of liability from this guy first and then pray he has insurance. The guy may even have diplomatic immunity!

Empty Link amiibo box listed as 'defective invisible' amiibo

  This was bound to happen, but that doesn't make it any less funny.

Damn GG, I just want you to know that things will change, things will go your way if you hold on for one more day, things will go your way, hold on for one more day.

Earthbound is confirmed fake already.

gamingeek said:

So Nathan Drake went from a preppy hanging out at the Gap, to a heroin addict?

Dvader said:

His chest hair even blows in the wind, no joke that is directly from ND.

Sold.

Is Uncharted 4 the generational leap we were hoping for?

It becomes immediately apparent that this isn't quite the same Drake we saw at E3 2014. While his facial structure appears comparable, the quality of his hair is reduced significantly while lighting and shading lack the sense of realism presented in the teaser, and the detail of his bandolier and shirt also seems pared back. Still, the transition from the initial cut-scene into gameplay is seamless, suggesting that the Drake we see here is at least the same model used during gameplay. The hair and shirt fabric also blow in the breeze, which looks quite nice in action, so while the overall impact seems to fall a little short of the teaser, Drake is still very nicely detailed here

On the AA:

It's not quite as clean as the near-flawless E3 teaser trailer but the results appear more impressive than just about any other solution we've seen on the platform to date.

At this point Uncharted looks strong and visually solid, but it doesn't really feel like a massive leap.

Still, as beautiful as the game's foliage is, the rock formations do leave a bit to be desired at this point. While texture work is impressive, we note many hard geometric edges visible across the world, reminiscent of Naughty Dog's work on the original Uncharted. We suspect that this is a compromise between aesthetics and gameplay - the developers need some way of highlighting traversable areas, otherwise the player could get lost. The trade-off is that these edges look almost artificially enhanced, literally standing out in a way that doesn't feel realistic. It's not helped by the fact that so many of these areas appear to lack proper occlusion properties, with bits and pieces fitting together without any sort of contact shadow.

More disappointing, however, is the frame-rate. Not long after E3 Naughty Dog confirmed that it was targeting 60fps for Uncharted 4 and, after making such a big deal about it for The Last of Us, we were hopeful that the team was making it the standard for its PS4 projects. Unfortunately, as confirmed in an official blog post, this new demo updates at a stable 30fps instead. It's not yet clear if this has become the game's new target, of course, but it's certainly disappointing after the flawless 60fps teaser (so was it real-time or not? We've still yet to see an on-the-record quote from the developer). However, the game has plenty of time left in development, so it's not impossible that Naughty Dog is still targeting 60fps - but we would like to see some clarification.

After our first viewing of the footage, Uncharted 4 definitely felt like an iterative evolution, but after re-watching several times, the improvements become clearer, suggesting a real leap forward for the series - but perhaps not quite to the extent hoped for in the areas we expected.

In a way, the demo flips our expectations somewhat. Naughty Dog may simply be keeping its powder dry for now, but the visuals seen in this gameplay segment aren't quite the jaw-dropping spectacle we had hoped for based on the immense promise of the E3 teaser.

Although it still looks good, great even, it seems it isn't quite the 60 FPS E3 2014 tech demo good. These are just some of the negatives, the positives in the article are mostly about the A.I.

Didn't ND do something similar for Uncharted 2 or 3? There are some iffy comparison screens doing the rounds that show the released game didn't live up to the earlier reveal visuals.

robio said:

Question for the PS4 owners. How bad are the network hacks? Seems like I see an article about something bad going on with the PSN but I've not really heard grumblings about it from people I know.

Sony is getting hammered with hacks recentely. North Korea to blame?

robio said:

Question for the PS4 owners. How bad are the network hacks? Seems like I see an article about something bad going on with the PSN but I've not really heard grumblings about it from people I know.

Although PSN is down from time to time, I've never heard of any personal information compromised or horribly disruptive DDoS attacks... other than the big one a few years ago.