So this past week Sony decided to throw their hat into the ring with the introduction of their new PlayStation Pro Console. Thus ushering in the generation of 4k (or Faux-k) gaming.

Why Faux-K?

Well right now there is no console on the market that can handle 4k gaming in native form. Through up-scaling and other tech magic both MS and Sony will take existing 1080p content and wave their magic wand, and turn the output into a 4k signal.

Now there is a lot more to it than that, but there is also a huge difference between a true native 4k image and an up-scaled one. A true 4k game would need to render at 4k, something that even the most expensive computer gaming rigs out there struggle to do. So do not be fooled, if your $2000 computer can’t do it, there is not a chance your $400 console will.

Now there is obvious advantages still, image quality is crisper, and there are less artifacts in the environment. But at the end of the day, it is not so dissimilar to taking a photo and having it enlarged into a the size of a poster. Sure you will see more of the minute details simply due to the sheer size of the picture, but beyond that, it is still the same image.

Next is the whole Ultra High Definition Blu-ray debacle.

Somehow Sony managed to bugle something huge in their new console. They decided that they were not going to offer a UHD Blu-ray drive in the new Pro console.

Why Sony… why?

Their direct competition, the Xbox One S, that retails for $100 less has one, and the real kicker? It is a bloody Sony drive!!! Sony developed the UHD format, they own the rights, they make the drives themselves, and yet, did not think to include one in their console.

This defies logic to me. Why on earth would you drive your users into the arms of the enemy.

This has been weighing on my mind since the Sept 7th press conference, and I found my answer last night.

Because folks, right now, you don’t need a UHD player, plain and simple.

Now you are all likely thinking, but but but, there are 4k TVs for next to nothing now, hell, you likely even have one. But, and this is a big one, is it a 4k TV that you can use?

In light of the Sony debacle, I went out and purchased a Xbox One S yesterday as I have a JVC DLA-X500R, fully capable 4k/60 projector.

I got home, plugged my XB1 into my Marantz 4k ready receiver, which in turn is plugged into my projector, powered everything up and…. No picture…. Hmmm.

So I jiggled some wire, tried another cable, and still nothing. So in a desperate attempt,  I plugged the console right into the projector. Ahhh, finally a picture.

After a lengthy 30+ min setup / update to the console I was ready to go. I plug things back into my receiver, and now I am getting a picture, phew! I immediately go to the display menu to switch over to 4K and get a warning. Sorry, your display is not 4k ready.. But… Umm…

So I unplug everything again and wire direct to the projector.

This time the display settings change, and I am told I can change to 4k, sigh of relief…. But wait, there is a warning message that takes me to a configuration page.

I am told that sure, I can watch 4k streaming media, but beyond that, I am out of luck.

I cannot play games in 4k, I cannot watch UHD blu-ray in 4k, and don’t even think about using HDR….

This is the kicker here folks, the new 4k format requires a very new HDMI port, HDMI 2.0a to be exact, and unless you bought a TV this year or very late last year, and you paid a fortune for it (No Vizio 4k for you mister!) then it is highly unlikely that your system will be able to accept 4k source material or signals.

Oh, and it gets better.

So why do we need to have HDMI 2.0a?

Simply put, because the American movie industry is driving the hardware in the world. They have decided that you must have a HDCP 2.2 ready connection to ensure that piracy is not possible of UHD disks.

So why is this such a slight you ask?

Because the HDCP 2.2 format has already been cracked, you can already download 4k Netflix content from many torrent sites.

All this has served to do is to force consumers to upgrade their equipment for a fictitious copy protection scheme that is completely useless.

HDMI 1.4 (the previous standard) is fully capable of handling 4k content, it can do full 4K/60 just fine. But what good would it do to the economy if you just used your 2 year old TV? Gotta keep that consumer machine running!

So this folks is why I believe that Sony opted not to include a UHD player in their console, because you really don’t need it right now, nor do you likely have a TV that can accept it. By omitting a UHD player, Sony has actually said to you, don’t worry, you don’t need this right now, and even if you want it, your system probably can’t handle it.

They would have a ton of pissed off people on Nov 10 wondering why they can’t watch movies on their new PlayStation in 4k, and thus the backlash would begin.

So should you buy one of these new consoles? Either a XB1 S or a PS4 Pro?

Well that depends entirely on what you hope to get from it.

If you keep your expectations in check, and do some research into what equipment you currently have, and how it will handle the new systems, then you will be fine.

But if you are going into this blind, chances are you are going to be disappointed.

So the hype around No Man’s Skye reached a level I have never seen before as a gamer and I have been playing my entire life practically.

The fervor for this game was off the charts, and what everyone perception was fell into a very different place than what the reality is.

2 years ago Hello Games took the stage at E3 and brought the house down, with the promise of a seemingly infinite universe for us to explore, 18 quadrillion (that is 18 with 18 zeros) planets to explore, it would take a single person over 5 billion years to see them all.

If that is not a promise of greatness I don’t know what is.

This captured peoples interest, oh my God, all the things we could do, all the places we could go! But not a one of you adoring fans asked what we would do when we got there.

Peoples perception of No Man’s Sky was unexplainable. I have asked dozens of people what they think of it, and it always comes up with, it was not as good as I expected. When pressed about what they expected it to be, no one really has a solid answer short of, “I don’t know, just better that this”

And there in lies the problem. People as a whole built up No Man’s Sky to be something it was never intended to be. Not once did the developer come out and say it would have a rich story, diverse NPCs to weave a tale of a galactic hero.

It’s promise was simple, we will give you more planets than you can count, and you can go check them out.

End of story.

End of description.

This summer we were shown a series of trailers that totally encapsulated the game, Survive, Trade, Fight, Explore.

This is EXACTLY what No Man’s Sky is. And STILL people were shocked when it didn’t turn out as THEY expected.

That folks is on YOU, not Hello Games, who gave you exactly what they told you they would.

So about this review, where does one begin to review a game that in all fairness, I have seen less than .000000000000000000000000000001 of?

Well my experience was almost exactly what I thought it would be (short of the ending, but more on that later) It was a fun run around the galaxy. The end.

Did it become repetitious? Yes. Was it boring? At times yes. Were planets all the same? Hardly. Were animals all the same? Almost never.

And last but not least, was it fun? Mostly.

In the 40+ hours I put into the game I would say I enjoyed about 30 hours worth. When I finally decided I had enough of going to random generated planet Q8172X12 and decided I was going to make a run for the center of the galaxy, things got tedious.

It became a rinse repeat formula until I reached the core. Make a pile of warp cells, jump to a black hole, go into black hole, repair ship, jump to black hole, run out of cells, then go get resources to make more, and start over. Rinse, repeat.

That is the last 10 hours to go from wherever you’re at, to the galaxy center.

Once you have lost the wonder of exploring new planets and solar systems, the game loses a lot of its shine.

This is a game that is far more about the journey than the destination. I will not spoil the ending, but I will say that a lot of people will be disappointed, but you should really have seen it coming.

For someone like me who has a completionist attitude and a smidge of OCD, No Man’s Sky can become a total nightmare at times.

When planet side there is always one more point of interest, one more set of ruins, one more outpost. It is honestly endless. I spent close to 8 hours on my first planet before I realized there is no way I will ever see it all and left.

This also plays into one of the games biggest short comings. There is no means of tracking where you have been or what you have discovered on a planet.

Sure you can get a tracker for life forms discovered, but there is no way to get back to a outpost or base you have been before as the game has no mapping system when planet side.

This is insanely frustrating when you are in the midst of harvesting resources and trying to sell them.

You found a new trading outpost, fly off into the sunset, harvest a pile of resources, then have no where to sell them as you scour the planet for another installation.

It is little things like this that stop No Man’s Sky from being great. The concept is solid if you are into a world / walking simulator. But it is the technical details that leave things coming up shy.

The game is also hampered by a lot of technical glitches. From constant game crashes and lock ups, to weird behavior like getting into your ship and being catapulted into the sky, or sometimes ejected from you ship and thrown hundreds of miles away.

It is goofy things like that that really mar what could have been a much better game.

I for instance got locked out of my platinum trophy due to a glitch. One particular trophy requires you survive on a “Extreme” planet for a grand total of 8 hours. What you don’t get to know is it needs to be 8 hours on the same planet, and if you leave, you have to start over 100%

Now this would not be such a big deal if the aforementioned glitch that tosses you back into orbit didn’t take place. Get tossed like that and the timer resets completely. You could lose 7 hours of progress in one glitch.

For myself I am locked out simply because my game crashed and I was punted back to the PS4 menu. I came back in and now my time is stuck at 5.7 Sols (57 mins) and will not increase again ever.

All in all No Man’s Sky is what it set out to be, a game about exploring the cosmos, and on that it delivers 100%. Is it that game you want it to be? Highly unlikely.

A solid 7/10. I can’t say I would recommend it per se, as it is not for everyone, but read the reviews and impressions, and if you are realistic in your expectations, you will walk away satisfied.

 

So a new addition to the CCG site will be some toy reviews and unboxings.

I have been doing this already via our YouTube channel, and decided to branch out a bit into the blog site as for something like Lego it is much easier. I have no interest in doing time lapse build videos, but thought I would share the some insight into the more complex sets I have.

I have been a long time Star Wars fans, and have been collecting Star Wars Lego since it debuted on the market in 1999 along side the release of Phantom Menace.

Back in those days I purchase 100% of the sets available, and did so for the better part of 5 year, until space (and money) ran out and Lego upped the production to WAY more sets per year.

At that time I dialed things back to just buying the Lego Ultimate Collectors Series ships, then even that waned as the price increased and the Canadian dollar dropped.

Over the years I have sold off about 90% of my collection as to be honest, the builds are just too damn big. I loved my UCS Millennium Falcon, but it was 3 feet long and 20 inches wide, my home just cannot accommodate something that big for a collectable.

But 2015 brought in a few new sets that are WAY more shelf friendly, and also priced reasonably. So I decided to take the plunge back into Lego with their long overdue UCS Slave 1.

The set retails for $225 Canadian, which is a pretty reasonable price for just under 2000 bricks.

The instruction manual was pretty beefy for the set clocking in at just over 300 pages.

And also containing 14 polypags of pieces. Gone are the days of opening all the packs and pouring them into one pile, Lego has chosen a new approach bu setting up the instruction based on bag numbers, so each specific bag contains all the parts needed for a single section of the ship.

Not sure I like that idea as I came from a place of dump them all out and go nuts, but it certainly takes the brick finding frustrations away from a 2000 element build.

Construction for the ship itself was very well done. A extremely sold build that once complete felt a lot like a playset more than a UCS ship, and by that I mean you could pick it up without fear of pieces falling off. There have been a lot of ships over the years that were very poorly made and looking at the sideways would cause parts to drop off. Not the case with the Slave 1 thought.

The base of the ship used a real unique build, putting together long flat sections small single elements to connect to the bottom of the ship, allowing for a much smoother finish.

The internal framework was something similar to most Technic sets, with a solid frame that was wrapped in some nice shiny smooth elements not seen before in any other set.

 

All told be build ran about 4-5 hours over a single afternoon.

The finished product sits upon a very well constructed stand. In the past the stands were a little flimsy at times and didn’t exactly feel safe.

This new design though is very solid, they employed the use of smooth bricks as well to give it a much more polished look, almost looking molded out of plastic rather then just more standard dotted Lego bricks.

Another great addition is the solid plastic mold for the sign. In the past left used 1×8 smooth elements across a large flat plate to make up the surface for the sign sticker to be applied. This was fine day one, but after a few months when the sticker shrunk down a bit, you could see all the little lines along the sign. This new design is 1 large smooth plate that works perfectly and offers a solid smooth surface.

Here are the final full build pics:

 

Lastly, this set came out February of 2015 and is still available for now at at major retailers like Amazon and Walmart, and of course Lego.com itself.

The set is listing as hard to find which means it is getting close to being retired, so I highly recommend if you want one, grab it soon before it goes off the shelves and the price goes through the roof.

A well rounded set that was fun to build, and highly recommend for the SW fan and Lego collector alike, a solid 10/10.

So I have been playing the Lego franchised games now since the very first title back in 2005. Having been a kid who grew up playing with Lego as his secondary source of entertainment, second only to watching and re-watching Star Wars a few hundred times, I was immediately draw to the franchise.

The ability to play as characters from my favorite franchise of all time in the form of toys I adored my whole life was almost too much to handle. My son and I sat down on release day back in 2005 and dove in head first and played for days searching for every mini kit, every gold brick and every hidden secret the game could provide.

And here 11 years later, my son grown and moved out, here I sit, 40 years old playing the same Lego games we enjoyed so many years ago together.

In the past 11 years the TT  games has stuck with a tried and true formula, yet managed to evolve into a much more robust games than their original release.

The old basics are still here, missions unfold one at a time and unlock a free play mode once complete. There are 10 mini kits to collect on every level, most of which you cannot obtain until the game is complete and you play again in free play mode. There are 250 gold bricks to collect, and the typical 18 red bricks that unlock cheats or goofy bonuses to the game, like high pitched voices for all the spoken dialog, or bananas for torpedoes on ships.

So in a franchise so old and that typically sees 2 – 3 franchise based releases a year, how could they keep things fresh?

Well this time around the small hub worlds from the original Lego Star Wars Saga have been replaced by massive sandbox like levels with a plethora of things to do. Each hub world holds about 40-50 gold bricks to be found, most of which are unlocked by completing small side quests for characters.

From completing a race, to finding missing droid parts, the side missions can take a minute or two each to complete. But overall there is over 50 of these types of missions spread over 4 main hub worlds.

On top of that the character unlock is a little different now too, where in previous games you would simply buy or unlock characters by playing missions, and for the most part still do. but this time there is 35 special characters that can only be found frozen in carbonite. All of which are previous franchise faves. From Luke and Han in storm trooper outfits, to Dooku and Darth Maul.

Lastly and the biggest change in the franchise is the amazing 3rd person shoot outs the game has added.

As specific times in the story missions you will enter into an over the should view of your character and enter into a cover based shooter mode. With specific tasks to complete before you can move on, from blasting a per-dertermined amount of Stormtroopers, to blowing up ships and shielded cannons.

It really adds a cool aspect to the tried and true Lego game formula.

All told the game touts 10 main story missions, and 6 bonus missions.

The bonus missions bring some real cool content. All these missions are based between Return of the Jedi and The Force Awakens.

We get to see Poe rescue Admiral Akbar, Kylo Ren hunt for the map that leads to Luke and narrowly missing Lor San, and 4 others. While TT does their usual tongue and cheek play on things, for die hard Star Wars fans it is a neat exploration of things unspoken in the film.

Lastly there is a season pass available that will be adding 4 more story based side missions to the game, first of which will be released on August 9th called The Phantom Limb. Explaining how C3-P0 got his mysterious red arm. This particular DLC is free to PS4 owners, and no release info is available as to other consoles yet.

The remaining 3 DLC levels will be coming later this year and possibly into 2017 and runs an additional $10.

All in all my play through lasted 23 hours, and that is to a Platinum 100% finish. Main story and the 6 side mission clocked in at just under 10 hours.

Well worth the money in my opinion for the entertainment value you get.

Now the game is not perfect sadly, as with most titles, TT does a great job building the world, but ensuring it does not fall apart or get vacuumed up is another thing.

The game itself is marred with a lot of technical glitches.

From start to finish I had the game crash completely, dumping me back to the PS4 main menu at least 10 times could be as much as 20. The game will just hang, the poof, your back to the PS4 menu and have to load the game from scratch.

What makes this more annoying than it should be is 2 fold, number one, the time it takes from starting the disk to actually getting to play, is about 2 whole minutes.

There is no way to skip the TT logo animation, the 3 Lucasfilm / Star Wars splash screens, and the entire D’Qar menu load. This does not sound like much, but in the midst of a battle or real interesting part of the story, getting punted out and taking forever to get back into the game is a real pain in the ass.

Secondly, you have to start whatever you were doing all over again. There is no checkpoint system in place for levels, so if you were seconds away from finishing a mission, then you start back at the very beginning, sans any collectibles you unlocked along the way.

I have also read (but thankfully didn’t experience) a save game corruption bug that can happen  when your game crashes. So every time you get dropped, you run the risk of losing 100% of your progress.

There is also some nasty slowdown that seems to randomly happen on Star Killer Base and on D’Qar. The weird thing is it is completely random. You can fly down to either area and be perfectly fine, then on the next visit the game is seeing massive screen tearing and choppiness.

That being said, all things considered, Lego SW: TFA is still an amazing game. TT managed to milk the movie for all it is worth and offer up a great 20+ hour experience, a pretty bold move considering most of their games encompass 3-4 movies at a time.

If you are willing to overlook the technical side of things, you will be in for a really enjoyable experience all in all.

A solid 7/10 and a must buy for Star Wars fans.

 

 

https://www.twitch.tv/nintendo

 

 

So the standout moment for me thus far from E3, and this was very unexpected for me, was the new South Park game.

I laughed harder than I have in years at a video game.

Please to report that the guys are doing a special edition that comes with a 6″ Cartman Coon figure.

Check it out!

Tune in to watch the weirdness that is UBI: