There has been criticism of the new TV deal in Australia this year which means many of the races are only available on cable TV but it has reinvigorated my interest in the sport.
Being able to watch all sessions live without ad breaks every 5 minutes has me more interested in f1 than ever. Being able to easily follow story lines over the weekend is significantly better than only getting short broadcasts of qualifying and the race with minimal context and ads interrupting them on a frequent basis.
I think the NFS series does itself a disservice by changing the style drastically with each new release. There always seems to be good ideas that don't ever get built on because of the frequent changes.
Underground went close to getting street racing right, The first Shift was a solid track racer, Most Wanted gave us the closest thing to Burnout Paradise and even The Run had an interesting concept despite its flaws.
It seems if they just stuck to one style they could produce something pretty special but the constant changing means every game feels like a solid first effort that never gets fully explored.
Many people criticise iterative sequels in the industry but I feel this is a series which could benefit from a couple of years of building in one direction instead of jumping around.
Destiny sits in a weird space. It turns out many of the people who complain about the grinding and rep systems simply don't like MMO's (myself included). While many of those who normally do like MMO's are unhappy with Destiny's stripped back take on the genre. In the middle of those two camps however lie a group of people who love it and that's fine too.
The backlash against Destiny came from the fact that so many people bought it not fully understanding what they were in for. It'd be the same if a whole bunch of people who don't like traditional FPS games suddenly bought Call of Duty and then complained they didn't like it.
The response to Destiny 2 will be much more tame I think as everyone knows what they are getting in to and only those who like that sort of thing will buy it.
I generally use Steams 'Add a non-steam game' feature whenever I buy something from GOG, Humble etc. I prefer to be able to launch all my games from the one place rather than having multiple clients.
The only real advantage I see for individual clients is easy patch downloading but the vast majority of games I don't buy off steam are older and aren't getting patches anyway.
The all digital future is a lot further off than some think. Outside of major cities and around the world digital buying of games is yet to really take off. As long as physical media sales make up the majority of sales relationships with brick and mortar stores will have to be maintained.
In the distant future where digital sales far out-weigh physical then I think we'll see console digital prices go the way of Steam games
I really hope everyone realises how stupid announcing games 18+ months before release is. I realise this is a long shot but after the negative response to games like Watch Dogs and The Order after really early announcements I hope everyone looks at shorter hype cycles.
I think Sony is in prime position to do this. They have numerous studios who have been working on PS4 games since before the console came out that we know very little about. I like to believe they have at least one big unannounced game which will be out before the end of the year.
I'd get much more excited about E3 every year if it was smaller but exclusively had games definitely coming in the following 12 months.
The advances being made now are simply less immediately visible than they have been in the past. Things like rendering individual enemies and large numbers of NPC's are easily overlooked but if a game simply re-used the same 3-4 character models as in older games they would be criticised for it.
The changes we are seeing are very much iterative but they are there. The Nemesis system from Shadow of Mordor had to be stripped out of the last-gen version but is often overlooked as a triumph for the new platforms.
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