What does a pirate say on their eightieth birthday? “I’m eighty” (“aye, matey”….geddit?)

Ahem, having picked up Xbox Game Pass a couple of months ago, I finally decided to give Sea Of Thieves a shot. I played some of the beta over a year ago and quite enjoyed it, but was running solo, so didn’t get the full experience and filed it away under “might get to it at some point”. Some of the DoD Storm crew have been playing pretty regularly and raving about it, so I thought I’d jump in and give it another shot.

This weekend I’ve been spending a little time on the Anthem demo/beta. That is, eventually, once the initial networking issues were resolved. It’s part of the reason for these betas, especially for online persistent games like Anthem, The Division, or Destiny, but the scale of the networking issues suggests that either someone completely underestimated the number of players, or made some very poor technical choices.

Regardless, I managed to get into the demo and spend some time flying around in my Iron Man-esque Javelin suit, and here’s what I made of the experience.

It’s that time of year again where we’re recovering from eating and drinking too much, and looking forward to the new year filled with exciting opportunities and a chance to do better. Who knew that an arbitrary point in the Earth’s orbit round the Sun had such power? I’ve definitely neglected the blog this past year or so (I’ve been a little more active on my dev blog, but only just) and I’m contemplating just migrating all the content from this site over to picnicerror.net and focusing my efforts on one site. Anyway, I digress. I think my last post on this site was looking back (very belatedly) at my favourite games from 2017, so it seems kind of fitting that my next post is this one.

I did it last year, so it’s time to do it again. Actually, it was time to do it again about six months ago but life got in the way. Here are my top games from 2017. Caveat: This list is only from games I’ve played myself in my limited available time. There are plenty of other great games that I just haven’t got round to yet.

I recently read Keza MacDonald’s article on Kotaku about struggling to get into Destiny 2 now that she has a nine month-old baby, and was able to sympathise somewhat. We’ve just had baby number two (now approaching 2 months old), and I caved and bought Destiny 2, which is (as expected) proving tricky to play while dealing with an infant.

But I was a little surprised to read some of the hatred directed at the article and author (okay, mostly on Twitter). Here’s someone writing an article about her experiences with a notoriously grindy game that she likes, but is coming to terms with the fact that she may not be able to explore all its content due to other commitments. It’s an opinion piece.

Hollywood is obsessed with reboots. Total Recall, Star Trek, Big Trouble in Little China (I’m gutted about that last one)! It’s wide open for debate as to whether all these reboots are a good thing, or whether people should stick to creating original stories. This practice has bled over to the gaming industry as well in recent years.

We’ve hit that time of year where everybody’s doing a “top games of 2016” write up. I’m not going to differ.

12th December 2006. The day the world bid farewell to disk drive pioneer Alan Shugart, and grumpy grandad Frank Barone (Everybody Loves Raymond). A Tuesday. Also the day I unlocked my first achievement on my brand new Xbox 360.

A lot can happen in ten years. People can forge a career, a relationship, move house, raise children, or simply end up turning tricks under the bridge due to bad life choices.

In addition to some of the above (I’ll let you figure out which), I’ve somehow managed to rack up 100,000G on Xbox.