Screen Access

Sunday 29th of October 2023

Image: Mathew Perry

In a tragic and unexpected turn of events, the entertainment world is mourning the loss of Matthew Perry, the beloved actor known for his unforgettable portrayal of Chandler Bing in the iconic '90s TV sitcom, Friends. At the age of 54.

Perry was found unresponsive in a hot tub at his home in Los Angeles at around 4 PM on Saturday (28th October 2023). Early indications suggest he drowned, but an official cause of death has not yet been released, local law enforcement said in a statement that there were no signs of foul play.

Perry's momentous career was marked by his magnetic presence on both the small and big screens. His portrayal of Chandler Bing, the sarcastic, quick-witted character in Friends, earned him a special place in the hearts of millions of viewers around the world.

Update: As of the 28th of October 2023, no announcement has been made.

It's been a decade since the release of Grand Theft Auto 5, for die-hard fans of the series, this has felt like a lifetime, and the burning question on everyone's mind is whether a GTA 6 announcement is just around the corner.

GTA 6 has been the subject of countless rumours, leaks, and fan theories over the years. In September 2022, the gaming community was sent into a frenzy when a trove of early gameplay footage was leaked online.

The footage provided a glimpse into the early development process. Ever since the leak fans have been convicted that an announcement is just around the corner. But with Rockstar Games remaining characteristically silent on the matter, the quest for concrete information continues.

October 24th

One of the most prominent theories online fueling the anticipation is the date of October 24th. Many eagle-eyed fans have noted that previous titles in the series were announced in the month of October.

Update: Some theories have also mentioned the 26th of October.

But that's not the end of this theory. Rockstar's parent company, Take 2 Interactive, is set to hold its quarterly earnings call on the 8th of November and some fans and industry analysts believe there could be an announcement before the event.

Of course, this is all speculation and based on very little hard evidence, but despite this fans of the series have wound themselves into a frenzy over the possibility of an announcement.

Source: BBC

The BBC recently made an exciting announcement that had Doctor Who enthusiasts buzzing with anticipation. In celebration of the show's 60th anniversary, the BBC planned to release over 800 episodes of Doctor Who and its many spin-offs on the BBC iPlayer.

It was a momentous occasion, and fans couldn't wait to embark on a nostalgic journey through the history of the iconic sci-fi series.

However, the excitement has been somewhat dampened as it was revealed that a few crucial episodes from the very beginning of the show would be missing due to rights issues.

The disappointment stems from the fact that the first four episodes of William Hartnell's era, featuring the inaugural adventures of the Doctor, won't be part of the archive.

The BBC, in a statement, explained that they lacked the necessary rights for these episodes. While this is undoubtedly a legal matter, it leaves fans disheartened, particularly given the significance of those initial episodes to the show's history.

We've all experienced it - the toxic behavior, the racist remarks, and the bullying in online gaming. But it's time to put an end to it. The gaming industry has been trying to combat this issue for years, but a recent development from Ubisoft, creators of popular games like Assassin's Creed and Rainbow Six, may just change the game.

Ubisoft has signed a unique agreement with Northumbria Police in the UK, with the hope of starting a conversation within the industry and encouraging others to follow suit. This collaboration is a significant step in making online gaming a safer and more enjoyable experience for all.

The agreement works in two parts - firstly, police officers will share their knowledge and expertise on harmful online interactions with Ubisoft's customer service team, and secondly, in extreme cases where there's a threat to life or potential serious harm, the team will fast track the information to the police for action. 

Online gaming is a global experience, and some cases that the customer service team sees cross national borders. The agreement with Northumbria Police means that in these situations, the team can quickly and efficiently get the authorities involved, even if the player is not a UK citizen. 

The customer service team at Ubisoft's Newcastle-based Customer Relationship Centre and four other locations around the world monitor player behavior and respond to requests for help, dealing with everything from purchasing issues to online toxicity. This agreement is just one of the many steps they're taking to create a better online gaming environment.

While less than 0.01% of the cases the team deals with require police intervention, they can also temporarily ban or permanently close accounts that breach the code of conduct, and in some cases, they can even recommend legal proceedings.

The gaming industry has been reluctant to address the issue of online toxicity, but it's time to be open and proactive about the steps being taken to create a safer environment for all players. This agreement between Ubisoft and Northumbria Police is just the beginning - Detective Chief Superintendent Deborah Alderson is working with a professor of police sciences to provide a blueprint for other games companies and police forces to follow. 

Ubisoft recently announced that they will be delaying all of their 2020 Q1 games line-up. The move comes after the less than ideal release of Ghost Recon Breakpoint. The game was criticised for its use of microtransactions, server issues and countless bugs. 

In a statement, Ubisoft’s CEO Yves Guillemot said  that the delay was to give the development teams “more development time to ensure that their respective innovations are perfectly implemented to deliver optimal experiences for players.” But the question I can’t stop asking is, could these delays put people into a false sense of security and ultimately disappoint players upon release.

Ubisoft has effectively set themselves a goal to change the way they approach their games, a formula the company has used since what feels like the beginning of time. A formula that gamers have grown bored of over the past few years.

UPDATE: I have since cancelled my subscription due to personal financial issues.

I, like many, enjoy physical things, CDs in a huge case, movies and books on a shelf, literally anything that can be collected I’ll collect it. With this in mind, I’ve always been slightly uncomfortable buying things digitally, most notably games.

Third Time Lucky

Ubisoft opened their 2019 E3 conference with a gameplay trailer for Watch Dogs Legion, a move that gripped the audience for 17 and a half minutes with actual gameplay. This move is quite impressive as gameplay was in short supply at this year’s conference.

The Watch Dogs series has always been let down in one way or the other by its storytelling. The story of  Aiden Pearce was so dull that I struggle even to remember the ending or any part for that matter. I did, however, like the tone set out by the central themes, overall colour grading and cutscenes.

Watch Dogs 2 improved slightly by putting the player in control of Marcus Holloway, and for one mission only his mary band of miss fits. Due to the story never actually giving any background to its characters, you never have a chance to connect with any emotional impacts that the storey tries to portray. The tone of the sequel has a far lighter tone that at times, feels silly and childish.

Legion appears to return to the darker tones of the series with a side order of the witty humour straight from its immediate predecessor.

The Perfect Setting

London is one of the world’s most surveilled cities in the world with an estimated 500,000 CCTV cameras watching over its 8 million inhabitants. All of this makes it the perfect setting for a game that’s central themes revolve around state surveillance and government overreach. The game will recreate eight boroughs of the iconic city including, Camden, West Minster, Lambeth and of course,e the landmarks that go along with them. Some of the confirmed landmarks include Big Ben, Buckingham Palace and the London Eye which according to one source you can ride to get a better view of the near-future dystopian London.

London is famous for it’s elaborate and robust transportation network and the London of Watch Dogs Legion is no different. Repurposing the Tube for one of the games fast travel mechanics. But that isn’t the only way to traverse the metropolis of London, there are also a wide selection of vehicles for you to acquire and the gameplay reveal hints at a functioning bus network. For shorter journeys, you can now hop on a drone and get yourself onto a rooftop or over a fence, a feature that has been long requested by fans of the series. Other rumoured modes of transport include black cabs a staple of London’s culture and the developers have confirmed as its the future all of the cars have autonomous driving.

With more than 270 nationalities and 300 languages London is arguably one of the worlds most cultured cities, and according to reports and the gameplay reveal the game pulls this off by showing lower-class areas alongside the more affluent ones.

The game will also feature characters from a range of backgrounds and nationalities. It will be fascinating to see the other ways Ubisoft decide to show this unique mixing of cultures.

A Game With A Lot Of Characters

To say that the character system in Watch Dogs Legion is ambitious is possibly the most significant understatement ever to be considered. The team behind Legion are throwing away the very concept of the main character and instead plan to allow the player to take control and inhabit the body of anyone they like.

In an interview with “Edge Magazine” Legions Creative Director, Clint Hocking explained that the character system relies on a database called “Census” which randomly generates character profiles and assigns them to player models in the massive open world. These profiles include core characteristics such as names, ages and ethnicities. They also include more intricate characteristics such as employment status, salaries and the areas they can live based on their core characteristics.

Hocking said “The most important thing about census is that it allows us to spawn NPCs in the world just like you do in many other games, but then when you profile those NPCs the relational database is able to fill in the blanks on who they are and sort of generate them in real-time and then make them persistent and keep them in the world…” he later moves on to say “If you see a groundskeeper trimming hedges in a park, and he has a certain ethnicity, when you lock on to that person and profile them, he’s going to have a name that reflects the ethnicity that you saw and he’s going to have an animation set based on how he was animating… Because he’s a groundskeeper, he’s going to make a certain amount of money which means he’s gonna be allowed to live in certain neighbourhoods, and because of his ethnicity will navigate to a different part of those neighbourhoods depending on where the different communities live within London”

Critics say however that the idea of a “play as anyone” system is impossible to comprehend nevermind develop the technology required to pull it off in a way that feels natural to the end-user. Those critics also claim this wouldn’t be possible without creating a product full of bugs, and let’s be honest, Ubisoft doesn’t have the best track record when it comes to delivering a flawless product. But the thing to remember about critics is, they have been wrong before, they will be wrong again.

Just what the world needs, another remake that won’t even come close to the original.

Streaming Service

Disney is set to launch its own streaming service Disney+ later this year, and it will be the only (LEGAL) place to stream all things Disney. The service will host Disney's expansive back catalogue as well as the franchises that have been acquired over the years. The service will cost $7.99 a month as a standalone product and is set to launch on the 12th of November 2019. It will also be possible to purchase a bundle of Disney+, ESPN+ and Hulu for the impressive price of $12.99 a month, giving Netflix something to worry about.

The Remakes 

A report has found that Rockstar Games have not paid the UK government any corporation tax in the last decade despite receiving £42 million in tax relief. Before I begin, I would like to give special thanks to Nerdcubed for his research into this, without his hard work, my life would be considerably harder.

What Have They Done 

In 2014 (it is hard to pin down a date as there are several dates online) the UK government created a scheme called, the Video Games Tax Relief Scheme (VGTR), to encourage British culture in video games, by providing tax relief to British based game studios. 832 games have qualified for the program so far including the very British titles, GTA V and Red Dead Redemption 2. Rockstar Games have received 19% of all funds paid out despite never paying a single tax bill while the scheme has been in effect.

How The Scheme Works

This is the tedious and complicated part, so I won't be offended if you stop reading now. To be eligible for VGTR games and their respective studios must score points in a verify of areas. As an example let’s take a look at GTA V’s estimated score.

games are scored across four sections and need to receive 16 points out of 31 to pass.  

Points System

A) Cultural Content = 16 Points

B) Cultural Contribution = 4 Points  

C) Cultural Hubs = 3 Points 

D) Cultural Practitioners = 8 Points

Cultural Content

This section determines how British your game is, for example, is 75% of your game set in the UK?

Cultural Contribution

This section determines if your game portrays British heritage or history, as an example, Assassin’s Creed Syndicate is set in a historical London and shows several aspects of British history.

Cultural Hubs

Is/was your game developed in the UK?

Cultural Practitioners

Did people in the UK develop your game?

Results

It is extremely difficult to calculate all of this, especially in an interesting way, if you would like to find out more information in a much better format check out Nerdcubed’s video here.

Micro-transactions, loot boxes and “surprise mechanics” have been heavily debated for years to the point that politicians are beginning to take a stand. Some say the move is too little too late. 

In a select committee to the UK government, an EA executive defended their trading practices by claiming that they do not use the term loot boxes instead calling them “surprise mechanics”. (1) 

I have never personally spent real money on fake money to buy fake things, so I find it hard to imagine the mindset you need to be in to spend your hard-earned cash on the meagre chance of getting that fake thing you want. Imagine walking into a shop with £50 to buy a pair of shoes, you hand over your cash, receiving a pair of plastic sunglasses worth £10  and are told “thanks for playing come back again and you may just get those shoes”. In my opinion, only a person with little to no concept of money would fall for a blatant scam such as this. However, it becomes clear that most of these predatory marketing techniques are aimed at children. And it’s not hard to work out why when you consider that children in the UK spend £12 billion of their own money every year according to The Family and Parenting Institute (2).

The BBC has published several reports in the last few months that begin to show the extent of the damage already caused by loot boxes and microtransactions.  

Thomas Carter told the BBC that his children spent almost £550 in Fifa for the Nintendo Switch after he purchased one pack for the price of £8. Luckily Mr Carter was able to obtain a refund (3) however, others haven’t been so lucky.

  Susie Breare also shared her story, telling the BBC  “I have a 22-year-old disabled son, who has cerebral palsy, complex epilepsy, autism, learning difficulties and the approximate cognitive ability of a seven-year-old child“. Her son relies on an iPad for communication, education, and entertainment (4). Her son recently started playing a point and click game called Hidden Artefacts which requires players to find various objects and pairing them to the description. Now this game sounds perfect for someone of his cognitive ability on the surface; however, the game which is available from the App Store for free, has what apple calls in-app purchases. Unfortunately, her son managed to rack up a bill of £3160.58 between the 18 February and the 30 May 2019, cleaning out his savings.  Susie contacted Apple who under Eu law is required to provide refunds within 14 days of purchase. The Apple support team were incredibly helpful however were unable to give any assistance and advised her to contact the app developer Blastworks Ltd. Despite several phone calls and emails Susie has received no response and has been unable to recover her son’s life savings.

 Karl Smallwood has been posting entertaining, sometimes pointless but always brilliant videos to his YouTube channel Fact Fiend since 2017. Karl recently made the decision to turn off the comments on all of his videos, and as you can imagine, everyone was overjoyed with the arrangement.

The Man

Karl Smallwood started his channel Fact Fiend with his friend brad in March of 2017 and has quickly risen to relative fame in the two years since amassing 440K subscribers at the time of writing. This, however, wasn’t Karls first outing in the online space. He has been uploading to his personal channel, Karl Smallwood, since 2013 and has written articles for the Today I Found Out YouTube channel and website. 

The Problem 

In a recent video, Karl and Brad explained why they made the decision to disable the comments on their videos. As a fan of the channel myself, I always enjoyed the comments on their videos as you could sometimes learn even more information related to the subject of the video. I was always amazed at the civility of the discourse and the lack of hateful comments. 

I like many others assumed that this was down to the fact that the videos were always of very high quality (despite the uncropped green screen) and that a genuine community had formed around them. However, as Karl explains, the only reason the comment section was so “wholesome” was down to the fact that he plucked the negative comments away like a social media sniper. 

Karl finally decided that enough was enough when he hired Nisha as a second editor and fans wrongly assumed that Karl had fired Brad. Karl said to Brad “I brought you into this thing with promises of glory and YouTube big dick money and then you've got people saying oh you messed up the sound you're a fucking idiot” he then goes on to say “this is the kind of thing that makes people want to stop doing this, I know so many people from my days of writing who would like nervously submit their first article which is very good and then commenters would just pull them apart or harass them on social media and then they never write again”. 

This is far from a new problem, the YouTube comment section has become somewhat of a meme, as its often filled with hate, racism, and toxicity regardless of a video's content. YouTube doesn’t seem to be doing anything to fix the problem. There currently isn’t a way to quickly moderate the comments on YouTube, without manually entering words that you don’t want to appear. Karl and Brad quite rightly point out that Twitch has much better moderation tools that even allow you to assign moderator powers to trusted fans. YouTube doesn’t offer this unless you add people as channel managers. However, if you do choose to do this you can’t Assign privileges, so anyone with access could potentially delete all the videos on a channel.

The Solution 

To combat the matter, Karl set up a Sub-Reddit with robust guidelines and community moderators. This is far from an ideal solution to a monumentally complex enigma, but it does point out one of the many shortcomings of YouTube as a platform. YouTube tries to sell itself as a platform for users to build a career and a community. But on the other hand, consistently erects barriers that prevent people from pursuing the opportunities that they are offered and ultimately push users to other platforms. YouTube could and should learn from their direct competitors before they become just another failed social network.

If you haven’t read part one, you can find it here

If At First, You Don’t Succeed

Watch Dogs 2 hit shelves on the 15th of November 2016 and addressed every criticism of the original with varying degrees of success.

You play as Marcus Holloway, a young African American tech activist who has been framed for numerous criminal offences by the U.S government. With the help of DedSec, Marcus sets out to take down oppressive and intrusive tech companies that are colluding with the government to gain access to the all-seeing and all-knowing CTOS. CTOS is a system designed and implemented by the U.S government to connect everything with an internet connection to Donald Trump’s iPad.

Overall the game was a massive improvement on the original; however, many players had already shifted away from the series. Personally, I found the game to be a very enjoyable experience, and the digital recreation of San Francisco is breathtaking, proving once again that if Ubisoft can do anything, it’s creating stunning open worlds.

Ubisoft announced the third instalment in their heavily criticised series, Watch Dogs at E3 2019 and it looks spectacular. In this series of posts, I’ll be taking a look at the series so far and examine whether or not the third instalment will be a worthy addition to the series.

The Original 

Watch Dogs was announced at E3 in 2012 and was released two years later, in May of 2014 to a barrage of criticism from both players and the media.  

The main concerns could be broken into two parts, first was the graphics, which were massively downgraded in the final game compared to what was shown in the E3 demo. Secondly, those who purchased the game were treated to one of the weakest storylines ever presented in a video game. The driving force of the main storyline is the death of the niece of the protagonist, a character that is seen for only eleven frames of animation. The gameplay, however, was pretty fun, but due to the scandal and media backlash, many gamers never picked up a copy. 

False Promises 

Creative director Jonathan Morin introduced the game as something that had never been seen before. However, what was delivered is nothing more than a classic revenge story that features hacking as little more than a mechanic. Morin closed his remarks with these words “connection is power, be careful what you do with it” but the question I’m left asking is what about the power you claimed to have to deliver the product you promised us? Jonathan.

In part two, I’ll be looking at how Watch Dogs 2 improved upon all of the shortcomings of its predecessor but didn’t quite do enough to win everyone over.

During his storytelling panel, Kojima said this  "In the near future, games and movies will come closer, in a similar category. So I think we're going into an era with a lot of possibilities. It will not just be interactive or non-interactive, there will be something in-between as well”