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I really hope one of the expansions for Forza Horizon 6 is a rally one like FH5 had, that was so much fun. The rally-spec cars are such a blast to drive because they accelerate like an absolute motherfucker but don't go to absolutely ludicrous speed like supercars do so you don't end up sitting there going "OHSHITOHSHITOHSHIT". 😅

Posted on 30 May 2026, 21:43

A screenshot of the Subaru Vivio, it's a very small red hatchback that's been lowered and big rims put on. The design of it very much brings to mind the Mazda 121 of the 90s. It's parked in a very narrow alley in Tokyo at night, with a bunch of lit-up shop signs stretching away down the alley, and it's been raising so there are water drops on the car and reflections in the puddles on the road in front of the car.

Forza Horizon 6 is out, and as per tradition I've taken a teensy little car and turned it into an absolute pocket rocket. 😁 This is a 1994 Subaru Vivio RX-R that now weighs all of 757kg but has a 4-cylinder 2.0L naturally-aspirated engine in it and it puts out 169kW! It's AWD so you basically point it in a direction and it'll fly there. I could have gone really nuts and added a turbo and done more engine upgrades but I wanted to keep it in Class B.

screenshot gaming xbox forza horizon

Posted on 25 May 2026, 21:55

A screenshot showing a cavernous Imperial hanger, all stark black and white. It's taken from the back of the hanger looking out through the forcefield into an entrance tunnel, and across the other side of the tunnel is another hanger with two of the Imperial shuttlecraft sitting with their wings up. On the ground is a large fairly grey flat ship (the main character's one), along with some parked TIE Fighters to the left, various mechanical bits and bobs scattered around.

Another screenshot of an Imperial hanger, but this one looks a lot more menacing because it's a TIE Fighter bay. There are several TIE fighters on the ground being repaired or otherwise inspected, and four of them being moved around above the ground by cranes that are attached to tracks hanging down towards the ceiling. In the middle of the floor there's a huge hole where a lift clearly comes up, and it would be just the right fit for a TIE Fighter. There are cables and storage containers and all sorts of bits and pieces hanging around, and at the right you can just see two tiny Stormtroopers that really show the scale of the space (it's BIG).

The final screenshot, this one is utterly different in feel to the first two. Instead of stark clean black and white of the Imperial fuelling facility, it's inside a wreck of an Old Republic cruiser, some sort of room with banks of control panels and a window at the far right. The walls are rusty and the entire roof has caved in and there's a big hole where the sunshine is shining in, and the floor of the room is covered in red sand, with various grasses growing at various points, particularly where the sun is coming in.

I am continuing to thoroughly enjoy Star Wars: Outlaws! I've been doing jobs for various crime syndicates, have snuck onto an Imperial fuelling station, and most recently salvaged a nav computer from an Old Republic shipwreck. Just before I turned everything off tonight I finally landed on the planet Kijimi, which is from the look of things a cold and barren ice world so it's going to be a good change from the harsh dry winds and heat of Toshara.

I really like how they portray the main character Kay, she's not a total badass, she's just someone who's trying to survive and who keeps getting the short end of the stick. They did a really good job with the voice actor as well, she's always got an underlying not-quite-sure quality like she's trying to bluff her way through things but isn't fully confident.

screenshot gaming xbox star wars outlaws

Posted on 17 March 2026, 22:34

A screenshot of a section of the "food court" in Star Wars: Outlaws, in the middle is what looks like a very small bar with stools except it's serving food made by a tall cylindrical droid, and scattered about in front are tables with people sitting at them with plates of food and drink in front of them. There a few aliens and humans standing around having conversations as well. The whole scene is indoors with huge cylindrical range pillars rising up, and all the walls are grimy-looking grey/brown metal.

Another screenshot looking into one of the food vendors' shops, this one has a bunch of enormous saucepans with some sort of food in them sitting at the back of shop, bottles and pans on shelves on the wall, and there is a human sitting down on a cylindrical container looking at whatever the Star Wars equivalent of an iPad is, and a Twi'lek crouched down stirring a pot of red sauce of some sort. The whole area is quite small and looks smoky.

Another screenshot, this one is of a smallish shop that's absolutely jam-packed with random bits and bobs on every available horizontal service and some spilling down onto the floor. It looks like it might be a pawn shop, and there are two deactivated protocol droids standing at the right. The shop owner is at the far end and has green skin and is behind the counter, and there are two aliens in conversation at the left.

Another screenshot, this looks almost like a street marketplace you'd see in our world, with vendors having their little stalls with baskets with piles of things in them. The walls around the edges of the marketplace are grimy-looking metal, there are various aliens both as vendors and buying things, and two Imperial Stormtroopers in the middle of walking around keeping an eye on things. The whole scene is lit in a garish reddy/orange colour.

I'm finally doing some gaming on the Xbox after many many months! I'd picked up Star Wars: Outlaws on super-special a while ago but hadn't actually played it yet so I figured I'd give it a go.

I've only been playing for a few hours and am only on the second planet, but they've done such a good job capturing the feel of the ordinary, grimy side of the Star Wars universe. I've been tootling around the Market District in Mirogana and I love all the little details they've added, there's a food court with people sitting around eating or ordering food from the vendors, there are little hole-in-the-wall vendors making food or selling or repairing electronics or other things, random droids wandering around, and then the underlying menace from seeing Stormtroopers marching about on patrol too. As well as people speaking Basic, you've also got the various alien languages as well, most of them exactly how they'd sound from the movies, and the whole atmosphere is so well-done.

screenshot gaming xbox star wars outlaws

Posted on 7 March 2026, 14:55

A screenshot of the original Doom, looking pixellated by today's standards but otherwise okay. It's got the hand holding the pistol in the middle of the screen, a brown kind of military/sci-fi wall at the left with a VERY-obviously 2D sprite barrel of green goo, the section in front of the wall has some steps and that section is lit up, but in the distance it's all dark and hard to make out, but you can see some computer screens and what look like control panels up near the roof. No idea why they're up there because you couldn't use them!

A screenshot of Dark Forces, it's EXTREMELY pixellated, much more so than Doom because I've turned it back to the original software rendering. The character is holding one of the black blaster rifles that stormtroopers use, the floor in front of me is dark grey cobbles and there's a gap in the floor you can't see down, then past that on the other side are white walls that look like they've been in a war zone, with black blaster marks on them. The whole thing is quite dark because the power is off at this point. The sky has delightfully pixel-art-looking mountains with a purple sky that's either just after sunset or just before sunrise.

A screenshot of Doom 64, this is a fair bit less pixellated than the other two screenshots, but all the textures have that early 3D rendering "smooth" look to them. The view is looking into a hallway with rusted metal-looking walls and in the centre is a glowing orange floor panel. The whole scene is lit in orange/red light that's coming from that panel.

I've been thoroughly enjoying going back to my gaming roots recently, with the remasters of Doom, Dark Forces, and Doom 64 on the Xbox!

The first screenshot here is the original Doom, which we got a demo of with our Power Macintosh 6200 in 1995, and my parents very much disapproved of the amount of gore in it. We also got the demo of Dark Forces on that same demo disc, which was just the first level, but I was so keen to get the full game that I begged my parents and promised I'd even delete Doom and not play it anymore if they got me the full game for Christmas. 😛

The second screenshot is very early on in the second level of Dark Forces, in all its software-rendered pixellated glory, and I can still remember sitting in my pyjamas on Christmas morning playing it with a sense of awe at all the new levels for me to explore. I think my favourite level was later in the game, Nar Shaddaa, the sheer vertical scale of it really grabbed my imagination.

And then lastly we have Doom 64, bought a handful of years after Dark Forces, and because it was on the Nintendo 64 and everything was 3D now, everything also had to have coloured lighting everywhere. It's hilarious how overdone it was looking back at it now, sort of like looking back at the pinstripes in early Mac OS X. Games now have lighting that makes sense contextually, you don't really notice it that much because it's realistic, but this was all "GONNA BE RED, LET'S HAVE SOME BLUE HERE, AND SOME GREEN THERE." 😂

And man, playing these I'd forgotten about the total lack of any sort of hand-holding you got when trying to figure out where you needed to go. There was an overhead map but absolutely none of these objective markers or UI indicators of direction. If you get lost, tough shit, you're going to have to wander until you figure it out!

screenshot gaming retro things xbox dark forces doom

Posted on 19 August 2025, 21:54

A screenshot from Diablo II Resurrected in the "Legacy" graphics mode showing the software renderer in all its 4:3 aspect ratio glory. My Assassin is holding a sword and a small round shield and standing next to a shallow lake with a large tree beside it. It's all extremely pixelated by today's standards.

Another screenshot showing the exact same scene as the previous image, but this time it's using the new 16:9 widescreen high-resolution remastered graphics. It's still not a graphical tour de force of course, but it's a SIGNIFICANT upgrade from the original.

Tonight featured a bit of remastered retro gaming: I started with Star Wars: Dark Forces and then discovered that the Diablo II remaster was on sale for the princely sum of $23! So I picked that up and was delighted to note that it continues the grand tradition of remasters allowing you to flip back and forth between the new and original graphics. Check out this wonderfully pixelated art from 2000 versus the shiny new remastered graphics. And I realised after I'd taken these that that was at the gloriously spacious "800x600" resolution, there's an option to use the 640x480 resolution from the game when it first launched and you can see even less of your surroundings, haha.

The remaster also has a "Performance" or "Quality" toggle for the new graphics, and honestly I don't think I can tell the difference whatsoever except that "Quality" mode drops the framerate to 30fps. Though funnily enough I actually kept that on anyway because the original graphics only run at 30fps so it's much less jarring going from 60fps in the new graphics to 30fps when I switch back to old.

screenshot diablo gaming xbox

Posted on 16 June 2025, 23:17

A screenshot from Forza Horizon 5 taken from behind and a reasonable way above the car. The car itself is a black 1991 Nissan Pulsar hatchback, that wonderful early 90s not-quite-completely-boxy shape where car designers realised they could round off some of the edges. The car is blasting along a dirt road in the rolling hills of a rural area with dust billowing out behind it, there are a handful of trees around and a bit of scrub and it all looks very dry. There's a wooden telegraph pole at the right with a single cable stretching behind the frame, and out beyond the trees. The overall light in the scene is warm and it looks like it's getting towards late afternoon.

Book-ending the weekend with Forza Horizon! This time I'm blasting around a lot of the dirt tracks to get the "Drive on every single road" achievement.

screenshot gaming xbox forza horizon

Posted on 9 June 2025, 19:59

It's the Friday night of a three day weekend and I'm in Forza Horizon 5 blasting through the deserts of Mexico in a hotted-up 1970 Datsun 510 while listening to the game's synthwave radio station. 👌🏻

screenshot gaming xbox forza horizon

Posted on 6 June 2025, 21:03

A screenshot of my Tiefling Barbarian. She's tall with broad shoulders, dark red skin, black eyes, and two short grey horns protruding up and back from her forehead. Her hair is long on one side and shaved on the other, and her neck is completely tattooed in dark blue, with the top of it being a flame motif coming just up past her jawline.

I decided to go back to Baldur's Gate 3, started a new character, and apparently the theme of all of my RPG characters of late is "extremely large horned woman". 😅

screenshot gaming xbox baldur's gate 3

Posted on 26 November 2024, 19:47

A screenshot of my character in Dragon Age: The Veilguard. She's a Qunari, meaning she's tall, broad-shouldered and quite muscular, and has two massive horns that protrude from the sides of her head just above the temples. They curl back and under so they're pointing forwards, sort of like a goat. She has golden rings around them at various points, and has a neck tattoo that looks like a choker, along with another set of square geometric tattoos on her cheeks. Her skin is a dark blue/grey sort of colour, and she has a swath of hair that comes down from in between her horns and over the right side of her face. You can't tell from the angle in the screenshot but that same side of her head has long hair on it behind the horns, and the other side is shaved. In short, she will fuck you up if you look at her funny.

My favourite character in Dragon Age: Inquisition was my Qunari Mage, so I've gone for the same this time around in Veilguard! I love how she just radiates "I do not take any shit from anyone" energy.

(Also, yay fully-controllable photo mode in this game too! Seriously, all games should have that IMO.)

screenshot gaming xbox dragon age: the veilguard

Posted on 4 November 2024, 22:05