J4MES OX4D

You nailed it. The Phil Spencer honeymoon is long over. The ‘gamer-first’ image doesn’t hold up anymore when layoffs and closures follow every ‘success.

Another video game crash can't come soon enough IMO.
These big publishers seem to think that gamers have an unlimited amount of money so they promise shareholders that profits will climb every year. Which obviously isn't possible as there are only a limited amount of players and money. This means that when profits don't go up they sack staff to save money. It's not even unbelievable that MS can sack staff and then Phil Spencer bangs on about how great they're doing as it's just the norm now. It's very believable that they did it.

it’d be so cool if Arkane or Eidos picked it up and made it their own...

Microsoft eh, raking in the profits and lying through their teeth. Closing the ESO studio, which had made them £2 billion is quite tge statement 👏

I still can't believe that was Danny Dyer!
 

That's funny because my local Jag dealership which I pass 10 times a week has a forecourt of about 70 of them and they ain't shifting. There is nothing clickbait about it - their sales have dried up and that's from their own press release. Just because their lines may be stalled doesn't mean there aren't tens of thousands of cars dotted around for sale. 

Well this was expected 
Jaguar Sales Crash 97% After 'Woke' Rebrand! Is This the End of British Luxury?
WWW.IBTIMES.CO.UK Jaguar's European sales tanked to just 49 cars in April 2025 after a divisive rebrand and EV pivot. Can the iconic...  
it’s amazing how normal people could see this happening but corporate marketing executives couldn’t😂
 
49 cars sold in one month globally has to be a record low!

this one was the only upcoming game that looked promising enough and seemed the gameplay followed the deus ex/dishonored formula but sadly we can't have nice things, it's a pity

Perfect Dark has been cancelled and the studio closed down. Feel very sorry for multi-billionaires Microsoft as this is clearly a very difficult time for them financially🙄
Microsoft cancels the Perfect Dark reboot that blew us away last year, closes developer The Initiative | PC Gamer
WWW.PCGAMER.COM Microsoft laid off 9,000 employees today, and cancellations and closures are following.  

It's amazing how these companies who continue to make massive profits manage to persuade people that this behaviour is normal. 

The cockney at the Malibu Club 🤣

Perfect Dark has been cancelled and the studio closed down. Feel very sorry for multi-billionaires Microsoft as this is clearly a very difficult time for them financially🙄
Microsoft cancels the Perfect Dark reboot that blew us away last year, closes developer The Initiative | PC Gamer
WWW.PCGAMER.COM Microsoft laid off 9,000 employees today, and cancellations and closures are following.  

28 years old. Man. RIP Diogo Jota 💔

More Resident Evil






 

I replayed the game last year and it was great fun! Huge step up over GTA III from a gameplay and narrative perspective. The soundtrack was amazing and who could forget taking a chainsaw to the Malibu Club! The latter stages to unlock the final mission was a bit of a grind - not so much back then, but certainly now, but the majority of the game is excellent. 

I replayed the game last year and it was great fun! Huge step up over GTA III from a gameplay and narrative perspective. The soundtrack was amazing and who could forget taking a chainsaw to the Malibu Club! The latter stages to unlock the final mission was a bit of a grind - not so much back then, but certainly now, but the majority of the game is excellent. 

Hey everyone,
 
I know FG has been pretty quiet for a while, so I’m not sure how much traction this will get — but I’ve been feeling a bit nostalgic lately and thought it might be fun to start a series of threads revisiting some classic games from back in the day.
 
First up: GTA Vice City — a game I’m pretty sure a lot of us here played and loved. I wanted to kick things off by sharing some of my own memories and inviting others to do the same. Whether you played it solo, with friends, family, or just have moments that stuck with you — missions, music, mayhem — I’d love to hear it.
 

 
For me, one of the biggest standouts from that era of GTA was the soundtrack. The 80s music was just perfect — imagine cruising down the strip with Toto or Michael Jackson blasting on Flash FM. I honestly think if Rockstar ever remade Vice City (or folded the music into GTA VI), it’d hit hard with fans.
 
The setting was on point too — that whole neon-drenched, Miami-inspired vibe. I still remember the first time I flew a helicopter in-game (pretty sure Vice City was the first GTA to have them?) — planting bombs in a construction site, then later storming Diaz’s mansion… total chaos.
 
And of course, who could forget spawning a Rhino tank just to wreak havoc around town? Or the classic 80s fashion — Hawaiian shirts and pastel suits everywhere. I wasn’t around for the 80s, but between the music and style, this game made me wish I had been. (Still a big fan of 80s rock!)
 
So yeah — anyone else feel like sharing some Vice City memories? Favorite missions, hilarious moments, radio stations, or just how it made you feel back then? Would love to read your takes.
 
 

They did 🏆👏
 
Great team effort considering some of the players like Delap were playing in the shitty club world shit cup 🤪

Forza Horizon 4 or 5
 
You can do stuff if you choose, missions, challenges etc but you can also just cruise around. Both  are great games 🙂
 
4 is set in the UK and 5 is Mexico.
 
Think they're on PS5 now as of quite recently 

Wow, thanks for the memories. I would love to see this franchise again, I miss the dinosaurs in a survival horror universe.

I (surprise surprise) fucking hate adverts in general. I dont watch tv so i get to avoid them there...but yes, it has gotten to the point on YouTube that I stop watching videos that I'm enjoying. There's an advert at the start of a 12 minute video, then a couple of minutes in I get a 50 seconder. I have no tolerance for it and I stop watching. It's fucking annoying, particularly when you also have to deal with the YouTuber plugging another product themselves part way through the video. It's ruined YT for me, but then again most of the content is mindless nonsense these days anyway🫠

I have been using uBlock Origin on Firefox for about a decade at this point, maybe even more, the internet is a cesspit without it, I browse FB for example sometimes and I get the default experience because uBlock can't detect its ads and it is infuriating, I would scroll past 20 posts for example and 10-15 of them would be ads or irrelevant stuff that I don't follow, can't the greedy morons understand that if I can't even see what I want then I won't care about your shitty site? At this point both with windows and the internet you are constantly fighting to reverse as much as possible the rampant enshittification going on

It's become unbearable, so I also use ublock origin on firefox + sponsorblock, it works pretty well.

I can't believe how bad YouTube has gotten of late - literally advert spam is insane and they are even worming their way into Premium which is a kick in the teeth to paying customers. I was watching an 8 minute video earlier and was presented with a 30 second advert, I then skipped about a minute of the video and was presented with the same advert which was unskippable once more. Not even halfway through and a 59 second video then popped up and to finish off, I was awarded the same 30 second advert I've already seen twice with about 40 seconds left of the video. So that was about two and a half minutes of adverts on an 8 minute video in which one was repeated 3 times!
 
Also checked out a System Shock 2 Remastered video which was from a stream and 3 hours 31 minutes long - there was about 40 advert slots in that alone. Assuming the majority are a minute and unskippable, that's almost half hour of adverts in a severely broken up video where if you wanted to quick-skip, you'll probably land on a one minute advert 6 clicks out of 7. You could sometimes bypass really annoying adverts by refreshing but now I seem to keep seeing the same ones over and over and maybe after 15 refreshes then I get lucky and hit a 5 second advert which can be skipped but even after all that, I've saved myself about 10 seconds. 
 
It's just turned into extreme greed and done in the most laziest way imaginable. Seeing the same Primark/Bellingham adverts 15 times in 20 minutes watching videos is becoming torturous and they are planting so many in long-form videos now that it's making some unwatchable. 

I can't believe how bad YouTube has gotten of late - literally advert spam is insane and they are even worming their way into Premium which is a kick in the teeth to paying customers. I was watching an 8 minute video earlier and was presented with a 30 second advert, I then skipped about a minute of the video and was presented with the same advert which was unskippable once more. Not even halfway through and a 59 second video then popped up and to finish off, I was awarded the same 30 second advert I've already seen twice with about 40 seconds left of the video. So that was about two and a half minutes of adverts on an 8 minute video in which one was repeated 3 times!
 
Also checked out a System Shock 2 Remastered video which was from a stream and 3 hours 31 minutes long - there was about 40 advert slots in that alone. Assuming the majority are a minute and unskippable, that's almost half hour of adverts in a severely broken up video where if you wanted to quick-skip, you'll probably land on a one minute advert 6 clicks out of 7. You could sometimes bypass really annoying adverts by refreshing but now I seem to keep seeing the same ones over and over and maybe after 15 refreshes then I get lucky and hit a 5 second advert which can be skipped but even after all that, I've saved myself about 10 seconds. 
 
It's just turned into extreme greed and done in the most laziest way imaginable. Seeing the same Primark/Bellingham adverts 15 times in 20 minutes watching videos is becoming torturous and they are planting so many in long-form videos now that it's making some unwatchable.