Community Round-up | 2016

"The view from PTC Towers."

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The image above, as you can probably tell, is not my work. It was masterfully drawn by Liam. You may be wondering why there's underwear beneath the tree in lieu of presents. As tempting as it is to claim it's a Dutch tradition, that is, unfortunately, not the case.

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 by
 Chris
​ Brand

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@SuperCrisco

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As it's December, we can officially start thinking about Christmas, and as the year nears its end, we come to the last Community Round-up of 2016. We've dusted the old instalments off and flicked through the time-yellowed pages to bring you some of our favourite pictures and videos, which you'll find interspersed amongst some tasty new stuff.

"The underwear, Chris!" I hear you shout. "What about the underwear?!"

We thought it'd be nice to have a Christmas-themed image up there for you all, so James suggested a Paint picture might fit the bill, before this exchange took place.

Yes, we are serious writers here at PTC.

​We've also trawled through the forums to present to you a handful of meaningless stats that you may find interesting. Think of it like a progress screen at the end of a level, but instead of a page detailing how many enemies you've killed, you get a completely unscientific estimate of just how much time we've all poured into our pastime of choice.

​On the achievements front, we've collectively attained 100% completion in 33 separate games (or at least remembered to post about that many)! If you're wondering who completed the highest number of titles and gained the largest number of Achievements and/or Trophies, then you haven't been paying attention, have you? It was Sam. It's always Sam, I didn't even bother checking.

(He's added another 11,000 points since)

You probably can't complain, because you're all pretty good at procrastinating. The Procrastination Page has grown by 17 pages. That's 170 posts. It would take a sharper mind than I to work out the overall man hours that have been wasted and the total cost to the economy, but experts believe it to be significant. Probably.

A lot of time was also spent rating the games you played. 15 pages of recommendations from staff and community members about games both old and new. Yours truly did attempt to tally up just how many games had been rated, but lost count at 60 (or was it 61?) with a few pages still to go. It's a significant number though, according to a different set of experts. 

ImmaturityRules living up to his name.

When it comes to sharing screenshots and videos, you certainly weren't slacking! A whopping 30 pages have been added to the Share Your Screenshots thread. That's hundreds of images and clips, and hours of entertainment.

Hopefully next year will see even more, if only so you don't have to see any more header images from Paint.

Over the course of the year we've grown from 186 registered forum members to 466 - pop in and say hi, we don't bite; unless you're one of the types that posts Russian porn, anyway - an extra 80 threads have been created and almost 4,000 posts have been made (at the time of writing, we'll likely have exceeded that when you read this).

Props to James for finding these statistics, and also for assisting Plas in the brutal elimination of Rodent.

Literally.

Rodent, still stinging from that collision, posted a video of Jam utilising some ungentlemanly tactics in order to secure victory. Or "being a dirty cheater" as he put it.

We're sure this is just a friendly rivalry.

You may remember some months ago that Sam tried to get someone, anyone, to buy Battleborn.

Well, he's at it again and this time he's serious.

Unfortunately it's climbed to the lofty heights of £8.99 since, but whilst the offer of a free copy is off the table, the offer of companionship remains.

Sam's been busy playing another multiplayer-focused shooter in Killing Floor 2 and shared a video of a particularly memorable boss encounter from the game. 

"Winning even as a full team just doesn't happen, you get obliterated 99 times out of 100, so finishing it solo was pretty special. I even got a message from a teammate thanking me."

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​That's not the best message he received this year though, no no. That accolade goes to the Ubisoft Viking, Jason Vandenberghe. I find it's much better to view this tweet on its own, without any context.

Another impressive video came from Heavyarms_Kai.

​Those totally accurate physics! ... We'll also forgive the fact Kai referred to Ryu Hayabusa as "a random dude"...

Liam had a very fortunate run in with Lady (or should that be Lad?) Luck in Modern Warfare Remastered. I think most FPS players have been in a position where the enemy have you pinned down, you're low on health and there looks to be no way out. It's a bad place to be, but it gets even worse when the grenade indicator pops up, just to let you know how screwed you truly are.

What a guy!

That's almost it from me, but who could resist the chance to re-revel in one of the best Plas fails?

Only Plas could follow the instructions to the letter and still fail. 

Just a reminder that we're currently running a giveaway. If you want to be in with a chance of winning System Shock: Enhanced Edition and System Shock 2 on Steam, then take a look here for details on how to enter.

As it's that time of year, we leave you with a terrible video game Christmas song.

That's a wrap, folks. We aren't going anywhere quite yet though, we'll still have content for you and you can find us in all the usual places; Twitter, Facebook and the forums. Have a great Christmas, and we'll see you in 2017!