solitaire

I have to be honest, I forgot about Rebels. By the end of Season 2 it started putting out some real bangers. Don't blame anyone for not being into a kids adventure staring a brat with a laser slingshot, but I enjoyed it more than I did the Bad Batch.

I fell asleep during Solo lmao

I remember it feeling pretty pointless.

It's an extremely similar movie to the Swedish version, which only came out two years prior, down to using some of the same locations to shoot. I preferred the Swedish cast and found Craig a particularly poor fit in the American version. No question that Fincher's is more impressive stylistically, but it also made it feel a lot more artificial in a way that I don't think was a benefit to the plot.

Bear in mind I saw both when they came out so my memory is fuzzy. Also the screen was fuzzy, because I was watching the Swedish version on a laptop with one of the janky, standard definition rips we used to trade in school due to the fact all of our internet connections were slow and heavily metered.

I replaced mine with a G Pro Wireless. Similar enough shape that it was still comfortable to switch to but lightweight and no cable to snag. Wouldn't go back to having a cable, such a huge improvement.

That plot point fucking killed me the first time I saw it. I seriously knew an older Italian guy who unironically believed eating pussy was gay. He shared this while inexplicably hanging around high schoolers and giving them unsolicited sex advice.

I hate that a lot of the ones with a progression settle on XP to unlock tiers of cars rather than money and buying them too. I liked going to the used car dealer ship in Gran Turismo and seeing what I could afford.

Contemporary racing games literally just throw cars at you in hope to make it fun by constantly giving you new toys.

Forza Horizon 5 is bizarre for this. It has an acquisition system, but right after the intro you pick one of three cars, all new and not cheap. Then you get a custom rally car from the next race. A bunch of unlocks are going to give even you more cars afterwards, and will keep doing so regularly.

Like hang on, maybe let me work up from one of your cheap, older cars first and work my way up?

But this is also the game that unironically calls you "superstar" from the jump and sucks you off constantly.

My MX518 is still sees daily use, just with a family member now. I think it's old enough to drink now (edit: not American lmao). The Logitech logo at the palm has been worn down to nothing but otherwise doesn't look too bad.

I dug out my old Logitech Driving Force GT from the closet and blew off the dust. I haven't gotten into a new (to me) racing game since Gran Turismo 5. The hardcore simulationist trend doesn't interest me, I miss proper career modes and I have just had some awful bad luck with games being broken. I just occasionally revisit some classics.

So after many enthusiastic recommendations I grabbed Forza Horizon 5. My first impressions were great. The intro was a lot of fun, with the big set pieces causing me to fight my wheel as it bucked after being long out of practice.

But this was not representative of the actual game. The vast majority of the content is filled by fairly normal races with long stretches driving to them, back and forth across the same stretches of empty open world. It's sort of like a Ubisoft game, but just cars.

This still could have been a good time. I like the driving model well enough, there is a large selection of cars and the environment, while bland, is certainly much less of an eyesore than what awaits me if I go back to play Need for Speed: Most Wanted for the umpteenth time.

I've got some criticisms of the actual racing (the way it generates opponents and their vehicles sucks, the tracks are boring), but what really killed it for me was this slowly creeping, eerie discomfort that built up in the back of my mind over hours until it became overwhelming. The vibes are fucked.

This is Fortnite, the racing game. It's full of cameos and tie ins with influencers. Brands are plastered everywhere. Microtransaction adverts in most menus. Everyone talks in this creepy, corporate approved "wholesomeness" and aware of how "epic" what they're doing is. There is a really uncomfortable tension between this huge festival that completely empties Mexico of pedestrians and how much the game fetishizes Americaness.

I wanted to scream during a sub-plot where you race a bunch of rich douche bags who are beefing with some guy at the festival. The game throws out shit like "they shouldn't be discriminated against for their money, they can't help the fact they are rich" and talks about fucking therapy. All the writing is this bad, I hate every single character in these inexplicably unskippable cutscenes.

The radio selection is dogshit too.

https://rutracker.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=5747412

No translation though. There was someone who did subtitle them in English but that's long since been removed.

Online subscriptions have actually been a thing for a long time. In some ways it's even fallen out of favor, especially with the rise of the "freemium" model. MMOs are a great example of this as subscriptions used to be the price of entry with no other monetization, where as these days if an MMO uses subscriptions it's a secondary "convenience" fee after entry that is almost always combined with MTX bullshit.

If you're talking specifically about SaaS bullshit, it's because it required a certain level of infrastructure before it became practical. We had to move away from cash and needed reliable internet connections first, amongst a host of other developments. Anything that couldn't be a cash purchase in a physical store was losing significant market share. This didn't stop time restricted licenses on software still being a thing, but it was generally pretty niche software.

Citizen Sleeper. It's a short game about precarity and human connection. There are a few off ramps out of the current, desperate situation you're in that are usually weighed against letting someone go or leaving things behind. It's unique in games with difficult choices for so rarely about being given compelling reasons to do bad things, just choices that are hard for their emotional consequences.

Life is Strange hit me so hard. A content warning for people unfamiliar, but a core theme of the game is suicide. It comes at the topic a few times with different contexts that had me crying more than once. Highly recommended.