YouTube link here. Ezzie makes her presence known.
This week, Tony gets a new name, due to his crippling fast food addiction. Also, videogames. But then we just hang out and dismantle the concepts of right and wrong. You know, just super chill. Enjoy!
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This episode was posted on Pi day!
Couple of things – yeah, Xbox Game Pass is awesome. I’m not wholly convinced Ultimate is worth it; my sub runs out just over a year from now and I’m not sure I’ll renew it. Whenever I go to stream games from the cloud, there’s always a 15 minute wait (recent thing, never used to happen). And the other benefit, ability to play PC games, is less handy now my son is mostly into Fortnite on his computer.
But yes, I’ve played a bunch of games I never would have bought. Good example is Control. So I’m just off the back of 130 hours in AC Valhalla, and actually it was some oddly miserly Ubisoft collect-a-thon that finally put me off going any further, because until that point I had completed most of the DLC and was up for continuing. I digress. I couldn’t think what to play next, I’ve been at it for months, literally. So I gave Control a whirl because I remember you mentioning it. I avoided it because it looked like paranormal horror shenanigans, which isn’t my cup of tea. But I’m really enjoying it! It’s hard, and I die a lot, but I’m getting strong Half-Life vibes. Not sure why, it’s obviously not the same. I’m digging the story telling being the focus, though.
Before Control, I did briefly try RDR2 and, lordy, moving that guy around after months of light footed Eivor was like walking through treacle. I’m not sure I can play that, at all. Totally jarring.
Anyway, I also avoided Hifi Rush. I have all the rhythm of a cabbage nailed to the floor, but you made it sound great, and I guess it would be daft not to sample 1st party games.
I have to say, I bounced hard off Starfield. I even paid $35 to unlock it a couple of days before release, and it looks *amazing* on the Series X and an OLED TV, but… I dunno what it is, just didn’t click. Which is odd, because it should be My Type Of Game(tm). I’ll go back to it eventually, I think. Maybe it needed some QoL refinements, like Cyberpunk (which, holy crap, I wish they had stopped tinkering with. I’m half way through that game and they redid like ALL the mechanics and now my build doesn’t work and I just can’t seem to play it).
Control! I was so sad that I had quit that game before they put all the difficulty and accessibility options in it. It was just too hard. But it’s an incredible game.
Gamepass Ultimate is a little confusing. Yes, it’s Gamepass Console plus Gamepass PC (which I mostly don’t care about). But it’s also Gamepass Core, which is the thing that lets you play online on an Xbox. And some games… even essentially single player games… require you to have that option.
So basically, I got Ultimate so I would have more options on my console. But I enjoy the other benefits, as long as I’ve got it. 🙂
Yeah, I sample almost everything, now that it’s coming with the subscription. I’m even discovering game-types I never thought I’d be into. And tons of games that I had only a passing interest in, but never enough to buy them. I’m really enjoying it for the most part.
The email discussion was timely. I was reading this article from Cory Doctorow about voting with your wallet, etc.
https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/12/give-me-convenience/
“Antimonopoly policy is the foundation for all forms of people-power. The very instant corporations become too big to fail, jail or care is the instant that “voting with your wallet” becomes a waste of time.”
Anyway, I was talking to Shan about this and we eventually realized that because there’s essentially no way to shop ethically, it’s basically like the Good Place. And when you guys hit upon that in this episode, I was like YES! That’s *exactly* it.
I wish late teenage me had been able to watch the Good Place. I was a clownshoe in my ethics class in school, mocking the teacher for the pointlessness of it all. I don’t blame her (utterly dry) methods in retrospect, I was just too much of an idiot to get it. But they should just make kids watch the Good Place these days, honestly. It’s profound. Or, at least, it’s good communication of seemingly dry but incredibly important subjects wrapped up in good humour.
Actually, “voting with your wallet” is only a tiny part of that article, it’s about monopolies, basically.
See, here in the US, we don’t get ethics classes. 😉
I’ve been dealing with some of this in my therapy, lately. You very, very rarely can make the ‘right’ choice, the ‘good’ choice, the ‘harmless’ choice. So you have to decide the choice you’re okay with, the choice you can live with, and go with that.
Every one of us has made decisions for the environment, the poor, and other noble causes. And every one of us is friends with someone who DIDN’T make those choices… but made other choices like that, that we didn’t make. Just gotta do the best you can do.