I’ve been playing Asphalt 9 recently, and I’ve started hitting the walls they throw in after tens of hours in which my options are to hope for lucky draws, wait for timers to reset, and watch ads, or pay.

It’s a legitimate shame, because the game is actually super fun, but the horribly predatory monetization is effectively a guarantee that I’m never spending a dime out of spite and I’m gonna quit once I get all the Xbox achievements, which is what I originally gave the game a shot for.

Edit: did I mention that the only ways to get many cars are loot boxes? I can’t finish certain sections of the career mode right now because I don’t have required vehicles, so it’s become a game of juggling the activities I can actually do at any given time.

It’s a global solution, not just localized to specific areas. No ads on my account on my Xbox, PS5, Switch, Google Home speakers (YouTube Music), Fire TV Stick, Android TV, Roku, my roommate’s Roku, or anyone else’s devices anywhere else, in addition to places like my phone and PC where I just use uBlock Origin.

In addition, I’m actually just splitting the family plan across three people, so it’s like $7.64/mo, which isn’t bad.

Whatever, PAYDAY 2 was already going to be the better game at launch, might as well make it the only one worth playing at all.

Just quickly checking Amazon, a 3060 will run people a little less than $300. Now, if you want the newest hardware, yeah, it’s overpriced to hell and back and we’ve been complaining about it for about half a decade, but a 1060 6GB from 2016 still handles a vast number of games, it’s what my wife runs in her build to date. In addition, games tend to cost more digitally on console because there’s no competition of storefronts, whereas PC has key and bundle sites plus countless competing storefronts that want your money, or even Epic and GOG that regularly do “please use our service” game giveaways.

Either way though, nobody wants to pay an additional $400 just for the privilege of playing a handful of games. That cost is almost 6 full-priced games alone.

Call of Duty

R6 Siege

Halo

I haven’t looked too far into it because I’m not that miffed about it, but after the initial opportunity to rename upon capture, I believe the only way to rename Temtem is a voucher to do so, which I’ve only seen in the premium battlepass.

I’m excited for CoD to not be a $70 gamble on whether or not the game is good. Like, 2019 was pretty good, 2020 was great, 2021 was bad, 2022 was bad, 2023 is most likely going to be bad, and 2024 is most likely going to finally be some good CoD again. It’d be real nice if I just had access to this via $15 subscription day one.

And speculative pipe dream hope: Activision has a load of currently unused IPs that I’d love to see Microsoft bring back.

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Don’t worry, you’re not alone

I’ve been told the tutorial sucks, but I do want to say that the PvP seems really good from a competitive standpoint. I don’t think there’s any RNG, just strategy.

My phone literally won’t let me download Doom (1993) of all games because “this app was built for an older version of Android.”

I have a Galaxy S22 Ultra, no custom OS changes.

After having watched Sony rest on their laurels for the last entire generation while doing effectively nothing for their platform except releasing new games, I am pushing for competition. The only company who’s seriously improved their platform in the last decade has been Microsoft, working on backwards compatibility, accessibility features like copilot and the adaptive controller, a full Chromium-based browser so you can do anything from your taxes to playing Mario 64 in-browser on an Xbox, and easy $20 dev access so that users can install Retroarch and have better backwards compatibility than people who actually own PlayStation and Nintendo consoles.

I want that for other platforms. I own a Switch and PS5 because I feel obligated to in order to play games. I own a Series S because I want one and I consider it a good value.

I wish they’d just let it through already. The way it looks, nothing changes for PlayStation gamers, Nintendo gamers get access to CoD for the first time since in years, Activision’s back catalogue goes to a company that’s way more likely to use it for something other than cool easter eggs in Black Ops games, CoD gets more accessible overall by being a part of the subscription, and Sony’s complete market dominance gets another blow that once again forces them to compete and improve their platform.

If anything, I wish the FTC had been this aggressive when it came to the Zenimax purchase. All that really did was give Microsoft the ability to make those games Xbox-exclusive (establishing a pretty scary amount of western RPG dominance) and plop them on Gamepass.

I had to fight to get my friends to move from Messenger to Discord, and man, I dunno if I could convince them to swap to Matrix until Discord’s enshittification levels start reaching the reddit-esque point of affecting the core user experience in favor of profit

That’s kinda the problem with community-based experiences.

It might not be what you’re looking for, but Temtem is listed as like 5GB on Steam. It’s basically Pokémon except built as an MMO. The entire main story can be played in co-op, but I haven’t found any of the dungeons or whatever yet as my friend and I have been doing a lot of exploration and side quests.

If that sounds interesting at all, it’s part of this month’s Humble Choice for $12 and that’s the best deal I’ve seen on it. Just remember to cancel your subscription after redeeming the games in the bundle.

The equilibrium would be fine if they never made the mistake of annoying their users. I got tired of pop-ups, animated desktop stripper ads, random loud audio, drive-by malware and fake download buttons, and most recently, interrupting my videos and games to show me 30 second ads. It’s that kind of overzealous creep the led to this problem on their end.