And that was apparently totally unintentional! Ratzenberger auditioned and got the role in part because he had stage fight training; that’s why he looked so good in that battle scene.

I unironically love House II. I even bought the soundtrack on CD, which was weirdly expensive. It’s a goofy horror comedy, sure, but it has tons of heart. And the Bill Towner scene is fantastic.

Yeah, I think that worst-case scenario here is that Microsoft stops making physical consoles (which I assume would take the form of not making a next-generation console rather than stopping abruptly in the middle of this one) and the only way you can install games natively is to buy a PC.

I thought Maher was fun in House II, but really I think it’s because he was just playing himself - a smug, smarmy douchebag who thinks he’s significantly smoother and smarter than he actually is.

Plus, the way they recently split up the tiers makes “Microsoft GamePass” branding make even more sense than it did before (and it even made sense then).

Basically, people are mad about exclusives if they aren’t on the specific plastic box that they’ve dedicated their lives to.

Every situation is different, but in many cases you’re committed to a certain number of seasons but that’s not guaranteed. There are renewal options at the end of each season and the studio can decide to not pick up that option.

Sure it’s great in the short term, but if you can play everything on a PC, people have less incentive to buy a console. I know I never saw any reason to pick up an Xbox. A thing has to have exclusives otherwise I feel like I’m just wasting my money.

That’s definitely part of it. I use Macs at home as my primary machines and prior to getting a NUC for couch gaming I only had a PC for a few very specific purposes (media server, ripping physical media) so I don’t have a need for a powerful one.

The NFL is partnering with Neuralink to embed cameras into every attendee’s forehead.

I didn’t mean forced in terms of a legally binding edict being handed down by the CMA or similar entity, I was pointing out that there were no formal agreements in place until the CMA made it clear that they were looking askance at the deal. “Cajoled” would’ve been a more explicitly correct word, but the CMA…

You’re a lot better at branding than Microsoft.

That’s one of the biggest reasons for not wanting to game on PC as a primary (or even secondary) platform. I like being able to turn the console on and play without having to worry about (among other things) whether I need to upgrade my GPU or other components, if my drivers are up-to-date and compatible, did Windows…

Here’s hoping.

Welp, time to see if I was right.

In fairness, he looks more like young Jay Leno in the video thumbnail.

That’s my thought as well. It’s good that there are two console makers directly competing (Nintendo is off very successfully doing their own thing like they always do), but bad that they’re trying to bludgeon their way to superiority via exclusives.

Ditto Activision-Blizzard — and indeed, Microsoft agreed to keep Call of Duty multiplatform, in part because they’re just not going to recoup those costs by going exclusive immediately. It would be leaving money on the table.

When Xbox Cloud Gaming was utterly unusable over the holidays I walked right into a Target and bought a 1TB Series S. They had a couple of Series X’s as well and they were the same price; it was tempting to get one of those instead but I didn’t need another one at home and the Series S is much better for travel.

That’s very similar to my use case. I bought my first Series X mostly because I wanted to be in a position to play the exclusives that were coming down the pike and I had and have absolutely no desire to do any gaming on PC except in very specific circumstances (mostly online play with friends for games like BG3 or…