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With people talking about Fallout now that would never have previously talked about Fallout, it's a great time to direct you to Bethesda's Vault 77 Page, which catalogs the origins of the entity known in the wasteland as The Puppet Man. There's also a lot of other text on the page, what your fifth grade teacher Mrs. Prang might have called a "primary source," which serves to situate the entire affair in that place and time. Bethesda was fully down to clown; it's a canonical vault, with item and holotape support. Seemed like it might be fun to go back.

In the modern era of course, Gabe is a petrol-huffing speed demon. In Wheel Saint, he made me anodize his filthy carnography with a Catholoid sheen. But even if we weren't obsessives in the past, we usually kept up with the big franchises because there was a lot of fun metaphors they could bang into unique gameplay. Burnout is the, I don't know… racing platformer, I guess? Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit was a really fun version of tag. We grabbed The Crew back in the day, sometimes called a "CaRPG," and Ubisoft allowed it to live and breathe and develop a unique audience. An audience they would scourge at the beginning of the month by seizing access to the game they bought.

There is no universe in which I purchase the new Ubisoft Star Wars game for $70 much less $200 now that they just delete games you bought from your library. This is especially frustrating considering I’ve been playing a lot of old games recently, specifically racing ones. Going back and playing these decade old games made me realize how much I dislike the new “festival” design for these sorts of racers. The Crew Motorfest and Horizon both want me to believe that I’m participating in some kind of sanctioned event and compared to games like NFS or even the original Crew it’s just super boring. I’m having a blast with NFS Payback and NFS 2015 right now which sadly is another of these Always Online games meaning that EA could pull the plug on it at anypoint. It’s wild because they still look and play better than many modern racing games. Just because a game is 10 years old doesn’t mean it’s no good anymore especially when you look at the current state of triple A games. 

When I see our engineer playing something in Early Access, I always make a note to come back and check it out - but Gabe beat me to it. This time it's The Planet Crafter, which just hit 1.0. It's a multiplayer techy buildy enviro sim type thing, but the couple screens and videos I saw didn't really communicate the arc. The arc is terraforming a hostile world into a paradise, which you can see in the video below. I've done the first part a ton - picking up all that shit, making shit from the shit, so many times that I don't really get out of bed for that layer anymore. I sure as shit haven't done this: