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.

For us, it was thrown into relief by the fact that they were also pushing $130 dollar Star Wars pre-orders - two hundred dollies Canadian, for my northern peoples - while reminding you that they can push a petit bouton in France and take your shit.

You might recall the previous time Ubisoft was in the news about this stuff, talking about their Ubisoft+ service, where the Ubisoft man said that we needed to get comfortable not owning our games. His full statement is a little richer, more robust, there's a subtle minerality, but man oh man. You go'a read that room, bruv. Because a rube like myself might come to think these things are all of a piece.

Back in the day, Garb and I eventually had to just stop buying EA Sports titles after a while because multiplayer didn't work at launch, over and over. But while we were buying it, for some reason we made his dad buy it also, because we thought it would be fun to play Skins or something with him in Tiger. It didn't work, but when he asked how they could just sell things that didn't work, we didn't really have anything meaningful to say. This sorta broke us of the habit.  It's foul what we had been trained to expect.

Occasionally issues like game preservation or… whatever Ubisoft is doing right now end up in front of a judge.  It's complex, because like the full text of a EULA there's room to interpret just how binding some aspects of it are.  It's often the case that issues of a technical nature end up before the oldest possible men, the most wizened coots imaginable, and it's frustrating because they don't understand an entire class of Reality that touches every inch of our lives. But I would like one of these coots around when this kind of shit hits court. Just to be like, "You want to do what? What the hell?" Exasperated sigh. "No, say all that shit again real slow."

(CW)TB out.