Game Pass makes this a much easier decision (after the car crash of FH3's PC release & feeling FM7 still doesn't really live up to the FM4 era of the series going all out, this would be a hard sell for $100).
I'm not entirely cool with day 1 DLC (Bond), that price tag for launch-day access, and some of the other stuff around "things we're not giving to people who didn't have $100" like VIP status (which comes with a 5 million credit free property and a wheel spin credit coin-doubler this year? Seems like lacking VIP means you've got to grind a lot more for credits if you want to buy a lot of the cars and play around with the upgrades for them). But at least the demo indicates that getting 4K60 on PC is possible this time so assuming the demo is reflective of the technical state of the full game, that looks like a positive step (especially if making use of Game Pass pricing).
Looking forward to bumping into people in the Giant Bomb Club (seems like playing co-op/online campaign gives a huge boost to rewards and also will be rather more interesting driving vs playing against drivatars - the Horizon games have never really been about winning every event for me so online is a good match).
Edit: Also this review format is extremely good. Top stuff.
What about the writing in that linked video is aged or considered "bad writing"?
I mean, it's all rather clunky "edgy snark" but specifically it ends with a misogynistic attempt at a put-down that doesn't even work in a game where you have some limited control over what the characters are wearing so that's not even what the writers expected to be worn during that scene. It's misogyny for no good reason that doesn't even work within the mechanics of the game (ability to change uniforms). That feels super dated.
I'm not even entirely clear what you think an appropriate "critical reaction" to that line would be. The player is permitted to have a positive interaction, if they so choose, with a bigoted character...that's not a moral position, that's just how RPGs work.
I don't get this idea that it's somehow troubling that ME has racist characters...it's a story, not every character is going to be a shining paragon of virtue. In the best stories, no characters are.
Typically good stories comment upon the problematic elements in them. That's what makes them different from just replicating bigotry. And that's something that has increasingly been commented on in critical writing about games in more recent years.
You absolutely don't have to allow the protagonist to be happy to have a racist on the team or give them a positive reply when they justify their racism analogy. There certainly wasn't the option to shove the character out the airlock - the options are always going to be constrained.
Ashley having a narrative justification for space racism doesn't excuse her space racism.
Ye, and having that explained (by the protagonist) as "heart" is... not a good look. Some Bioware writing seems to age pretty quickly and that's definitely an example of something that would get more of a critical reception today than when it came out.
...or people questioning the quality of Mass Effect 2.
I mean, people have written book-length essays on how ME1 was the slightly janky but amazing world building retro-scifi game that turned into ME2's ensemble character piece (with mainly better mechanics - save us from resource gathering) while starting to fall in on itself before that game concluded, seeding the issues that only got more visible in ME3.
So on the topic of damage, I will say that I'm yet to see AIs damage their cars in a recent Forza (7 or the demo of this).
It feels like the assist/setting to turn on real damage (so a good bang will seriously harm your acceleration or turning) only applies to your vehicle and the AIs only ever have cosmetic damage applied. This... feels like too much of a penalty, especially when an AI causes a crash by trying to nudge your rear and spin you out (even if done accidentally) and they manage to drive away at full speed while your race is over. You basically have to pick only rewinds off or damage on to avoid such annoyances of the two combined.
So that metabolism correction was extremely not correct.
I think (because it's the only thing that roughly can be approximated to about 200 calories) that it's referencing the drop in basal metabolic rate observed in some early tests immediately after going onto a highly restricted calorie diet (about a 10% drop, which can be around 200 calories).
However, this isn't saying anything about long term metabolic stability (be that via age, changes in health, thyroids being weird things that can do funky things, or just some weirdness of your personal biology reacting to your current environment and diet) or the variation of metabolism between different people.
The recorded range of metabolisms in humans throughout academic literature is huge. This is somewhat given away when you see the typical units for BMR include "per kg of body weight" so the units themselves point to expecting larger bodies having significantly higher metabolisms in absolute terms of calories needed a day (so to make the range of values smaller/more comparable, we divide by the size of the body being powered by the energy). When you're having to use an axis (fig 1) between 3000 kJ/day and 10,000 kJ/d to plot your data for BMR, it's probably not accurate to say any two people will fall within 200 calories (800 kJ) of each other. (linked study is not looking for outliers, the full range of possibilities goes well beyond that plot)
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