Microsoft has just upped the cost of Game Pass by 50% - the top tier is now an eyewatering £22.99 a month.
Aaaaand they've backed down. Game Pass Ultimate is dropping from £22.99 to £16.99 with immediate effect, but you don't get new Call of Duty games for a year or so after release.
That suits me absolutely fine, as I have no interest in Call of Duty whatsoever, and it's interesting to see that they've basically admitted that they were charging six quid a month for that alone. It's still a reasonably pricy subscription but I get a lot of use out of it and I guess the challenge is now on for them to add enough games to it regularly enough to make it seem like good value.
Game Pass Premium, which doesn't include day one releases at all, stays at £10.99.
Mostly this is stuff is interesting because we're immediately seeing the new Xbox boss making big changes; I wonder where this is going to go.
Bin: Resident Evil 4 Remake. I don't like it. It's brown, it's boring and it's nothing like proper Resident Evil.
Play: The Witcher 3. The various rumours of a new expansion this year (which seem very odd) have reminded me that I never actually played the two existing expansions for this, and of course because it's been years since I played it, I've started the whole thing again. Graphically it's starting to show its age and the camera and controls are definitely a bit different to the norm, but my word it's absorbing isn't it. I'm still pottering around White Orchard doing side quests for peasants and it's just brilliant.
I'd like to have a go at South of Midnight, too, now that it's hit PlayStation, and it's surprisingly inexpensive.
South of Midnight is really great. The combat gets a bit repetitive perhaps but everything else about it is superb, especially the music. I hope it finds a new audience on PS5.
and Roger
Short, beautiful and profoundly sad. Go in completely blind if you can.
Thanks to cavalcade and feltmonkey for recommending this.
Play
Resident Evil 4 Remake - I haven't played Resi 4 since it originally came out on the GameCube. Despite the general reaction, I remember being really disappointed with it - I'd loved all the Resi games up to that point (the majestic Resi 1 remake most of all) and this linear action game with its constant shooting and crazy bosses wasn't at all what I wanted. Going back to it twenty years later and I feel… pretty much exactly the same. It's fine I guess but I don't like the setting much, gunning down peasants feels a bit unpleasant, I'm spending 75% of my time kicking barrels and the whole thing is browner than poo. I'll stick with it for a bit as I remember the castle section getting much more interesting in the original but on the whole this feels like a very faithful remake in that I didn't like it then and I don't like it now.
Mario & Rabbids: Sparks of Hope - I put about ten hours into this a while back but I've gone back to it this week and it's pretty great. The setting is as uninspired and generic as Mario spin-offs always seem to be (although the actual Rabbids themselves are hilarious, maybe I'm easily pleased) but the combat system is really decent in an XCOM-lite kind of way and hitting goombas in the face with rocket launchers never gets old. The Switch 2 tidies up its framerate and dramatically improves its loading times, too, which is great.
Want
I have… no idea. What's coming out this year anyway? I'm mostly going through my backlog at the moment, with the occasional dip into interesting-looking Game Pass titles.
EDIT: oh, 007: First Light of course.
Bin
There isn't a bin in the world big enough for Trump's bloated, festering corpse. Get a move on, cholesterol.
Garwoofoo