Mr Party Hat

Seeing as you've subscribed, give retail a go. They've completely reworked the levelling experience in last week's patch, so you start at Dragonflight and it gives you a (supposedly) coherent story, right up to the current plot. And you can buy a house now!

Retail is probably the strongest WoW has ever been. Apparently the subscriber numbers are back above 10 million too, proper halcyon-day figures.

LotRO finally has UI scaling! And a map that doesn’t stretch in widescreen! It’s beautiful!

Well, it’s not, it’s still fairly ugly and the bare minimum they could have done. But at least it’s readable now.

Spirited Away was probably the first anime I ever knowingly watched (stuff like Speed Racer was snuck into my life as a kid, I had no idea they were anime at the time).

And yeah it's brilliant. Not my favourite Ghibli, but I love how ALL Ghibli films turn their back on the usual anime tropes. If I'm looking for anime to watch, I spend most of my time trying to avoid chibi(?) faces, melodrama and sexism. Which is bloody hard.

Aside from slice of life stuff, and anything aimed at women (I forget the name of the genre), the disaster trilogy (Your Name etc) are the only things I've found that come close.

It's been ages since I watched any anime, but I'm enjoying Natsume's Book of Friends. Seems to be quite low on anime tropes, and I've always found Japanese ghosts/spirits/whatever Yokai are fascinating. They're so different from anything in Western culture.

Now that Game Pass Ultimate costs an eye-watering £275 a year, is PS Plus Extra the new 'best deal in gaming'?

I just bought a year for £80 and downloaded Granblue, Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth, Epic Mickey, Skate Story, the Red Dead Remaster, and Blue Prince. And that was just from the first screen. I'm sure they're all on Game Pass too, and PS Plus Extra doesn't have the big day-one releases, but how many of those does Xbox actually have any more?

Even when I've bought Fable and Horizon 6 for PS5 (instead of renting on Game Pass), I'll still be £100 up. And I'll own more games.