Word of mouth my ass. Heard absolutely nothing about this game for years and then suddenly a few weeks before launch ( and even now) reddit and youtube absolutely exploded in “can’t wait for this!” and “this is the greatest game ever!” posts. To me that smells of astroturfing. I don’t doubt it’s a good game and might pick it up when/if they drop denuvo, but it was definitely not “organic”

While this is good news, I think the worst impact of that war would actually be famine caused by lack of fertilizers during these critical months.

Lol, I know what you mean but take a look at that top 20 list and notice there’s only like 2-3 games that aren’t generic sludge pushed by shit companies ran by sociopaths.

Yes, I believe it was xenia. Iirc I did have to create an account, but in the emulator, and then it acted as a wrapper and logged me in automatically when running the game. Sadly I was not offline to test if it also works like that, but I imagine it does, since it was a “fake” and not actually connected to xbox.

True but for FH3+ they were further integrated with the Xbox login and I don’t think you can try them without an actual account and login. I did emulate and run FH1+2 and they were perfectly playable as off SP games with no strings attached

I don’t recall if burnout had cop chases, but if it did, note that FH games are very milquetoast, in that they try to not feature anything resembling illegal driving. If you fancy those, The Crew 1 (or 2) might be more your thing. Otherwise, FH is imo the single best non-sim open world racing game. It gives you a huge playground to dick around in, a crapton of cars, allows tuning and some limited customization, looks great (even on lower end hardware), sounds great and features arcadey but still somewhat complex handling. Its biggest sins are the fact that it requires servers, so it’s not exacly future-proof, it features some FOMO stuff and wheelspin gambling mechanics which are bound to get worse in FH6 (nothing ptw though), and it’s tied in to a microsoft account.

Omg me too! Wasn’t there a marketing term for person that tends to buy only failed products and based on them liking a product they could predict whether it would fail or not? Always thought I’m one of those. Mafia 3 - loved it, but hated mafia 2. Love AC 1,3 and syndicate but didn’t vibe with 2 or black flag. Loved Borderlands 1, hated all the sequels etc. Still, I feel the hate against starfield is way overblown and there’s too much polarization. A game can be either great or awful, with no more room for meh games.