The Hardening

Today on rhe 5: I played the demo for Pacific Drive and had a good time with it. It was also great to many positive reviews of the game when it recently launched. I bought it, started platying it, and at first it was the same good time I had with the demo. Unfortunately, I very quickly ran into the same save issue others have, and it's shifted the game into park for me.

Today on the 5: In the latest evidence of a long slide down in quality, Roku is soft locking their devices if users refuse to accept new terms of service with a lousy opt-out mechanism. This is a scummy way of dealing with customers, and I'm increasingly glad I jumped off the Roku train a while ago.

Today on the 5: I knew a reboot of The Crow has been in the works for a while now, and I figured I'd judge it on how it took a fantastically adaptable concept and did somehting interesting with it. Sadly, the remake looks almost impressively lazy and uninspired. Does this thing have a chance at being anything besides a letdown?

Today on the 5: Over the weekend I watched Poor Things, a movie that sounded like a bizarrely good time. It was an excellent film, but far weirder and more intense than I was expecting!

Today on the 5: You may have seen some news stories and heated discussions over the Google Gemini LLM providing some wildly inaccurate responses on prompts for things like vikings or religious figures. To some extent, this feels like an inevitable result of the unrelenting hype and misinterpretation of this technology.

Today on the 5: Based on some comments made by Wendy's CEO Kirk Tanner, reports started circulating that the fast food chain would be implementing "surge pricing" on food items. That was later changed to consideration of lowering prices at certain times, but either idea is monumentally stupid.

Today on the 5: As part of his excellent "When Phones Were Fun" series, Michael Fisher finally covered a phone I dearly miss. It was called the Palm Pre, and there are things about it I still wish I could get a modern phone with.

Today on the 5: 4 years after release, I've finally played through the majority of Cyberpunk 2077. The gameplay itself and the story are both good, but the standout aspect of the game is the world it creates for you to bounce around in.