I may be bored with electronics overall, but here is a major exception: this is the kind of ambitious-relative-to-the-hardware software we used to get monthly when I was a kid. If the games industry could re-discover this kind of form, my boredom would be erased completely. Unfortunately, I don't see that happening due to the reasons I discussed in this post.

I played the early portions of the "Gears No-Longer-of-War 5" campaign yesterday, and I'm not sure I'm digging the "Metro Exodus"-style pseudo open-world design. That, and the butch female protagonist is one of the most obnoxiously sarcastic, vulgar, low self-awareness character I think I've played in a video game.

Speaking of which, wifey and I were laughing at the female NPC character designs in the boring village "walking simulator" portion; they all had this phenomenon going on, and all of the "walking past" dialog was littered with f-bombs and selfish non-stop bitching about pointless crap.

That's not to say "Gears No-Longer-of-War 5" is a bad game: the gunplay is still just as fun as it was when the original title came out, the world art direction and technology is phenomenal, I like the addition of "Jack" and its skill tree, and the entire campaign supports drop-in and even split-screen co-op.

That said, I have been running into problems with what appear to be memory leak-related cache or VRAM thrashing, after the game runs for twenty or so minutes. I posted on a forum asking about it, and someone recommended downgrading to the previous Nvidia drivers-- which did help at least partially. Someone else posted and said the game is a hitching mess even on the Xbox One X-- yes, even the console version running on Microsoft's own hardware!