I refill my water bottle, get my room all situated, TV on, sound bar on, back rest pillow in place, controller in hand, kick off "Gears 5" from the "Xbox (Beta)" icon, sit through annoying splash screen FMV... game sits at the menu forever with a spinning "loading" icon... followed by a window popping up, "your data will sync soon!"... wait longer... longer...

Yay, it's done. Main menu shows up, and... "There is a game update". And the game... force closes. I open up the "Windows Store" application, and there is an almost 13 gig update. And the game quite literally won't even let me run it without the update.

I kick off the update. It's going slow. I "pause" it. I disconnect my VPN. Try to restart it, and... "Error". I click the "See details" link. In typical Windows and Microsoft fashion, I get the least helpful message ever: "Something unexpected has happened!" Why Microsoft's crap can't show you the extreme verbose, raw details like GNU/Linux so I can actually diagnose the problem, I've no clue.

So now I have a game which won't run without a patch, and a patch which won't install because "Windows". Welcome to your all digital future, today. What happens when these servers are gone some day, and you want to replay a game you paid good money for once upon a time? The game has to "phone home" every three seconds, and get back just the right messages, or it force quits! Of course, I'm not sure there's much worth revisiting here anyway; all games today are so contrived and derivative.

Makes me just want to play Sega Genesis the rest of my life: the cartridges still have me up and playing in ten seconds, thirty-plus years after they came out.