BigDaddySlim

Yes, but also that was because of Bungie. Halo Studios is an Xbox Games studio meaning what Microslop says goes, Bungie was able to push back against that and have more control. We didn’t have the contractor fiasco with H1, H2 and H3 like we did with Infinite, and no spaghetti code as a result. There was massive crunch, especially for 2, but they maintained control over the project and a much higher capacity. Devs stated many times it was always due to their own ambition being bigger than the time available, or even hardware limitations (Halo 2 E3 demo build).

Did they just not see the backlash and class actions filed against PayPal/Honey, CapitalOne, etc. for this same affiliate code swapping scheme and just decided they’d do it anyway? Surely they had to have seen that, or did they think it was a good idea done blatantly and are trying to be sneakier about it?

Oh man I forgot about these, I had one as a kid and loved it. I had also found an old instrument cluster in my dad’s car parts horde and asked him if he could hook it up to the game and make it work. He was too polite to say it was a stupid idea, so he just said “sorry, bud, that’s a little outside my knowledge” but attached it to the top anyway so I could pretend.

Good times.

Toyota did it lazily in my '21 Rav4, just pull the fuse for the modem and it doesn’t care. Just don’t let a dealer plug into the system in case that data can still be downloaded physically

UK specifically right now, will probably spread soon to other places.

While Sony won’t be requiring age verification for UK and Ireland PlayStation accounts until June, you can verify early and avoid losing access to features. Both Microsoft and Sony are making age verification mandatory in the UK as more parts of the Online Safety Act come into force this year.

If you want a CoD game, pretty much any CoD up through Black Ops 2 is still decent, but only if Activision actually let’s the game go “on sale”. Halo games have a fantastic story (up until 5 at least) and the Master Chief Collection is usually on sale for $10.