You know what? Fuck the haters, Cyberpunk 2077 is a goddamn masterpiece. It is a slavish love letter to a genre that reached its absolute apex in 1989, a purity of angst and dystopia utterly ruined by the Wachowski brothers in their attempt to Hot Topic the future. It has zero interest in today's 2077, instead fixating on a 30-year-old, Japan-obsessed, technology-fetishing noir of blood and integrated circuits. And you know what? It's less glitchy on my Gen1 PS4 than fucking Borderlands 3 so fuck off with your whiney ass Youtube videos you choads. A year or two on and the bad reviews of Cyberpunk 2077 are going to come across like the bad reviews of Empire Strikes Back.

"Santa" brought the family a PSVR. This was primarily because my daughter, who will stop at nothing to turn her room into a Berlin discotheque ca. 1992, was a good candidate for Beat Saber. Turns out my wife was the Beat Saber candidate while my daughter loves Paper Beast, probably because it's basically a VR version of Toca Nature.

Me? I can only say that Wipeout HD VR is the ultimate expression of the medium, and I say that as a noted hater of VR.

I do not care that this defines me as a heinous old fart. I find it fascinating that culturally, we are having a moment where we celebrate not the past where we believed in the future, but the past where we started to suspect that the future was fucked... and we all look back nostalgically at an alternate universe where somehow the dystopia we feared was still preferable to the dystopia we're living.

COD:Cold War, Ready Player Two, chiptune... does GenZ actually want this shit or are they just being relentlessly marketed to the same way Pepsi thought I gave a fuck about '57 Chevy Bel Airs in 1985? I suspect it's the latter, I suspect it's insufferable and I expect that a checker in her 20s having to listen to Genesis all day while restocking a Trader Joe's is every bit as awful as the fucking Four Seasons were when Reagan was president.

Horizon Zero Dawn is still better, though. It has hope.