I'm hoping it's not november 31st all I know is that it was the last day of november and today is the first day of december (as I always write these the day after)
took a day off to go up to saitama to check out a round 1 spocha with a f355 challenge cab (non-dx) and some other treats. hoping to have a full writeup on this by next week but in the meantime my quick review is that the spo is very dated, the cha is fun (if by cha you mean chase hq 2 and other old arcade games), and the 3km roundtrip walk was not very pedestrian friendly.
I also ate my two meals of the day at 4pm and 6pm like someone who is not very smart
spent my evening giving two new free-to-gamepass games a shot, nfs unbound and soccer story. both I had firmly in my "thing I want to play because it's free but am not convinced I will enjoy enough to finish" bin beforehand, and I do worry that biased my perception of them, but also... they're both firmly in that bin lol.
nfs unbound, following on the trail of nfs heat which I enjoyed reasonably, is a pseudo-cel-shaded-character open-world nfs game, where the open world doesn't really contribute much to the experience unless you are being chased by cops.
the more I play open world racing games, the more I think I don't really like open world racing the way nfs defines it, because I get lost so easily when racing point-to-point in an open world, where you kinda have to follow the directions, but not really, but also you really have to. I much prefer circuit racing with some open world exploration (with collectibles and npcs and stuff) as a separate task. this is to say I prefer choro q. teehee!
the plot of nfs unbound is fine enough - it takes a little bit to kick, in but basically you and a friend, as foster children (unclear) are taken in by a well-meaning but not-good-at-communication mechanic, and your friend, who puts no value on family and loyalty, betrays you all by taking all the money and cars and running to a group of No-Gooders who promise her the world. a short timeskip later, it's up to you to win everything back by uh... participating in this extremely underground series of street races which is plastered all over social media (famously the most underground place)
as far as AAA racing game plots go it's serviceable, and it actually is good setup for the gameplay loop, which gives you a fixed amount of days to earn money and prepare your car for a big race. this time pressure lends itself to the risk/reward of how much to race in a day vs how much cop heat you want to risk, and the structure of the Big Tournament requires you to maintain many different classes of car, which should preserve variety.
ultimately, the game feels well made, although the dialogue is as blandly artificial as you would expect for a AAA game (there are lots of forced Millenial Jokes, like one where a podcaster is exposing the city's corruption but stops to do a pillow ad readout), and the actual driving is surprisingly challenging.
do I feel any need to continue playing it? not really. two hour review: like 40 anime shirts in the character customizer out of 10
ok i wrote too much, soccer story later, or maybe never