If there’s one thing we’ve learned, it’s to never underestimate the incompetence of this Aston team.

Well, yes, but the original purpose came from a very different era in the 90s, where you had really poor pay drivers and also teams that pretty much were only interested in showing up to the race to be seen for sponsorship purposes and were never even intending to actually race. It was intended to keep unserious cars out, and I would be highly surprised if they barred Aston from racing in Australia even were they 5 seconds off the pace.

The last time a car was excluded due to failing to comply with the 107% rule was in 2012. They’ve already waived it tons of times since then, most recently for Sargent and De Vries (2023) and Stroll (2021).

Well, the budget cap doesn’t really let them. Although I was thinking more about general F1 sponsors and not the team’s sponsors. It would be a bad look for the sport if some cars were excluded from running due to the 107% rule, so I assume they would just handwave it were it ever to come up.

Not likely. They would most likely need to be about 5-6 seconds off the pace for that. But even were that to happen, I think FIA would ignore it. Sponsors would be livid otherwise.

The two takeaways thus far seem to be: Red Bull will be winning by large margins again and Aston are astronomically shit.

Chaos Theory is an absolute all-timer and a must play for anyone even remotely interested in stealth games. Double Agent (Xbox version) is also quite good.

I never played Blacklist as I couldn’t get over the recasting of Sam and how different it looked, but I heard good things about the co-op in it. Always wanted to try it but never had anyone to play it with, so didn’t bother.

Alonso + Honda is really a match made in hell, holy shit. I was so hopeful for the season, man 😑

I don’t like linking to Reddit but I hope it is allowed in this instance. Someone over there made a summary of some connections between the Sultan and Epstein from the files: [link]

Same, it’s lovely to have as a kind of podcast.

Yeah, that’s pretty much exactly it. It’s very good, and I say that as someone not really all that into anime.

If you’re looking for another roguelike deckbuilder while you’re waiting for STS2, may I recommend Chrono Ark? I am finally playing it right now after having it heavily recommended to me for a while, and it’s really excellent. Very fun gameplay and a surprisingly interesting story, once it gets going.

It’s been really cool watching the project evolve, it started out feeling like a cool kind of “oh yeah, I guess this is public domain now so you can do something like this” kind of vibe, and slowly it evolved and grew its own distinct identity. It’s so much more interesting now than the initial concept trailers.

Ultimately as an FPS it will live and die by its gunplay, but as long as it’s at least “good enough” I think the art direction and creativity will get it the rest of the way. Sort of the same as with Bioshock (which clearly was a big inspiration for the developers).

My backlog is so long that I don’t tend to look forward all that much, I just wishlist and move on and then check in around release for reviews to see if they’re worth keeping wishlisted or not. So I don’t have a huge handle on the exact titles that are slated to be released this year.

I have been following Mouse: PI For Hire for a long time, though, so I am quite looking forward to that one (provided it turns out good).

Haas livery is my favourite by a mile. Clean, classic racing livery, no colour clashes, TGR sponsor looks great, flowing with the lines of the car and looks fast. Not too much black, either.

Cadllac is growing on me, but I like it from this angle and less so the other (and the asymmetry still kind of irks me). I don’t love the Audi when viewed straight from the side (the vertical line is so abrupt) but when viewed at an angle like this I actually think it looks good. Those are my top three I think, surprisingly enough. Red Bull looks good in renders but it looked much less impressive in real footage.

Pokémon Uranium is supposed to be good, I think.

Kind of looks like a worse version of last year’s. Still too much black, especially that black box on the sidepods looks bad. But on the whole it’s a lot of British Racing Green - which is a great color. So it’s not awful, just safe and boring. Which I guess is about par for the Aston brand.

I was about to bring that one up! That’s a great one and the ultimate “best of both worlds” edition for FF 6 imo. Keeps some important Woolsey character while improving the script. I also think this is the best translation of the Opera scene (it’s based on the GBA version I think).

White wheel walls are awesome and I think it looks okay from the white side, if a little boring. I don’t like it at all from the black side and it doesn’t really feel like the asymmetry adds anything other than a talking point. I wonder what a mockup of just the white side duplicated would look like.

The chrome bits on the logo towards the rear look great though, if they keep that in it’ll look awesome in direct sunlight.

Bleh. The orange + tons of black and especially in that blocky pattern is very Black & Decker appliance coded. Makes me think of a heavy duty drill, not a racecar.