Agreed. But not impossible. Insignia got original Halo 2 Xbox Live servers back online. Most nights you can find a game easily with 20-40 people online during peak hours. It requires a soft mod and maybe 1-2 hours of set up to get online. If anyone could just turn on their old Xbox and play, I’m confident those numbers would be in the hundreds at least.

Allowing people to run private servers is an easy way to allow those that want to play to keep playing in an era where most games have some level of online functionality.

stopkillinggames.com

One of their ideas is allow private match/self hosted online services for any game that shuts down it’s servers.

We got very lucky in SE Indiana. Drive which is normally an hour (we went to in laws house) was 1.5.

Clear skies the entire time and a beautiful day in the mid 70s.

My parents flew in south TX thinking they would outsmart the weather and ended up being covered in clouds.

Porn! Chipotle! Xbox!

I try to patronize my local game shops as much as I can. I’m not into card or board games which limits where I go but I’m lucky enough to have a few local game stores that sell a lot of retro games for fair prices.

Of course with new games (I still like to buy physical quite often) I generally have to buy from the big stores but I make it a point to avoid gamestop.

Return that immediately. I worked for gamestop for about 6 years from 11-16. It was a horribly run company that should be a relic of the past like circuit city and blockbuster. Executive management would rather make tiny profits than make pro-consumer changes that would draw in gamers (things like tournaments were actively discouraged).

I really hated that gamestop became a meme stock. It meant executive made a lot of money from no effort on their own. I would have much rather seen their shares go to zero and then get bought for pennies on the dollar, leaving the top brass on their ass.