Since I’ve gone almost entirely away from physical media, I’ve had to come to grips with the notion that the “digital future” probably means losing access to things I’ve paid money for, from time to time.  It’s actually pretty rare that this happens, and usually there are workarounds.  Like, I bought “Bioshock 2” on Microsoft’s long-defunct Games For Windows Live Marketplace, and I can’t download it any more, but it’s also available on a myriad of different systems at this point.

Most of which have controller support.  I’m still annoyed by that.

Of course, if a digital platform shuts down, I can’t buy anything new there even if I still have access to all of my old stuff.  This usually sees me doing a last-minute binge of “I might play this some day” and then I don’t, and today’s binge is probably not going to be an exception.

With the Xbox 360 marketplace going offline in July of 2024, I thought I should look through the games on offer and just make sure that I had everything I could possibly want from it.  It turned out that the list of “I might ever want this” and “I don’t already own it” was pretty short, so the binge wasn’t much of a strain on the wallet.

Exit was a puzzle strategy platform sort of game that I played to death on the PSP back in the day.  Mostly while hiding from my actual day job, if I’m honest, but it’s not like the difference in productivity between “me pretending to work” and “me abandoning all pretense of working” was all that massive anyway.

Anyway, you’re a dude with an awesome scarf who saves people in all kinds of trouble, and the game is just super stylish.

I never played the sequel, but now I own both it and the original and may even play a level and get that nostalgic feeling and then forget to ever come back to it.

Speaking of nostalgia, I am a young lad of the age to have seen Tron in the theaters and owned the Official Novelization Of The Major Motion Picture and played the Official Arcade Game whenever I could cage a quarter from my parents, and apparently the Xbox 360 Marketplace is the only way you can play the game without buying one of these gorgeous things from Arcade 1up:

But while I like Tron, I don’t six-hundred-dollars-LOVE-Tron, so spending five bucks on the Xbox 360 version will do me just fine.

I didn’t buy Discs of Tron because (blasphemy!) I was never a super fan of it.

I wanted one other Xbox 360 game – “Flatout: Ultimate Carnage” – but it looks like that was only released on disc, or if it ever was available via the marketplace it has been pulled.  Fortunately, you can currently buy the entire Flatout series from Steam for 8 bucks, so I did that.

Imagine my delight when I tried to launch it and it simply closed without any sort of error message.

Thanks to the fine folks over at PCGamingWiki, I discovered that this was a known issue and that I needed to download and install the Vista-era Games for Windows Live client, which miraculously still works on Windows 11.

The game also looks pretty good at 4k, and controls very nicely with my repurposed Stadia controller.  I remain very glad Google decided to unlock those after that particular part of the digital future died, because it is a super comfy game pad.

With the startup and controller issues resolved, I decided I’d play Just One Race to see how it worked… and finally stopped myself five races later.  There’s just something about the way the physics work in this and the godawful horrid soundtrack and all the wonderful things you can crash into and send flying that make it a very compelling package.

Anyway, there’s probably some DLC I should pick up while I still can.  I’ve got like 10 months.  Plenty of time to forget I need to do that.