It's not as simple as asking whether you plan to play physical games.
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Whether to get a console with a disc drive has been a debate among PlayStation fans for the entire lifespan of the PS5. And that lifespan is coming to an end eventually. The future of gaming looks increasingly uncertain, with the PS5 (and other systems) having jumped sharply in price as computer hardware remains wildly expensive. Even so, Sony will need to release a next-generation console sooner or later. We've seen projections as far as several years out, but Sony can't put the PS6 off forever.
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Meanwhile, discs themselves have become a major gaming controversy. Sony will no longer make game discs starting in 2028, so although new games will presumably continue to launch for the PS5 after the PS6 comes out (just as they did for the PS4 during the PS5 era), you won't be able to get them on disc. Unless you've already got a massive collection of physical games or plan to build one, there's one compelling reason to get a disc drive on your console, and it's got nothing to do with gaming.
The choice is further complicated by the fact that Sony has released a number of different PS5 models, bifurcated between the Slim and Pro editions. The PS5 Slim Digital Edition has no disc drive, with a drive instead being available as an add-on for both it and the PS5 Pro. So which of the two flavors is a better choice for you? It depends on your budget, as well as your existing collection of disc-based media.
Sony's storage shrinkflation makes it easy to recommend one model
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The PS5 now comes in two tiers: Slim and Pro, with the former taking the place of the launch model and the latter offering a bit more horsepower for a lot more cash. The Slim offers both a digital-only model and one with an integrated disc drive, while the Pro's sole configuration is digital-only. If you buy one of those digital-only systems, an $80 disc drive add-on is available separately. If you're shopping for a used or refurb PS5, be aware that the Digital Edition of the original (non-Slim) model isn't compatible with the disc drive.
The PS5 Slim Digital Edition costs $600 and comes with 825GB of storage, while the disc version has an MSRP of $650 for the 1TB model. The digital Slim used to include 1TB, but in addition to increasing its price, Sony shrank its capacity. You may still be able to find 1TB slim disc models at certain retailers, but this is down to luck. Keep in mind when you put a disc into a PS5, the game still needs to be installed to internal storage. You won't save storage space by using discs compared to downloading digital games.
With all this in mind, the 1TB disc model wins on price. For $50 more, you get 175GB of extra storage and have a disc drive that can play all games released through the end of 2027. Physical games go on sale regularly, so the extra upfront cost will pay for itself before long. Plus, more base storage means you delay needing an SSD for your PS5, which is welcome given current storage prices,
Meanwhile, the heavier-duty Pro console has a sticker price of $900. At the time of writing, it's largely sold out, likely from people buying in anticipation for GTA VI following its major trailer. With the current low stock, you'll see scalper prices on many sites. If you can't find one for the normal price now, it's worth looking again after the GTA VI hype dies down in a few months. A PS5 should have a long lifespan thanks to PS4 backward compatibility and likely several more years of games to come. But if you're thinking about the PlayStation 6 being over the horizon and have no immediate need for a console, it's worth waiting.
The death of game discs and the Blu-Ray factor
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Sony sent shockwaves through the gaming community with its announcement that it would stop selling games on disc. That makes it more difficult to recommend the disc version of the PS5 for anyone without a library of physical PS5 or PS4 titles. But there is a major exception.
With games on disc on their way out and the gaming industry itself increasingly on fire, one of the most consequential factors to consider isn't gaming, but movie watching. Sony was one of the major forces behind the adoption of Blu-Ray during the format wars, and multiple generations of PlayStation consoles including Blu-Ray playback functionality helped the format to triumph over alternative high-definition formats. The PS5 is no different — if it has a disc drive, it can play Blu-Ray discs (including UHD Blu-Ray).
Blu-Ray is the easiest way to experience uncompressed movies in the highest quality currently available for home theaters. Streaming services advertise 4K video playback with Dolby Atmos mixes, but the picture and audio are still heavily compressed compared to 4K Blu-Ray. If you value high-fidelity media and have invested in a home theater setup, but still rely on streaming services to watch movies and TV, it's much easier to recommend a PS5 with a disc drive. Since you're buying the console regardless, adding a disc drive is the cheapest and most space-effective way to put a Blu-Ray player in your media setup. Similarly performant standalone Blu-Ray players cost several hundred dollars.
At current prices, the disc-based Slim console is the easy recommendation. For $50 more, you get extra storage, plus you'll have access to 14 years of PS5 or PS4 discs, along with a Blu-Ray player ready if you ever need it. The 2028 discontinuation of game discs is a factor to keep in mind, but it doesn't change the math. If you're buying the PS5 Pro, you can probably skip the disc drive unless you already have a physical game library. %!s()
Susanna Hoffs has a list. When she was a teenager growing up in L.A., she began keeping her list in a leather-bound notebook. That’s where she started writing down the names of everyone she’s ever dated. She began when she was just an arty high school kid in the 1970s, learning to play guitar by strumming along with her mom’s Beatles records.
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But her list kept growing in the Eighties, when Hoffs suddenly blew up into a wildly famous rock star. With her band, the Bangles, she sang one massive hit after another, from “Manic Monday” to “Walk Like an Egyptian” to “Eternal Flame,” strutting her stuff on MTV. The Bangles were making history as one of their era’s only all-woman rock & roll bands, four California girls kicking down doors for female musicians. Yet all the while, she kept scrawling more names, in that same notebook.
“There’s a whole bunch of different names,” she says today, laughing over coffee in a posh NYC hotel. “Some actors. Some fuckwits, in truth. Then I would note if it was just a one-night thing — it would have a ‘1,’ or maybe a ‘2.’” She flashes a mischievous smile. “It’s a juicy list.”
Years later, Susanna Hoffs has turned that notebook into an excellent album, The List — her first batch of original tunes in 14 years. “It’s been fun to revisit not only the old memories, but the whole arc of the thing, over these decades,” she says. The List is full of her signature folk-rock tricks, looking back on her long, twisted, remarkable life in music. Hoffs has made her name as one of rock’s sharpest interpretive singers, with impeccable taste in covers, which is probably why she’s always been weirdly underrated as a songwriter. But 40 years after the Bangles first topped the charts, she’s ready to tell her stories.
She made the album in her home, with her producer and kindred spirit CJ Camerieri, who’s worked with Bon Iver, Phoebe Bridgers, and Paul Simon. “CJ introduced me to a whole gaggle of musicians I really fell in love with,” she says. They started tinkering in a studio, but soon switched to more familiar ground. “We realized that my house had the best acoustics. It was the coziest, warmest, fuzziest environment. So we recorded the whole album in my living room. It was easy for me — I could just walk downstairs and make coffee, get everybody upbeat and in the mood.”
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The home environment makes sense, for such a personal project. “I had a Filofax notebook back in the day — this is how old-school I am,” she says. “Very posh, a nice leather diary. Pre-internet, that’s how I kept track of things. But I wrote down the name of my very first boyfriend, from high school. I don’t even know where he is now.” (She mentions his name — it only takes about 10 seconds to find him alive and well online, though obviously he’s a civilian, so nobody should bust him for fumbling a Bangle.) “So I met the first guy on the list, when I was 17. And then, as I went through my dating life, I just kept adding names to the list.”
She kept the list going into her thirties, until the Nineties. But it ends with a name on the final page, in all caps: “Jay Roach.” She met the Hollywood filmmaker on a blind date, married him in 1993, and they’ve remained madly in love ever since. Roach made the classic Austin Powers movies with Mike Myers, with Hoffs rocking out in the Sixties-themed house band Ming Tea. They’re very much the Hollywood It couple: Every time he’s on TV winning an award, he finds a florid way to brag that he’s married to her, as any husband would do. She laughs merrily when she’s reminded of the year he won a Golden Globe for Game Change, and thanked “my muse, lover, friend, and Jewish rock angel Susanna Hoffs.”
But singing about him on the new album turned out to be a challenge. “The last name is Jay,” she says. “I have to hold myself back when I get to the line, ‘You were the last one on my list,’ which often brings a tear to my eye as I sing it. I feel my throat tighten a little bit. When I get close to that moment, I have to go, ‘OK, calm yourself, girl.’”
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The Bangles were a unique presence in the Eighties — an indie-rock garage band that went pop, sending shock waves through MTV. These California girls had a foot in the Sixties, with their intricate Rubber Soul harmonies and jangly guitars. But they also embraced the Eighties glam, big hair and all. “We had a very thrift-store aesthetic,” she says. “We kept trying to drag the Sixties kicking and screaming into the Eighties, but we were just scrappy. The Go-Go’s were more polished — I don’t know if it was the tutus or whatever. They were so great. I think we wanted to separate ourselves. But it worked — we could do super-melodic emotional songs and we weren’t shoegazery at all.”
The Bangles’ electrifying 1984 debut, All Over the Place, was Sixties flower-power rock with a postpunk guitar kick and a tough-talking feminist edge. “Hero Takes a Fall,” written by Hoffs and guitarist Vicki Peterson, blew up on MTV, showcasing the band’s jangly Rickenbackers and acerbic humor, stomping on a fragile male ego. Plenty of Eighties folks heard this song, or saw the video, and flipped for their new favorite band.
One of those people happened to be Prince. The Purple One fell in love with their sound (maybe also the singer, though they never dated), and wrote them a hit, “Manic Monday,” with Hoffs singing the immortal hook, “Come on, honey, let’s go make some noise!” When they met him at Paisley Park, they jammed until 3 a.m. — he knew all their songs. “Manic Monday” reached Number Two on the Hot 100 chart, blocked by the song at Number One: Prince’s “Kiss.” It kicked off a flurry of hits: “Walk Like an Egyptian,” “In Your Room,” the Simon & Garfunkel banger “Hazy Shade of Winter.” “We weren’t cool, exactly,” Hoffs says. “We just wore it on our sleeves.”
The Bangles came up in L.A.’s Paisley Underground scene in the early Eighties, where postpunk rockers rediscovered the psychedelic rock of the Sixties, which in fashion terms was strictly taboo. The Bangles, along with bands like the Rain Parade and the Dream Syndicate, taught Eighties kids how to hear music they officially weren’t supposed to like. The scene came together for the 1984 album Rainy Day, reviving obscure nuggets from the Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, Love, the Velvets — a vastly influential project that opened a lot of hipster minds.
“That was my ex-boyfriend, David Roback, who then went on to do Mazzy Star with Hope Sandoval,” Hoffs says. “David was my best friend’s brother. But once a romantic spark occurred between me and David, we became boyfriend and girlfriend. I almost said ‘lovers’ — that’s the worst word! But David and I became lovers.” They graduated from Pali High, in Pacific Palisades, then lived together in Berkeley, where she studied ballet, theater, and art. That’s also where they formed their first band together, the Unconscious. It was a powerful musical connection, with a huge influence on both Mazzy Star and the Bangles.
“We were so yin and yang because I’m always bubbly, and he had a kind of darkness in him,” Hoffs says. “But the Mazzy Star stuff was beautiful darkness — just gorgeous. It was very sad when he passed away— way too young.” After leading the Rain Parade, Roback started Opal with Dream Syndicate bassist Kendra Smith, which became Mazzy Star when Sandoval replaced Smith on vocals. (Since “Fade Into You” and “Eternal Flame” have both become timeless classics, it might be surprising to recall they started out in the same place.) Roback masterminded the Rainy Day album, where Hoffs sang Bob Dylan’s “I’ll Keep It With Mine” and Lou Reed’s “I’ll Be Your Mirror” — totally unknown songs at the time.
“I had a bottle of whiskey in the studio,” she recalls. “I was a little rascally person. I took a swig and sang both songs in just one take. Rock & roll!”
Like the Georgia boys in R.E.M., who started making noise around the same time, the Bangles changed how people heard the Sixties — suddenly, all this hippie harmony was on the table. “I love that Sixties era,” Hoffs says. “I love the sonic quality of it, the warmth of those recordings. Just beautiful. The Sixties were like, to me, all sunshine-drenched music.”
“Casablanca” is one of the album’s most poignant tales, about a romantic stroll with a surprising rock star: the late great Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead. “The cute one in the band,” she says. “We were on tour with George Michael in 1988, and we kept noticing kids in tie-dye shirts on the way to New Orleans. I was in the lobby of the hotel, on a day off, staring out the window because I was bored. I see a van pull up. Then all of a sudden, I see the Grateful Dead file out of the back of the van.”
Ever the flower child, Hoffs had a word with someone on the Dead tour, who invited the Bangles to the band’s crawfish boil that night. “I said, ‘Count me in, I’ll tell the other girls.’ We were at the Neville Brothers’ place, and Jerry Garcia’s there with his new baby. It was all so Grateful Dead-centric, but so fantastic.” The next night, the Dead brought the Bangles onstage, on the shores of Lake Pontchartrain, to sing along and dance — a truly surreal duet. “We did ‘Iko Iko,’ ” she recalls. “People were throwing the beads at us. It was crazy.”
After the show, Weir lured her away. “That’s how I got to know Bob Weir. He wanted to go on a walk with me. He was a big walker.” They took an innocent evening stroll down Bourbon Street, by the Mississippi River. “The moment in New Orleans when Bob said, ‘Let’s go for a walk’ — there was just something so dreamlike about it, for lack of a better way to describe it. I remember turning around when he said, ‘Let’s take a walk in the French Quarter.’ He had a flower in his hand, gesticulating with the flower as he talked. He was special. I mean, they all were, but Bob, he had a certain thing.”
Naturally, this rambling California rose adored the Dead. “They were very meaningful to me. You wouldn’t have thought that necessarily as a person who grew up on pop music and Dionne Warwick records and Burt Bacharach stuff, but I was a music junkie. Later on, when I reconnected with Bob, he remembered that night too, which really touched me. We both cherished that memory.”
If you’re geeking out about music with Susanna Hoffs, you need to bring your A game. She’s the kind of deep rock nerd who loves to argue about the nuanced details of history. When the Zombies entered the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2019, she gave a heartfelt tribute; she also joined a stage full of fellow legends to sing David Bowie’s “All the Young Dudes.” As she notes proudly, “I was the only non-dude.” A couple of years ago, she did an irreverent revision of the Rolling Stones’ “Under My Thumb.” “That was sassy,” she says. “It was fun to turn the tables and make it girl-centric. Put him under her thumb.”
Hoffs grew up in the quintessentially 1970s free-spirited SoCal environment. “Yeah, I had very liberal-minded, democratic parents. My mother was the daughter of a very cool rabbi. He marched with Martin Luther King. My dad was a psychiatrist. There were no real rules. My dad was the best — I mean, he took us to see Midnight Cowboy when we were kids, because we wanted to see it. He always said, ‘Anything you don’t understand, I will explain.’ So anything about sex, my dad was so open. ‘This is how the body works, and that’s a body part, and then this is how you make a baby.’ He was so cool that way.”
In so many ways, the Hoffs home was the ultimate California dream. “It was always our house where everybody wanted to hang. And we had a pool table. My dad was really good at pool, too.”
When she met the Peterson sisters, guitarist Vicki and drummer Debbi, they were from a different world, Catholic schoolgirls from the Valley. “Their parents were so strict,” she recalls, “and they just had completely different upbringings.” But music brought them together. They met in late 1980 when Hoffs put an ad in the paper, looking to start a band. “‘Wait, you play guitar, and your sister’s a drummer?’” she recalls asking Vicki. “So they came over to the garage in Brentwood. I’d done stuff with David Roback, but I wasn’t savvy with technical things — they just laughed at me. ‘She’s so green!’ But then we needed to find a song, and they suggested ‘White Rabbit,’ because it only has two chords.”
The Jefferson Airplane psychedelic anthem might seem like a weird audition pick, but the musical connection was instant. “I started singing, and something happened,” Hoffs recalls. “We decided to be a band that night. It was like meeting someone on a blind date, and then jumping in the car, driving from L.A. to Vegas and getting married in an Elvis chapel. That’s how impetuous — or crazy — it was.”
Hoffs’ mom, listening on the front porch, said, “You girls sound like a band already.” Susanna replied, “Maybe we are.” Arty young women did not form bands in those days — not in L.A., not in the Eighties, not without a male Svengali figure pulling the strings. It just wasn’t done. But these women were ahead of their time, mixing folk tunecraft and punk aggro. They first called themselves the Bangs, a sexual double entendre, though another band had already claimed it, so they became the Bangles. They found bassist Michael Steele, a veteran of the Runaways. People tried to pit them against their friends in the Go-Go’s, but the Bangles had their own sound. They had ambition. They had drive.
They also had four ace singer-songwriters in the same band — a sure way to guarantee constant conflict. It didn’t take long for them to butt heads in public. When they made it to the cover of the Rolling Stone in 1987, both Petersons spent most of the interview trashing their latest album.
“Some people are trying to get a Bangles documentary off the ground,” Hoffs sighs. “But I don’t think it’s ever going to happen. So I’m just going about my business and wishing them well. People usually make documentaries where there’s a major tragedy or major drama. We had a Behind the Music episode, which is all [sings suspenseful music] ‘da-da-DUNNNN! Then this happened!’ With the documentary, I always think, ‘Well, you already have the Behind the Music. It’s not going anywhere.’”
That Behind the Music from Y2K did go into some of the band conflicts — especially how much the other Bangles hated “Eternal Flame,” their most famous hit. It’s a sublime Eighties ballad, full of angelic harmonies, yet a deeply eccentric one — almost half of it is the “repeat the chorus forever” coda. It sounded like nothing else on the radio. Hoffs wrote it with outside pros Billy Steinberg and Tom Kelly. “The ‘say my name’ part on ‘Eternal Flame’ was a complete left turn,” Hoffs says. “It wasn’t just verse-chorus-verse. When we got to that part, when me and Tom and Billy were writing together, my brain exploded.”
Everybody on earth loved this song. With three exceptions. “Eternal Flame” hit Number One in 1989, but it became one of those hits that dooms a band. (The Eighties had lots of those stories.) It ripped the Bangles apart in a matter of months. “‘Eternal Flame’ is a beautiful song,” Vicki Peterson said on Behind the Music. “Whitney Houston could have a hit with it. Why are we doing it?”
“Vicki said something that I thought she shouldn’t have said,” Hoffs admits, more bemused than anything else. “Because she slagged Whitney Houston. I was like, ‘Don’t slag Whitney Houston!’” And I was so horrified. ‘You didn’t just say that. She’s an icon!’ And she slagged my most popular song — the Number One Bangles hit.”
She kicked off her solo career with a real oddity, When You’re a Boy, with the glam-pop hit “My Side of the Bed,” the rock ballad “Unconditional Love,” and the bizarro Bowie cover “Boys Keep Swinging,” where she sings, “Life is a pop of the cherry, when you’re a boy!” It was obvious she had no desire to play the conventional pop game, as she’s kept proving ever since.
She also tried acting, in the trashy Eighties beach flick The Allnighter, directed by her mother Tamar Simon Hoffs. “Oh, God,” Hoffs groans. “That was just to help my mom do her low-budget movie. It’s very cheesy, but it’s become a weird, terrible cult classic. Like Beach Blanket Bingo, with worse dialogue and Eighties hair.”
Hoffs has kept continually active — she just published her first novel in 2023, the acclaimed bestseller This Bird Has Flown, about a rocker trying to make a comeback. She teamed up with longtime pal Matthew Sweet for a great string of crate-digging Under the Covers albums, under the name Sid & Susie, until his recent stroke. “I love to cover stuff with Matthew,” she says. “We were like kids in a candy store back in that time.” Her recent albums Bright Lights and The Deep End feature her interpretations of everyone from Nick Drake to Billie Eilish. On The List, she collaborates with a wide range of peers like Rufus Wainwright, Dan Wilson, Edie Brickell, and Wendy Melvoin.
But these days she’s on a roll with CJ Camerieri. Their next project is covering favorite albums in their entirety, starting — where else? — with the Beatles. “We’re remaking the Help! album, song by song,” she says. “The opening line is, ‘When I was younger, so much younger than today.’ It hits home now that my older self wanted to revisit my younger self. Songs like ‘The Night Before’ — that could be a 67-year-old lady’s perspective, looking back. We’re doing Revolver next.”
The Bangles’ songbook still holds up smashingly, from “Dover Beach” on the debut to “Glitter Years” on Everything. But the band’s crucial place in history gets obscured, since they were an Eighties band who broke up right before the Nineties explosion of female rock stars. So they failed to cash in on the freedoms of an era they helped to inspire. (When Kim Deal started the Breeders, she famously proclaimed them “the Bangles from hell.”) Hoffs is genuinely surprised to hear that the Bangles remain a touchstone for how modern pop sounds. When she asks for examples, she dutifully listens to songs like Olivia Rodrigo’s “U + Me = <3” or Taylor Swift’s “Hits Different,” both jangle-pop guitar bangers in the Bangles mode, both new to her.
She also pauses to watch a video clip she hasn’t seen in 40 years: the Bangles on MTV in 1985, on the late-night alt-rock showcase IRS’ The Cutting Edge. They’re in the back of the van, pre-fame, pre-pop glitz, just four punk girls on their way to the next gig, doing a scruffy sing-along on a 1966 nugget from the Mamas and the Papas, “Creeque Alley.” She smiles. “Total thrift-store aesthetics,” she says. “You know what? The Eighties were great!”
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That’s part of why The List has so much emotional resonance — the sound of an adult sifting through her old stories, letting them tell her something new, with nothing bitter or jaded getting in the way. No doubt many listeners will wish they’d kept their own notebook over the years. “Maybe they can go back in time and cobble together a little list for themselves,” she says. “’That guy was a dick! No, that girl was wonderful!’ Whatever it is. But that’s music for you. Music’s the beginning, middle, and end of every day. There’s always a song for every feeling or every day or every moment — any time you want it, it’s there. You can just pluck it from the ether.” %!s()
Sometimes we wish that car manufacturers could be encased in amber, that their assembly lines could keep pumping out the models that we still love at affordable prices. If we ever run into any mechanical issues, there's an ample supply of spare parts. As incredible as that would be, it's just a fantasy. The times may change, but we can't forget the cars that captured our imagination.
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We asked our readers last week what the golden age was for their favorite automaker. The peak for any car company's model lineup is completely subjective. The comment section was filled with responses from the 1960s all the way up to the present, featuring manufacturers based in Asia, Europe and North America. Some automakers were mentioned multiple times for their work in different decades, another sign of how subjective the question can be. Without further ado, these are the halcyon days of your favorite car manufacturers:
Mazda in the mid-to-late 1990s
Wikimedia Commons
Mazda in the mid- to late-1990s, their "Passion For the Road" and "Zoom-Zoom" periods. While they still had Ford money coming in, they had four sports cars (or quasi-sports cars; the RX-7, the MX-5 Miata, the MX-6 and the MX-3) in their lineup, and they and Ford were making each other better.
"I'm a Ford guy, and for me it has to be the late 60's. Mustangs were great, the Galaxie is a car that should get more love, Torinos were fantastic too. It was also the golden era of the Pushrod, carbureted V8 engine."
"Lexus, 1991-2009. After that, increasingly lost the plot.
The LS430 was better than the LS400, the LS460 was worse.
The LX470 and GX470 were their peak SUVs, total Land Cruiser and Prado cred and capability, everything after was worse.
And we won't even talk about the egregious change from the SC400 to the senior egg-bland SC430.
The LS is gone because it went from a Japanese Bentley to a claustrophobic, hard seats, noisy, sporty but large...something with no point or audience to it."
Volkswagen from the late 1990s through the early 2000s
Charles01 / Wikimedia Commons
Late 90s to early 2000s for VW. The MK4 Jetta was the best Jetta. I'd love to have a W8 Passat. Can't forget the R32 either. The Phaeton was quite the gamble. And you also have to give them props for the V10 TDI Touareg. Of course, no one can afford to own most of the really cool ones, but they are still technical marvels.
Prefacing this up front, this is no longer my favorite automaker, not by the longest of shots, but 10 years ago...
2013-2020 Tesla, man. When you talk about "disruption," there are few examples better than Tesla's impact on the global car market. And it wasn't just that they came out swinging with a groundbreaking product, they kept at it. Iterating faster than Apple iterates a phone, building supporting infrastructure at a loss, listening to consumer feedback and actually implementing it real time, even to cars already on the road (remember those days? It's easy to forget).
And they didn't just prove that electric cars can be functional in the present, but that they can actually be desirable. The Model S goes toe to toe with any major car release when it comes to universal appeal. In the modern era, I think it goes AM DB9, Ford GT (2005), and then the Model S when it comes to designs that almost everyone could agree looked, at the very least, "good". I'd say they never struck fire again with the X, 3, or Y, but those cars also earned their keep in other ways. The 3 and Y made Tesla not just an aspirational car, but one that was a realistic get for almost any middle-class family, putting affordable driving in the hands of the masses, just as gas prices skyrocketed during COVID.
Then came the downfall. But there is enough there for another post entirely."
"1950-70 Golden age of Alfa Romeo (or sooner or later ;-): Alfa Montreal, 2000 GT, Spyder, Disco Volate, Giulia TZ2, and Tipo Stradale 33, the most beautiful car."
"Volkswagen in the early '80s, when car lightness was in vogue in Europe. My '83 1800 cc, 110 hp GTi had a power-to-weight ratio of @ 125 bhp/ton. It was a fast & agile hoot to drive.
No one then thought vehicles weighing less than a ton were unsafe. Now the new(ish) Renault 5 EV, at @ 3300 lbs, is being praised for its lightness.
"1984-1998 for Saab. The 9000 and the 900 SPG were introduced in 1984, and 9000 production ended in 1998. You could argue up into 2002 when the 1st-gen 9-3 ended production, but the 900/9000 was an elite pairing."
Ford's aero period in the mid to late 1980s was underrated. They really pushed styling across the board in their passenger cars (and Aerostar, but minus Crown Vic). The movement started in Winter of '82 with the '83 Thunderbird (loved the later '84 Fila Edition!) and ended with the 1998 Lincoln Mark VIII. Even the mild Tempo looked sort of sleek in its debut in spring of '83 compared to all the boxy sedans of the day. We all know what the Taurus/Sable did. The best of this era, the Thunderbird SuperCoupe! Essentially, the boxy baroque Thurderbird/Cougar with its brief run from 1980-1982 was likely the failure that birthed Ford's aero movement.
Ibrahim Issa, 50, is from the Yemeni coastal town of Dhubab, right on the front lines of the war between Yemen's Houthis and the Saudi-backed pro-government forces fighting them.
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Today he sits, surrounded by his family, on a tarpaulin spread over a sandy floor inside a vast open-sided warehouse at Markazi camp in Obock, northern Djibouti, packed with Yemeni families who have fled by boat across the narrow Bab al-Mandab Strait.
After their sea crossing, Yemeni refugees have made their way by truck and on foot to this camp, jointly administered by the government and the UN.
"How could I just sit there when my kids are screaming and shaking in terror?" says Ibrahim Issa. "When the sound of the planes start, and the kids hear the planes, they begin shouting and screaming. As parents it is our responsibility, what can you do when you see this? That is why we fled, to save them."
Image source, Ed Habershon/ BBC
Image caption,
Ibrahim Issa escaped on his fishing boat with family and several goats
As a fisherman, Ibrahim Issa already owned a boat large enough to bring out his family from Yemen.
He even brought several of the family's goats which I can now see nibbling at scraps nearby, foraging amidst the discarded canisters of cooking gas and empty plastic bottles. Some families have been able to bring small bundles of possessions with them from Yemen – one family has even brought a "jeraak", a tall metal shisha pipe – but others have arrived, exhausted, in just the clothes they left in.
In just the last few days more than 3,000 refugees have arrived here from Yemen, many entire families. The UN estimates that in all, more than 120,000 Yemenis have been displaced by the sudden surge in fighting along Yemen's Red Sea coast.
This month, the country's Houthis, who had already seized most of the populated parts of Yemen years ago, made a lightning dash down the coast towards Bab al-Mandab, the narrow, maritime chokepoint where the southern Red Sea flows into the Gulf of Aden and the wider Indian Ocean.
Saudi Arabia, which backs the internationally recognised government of Yemen, has responded with hundreds of air strikes along the flat, coastal plain where the Houthis are now digging in. The Houthis have also launched hundreds of drones and missiles at cities and infrastructure in south-western Saudi Arabia.
"We don't care which side it is that's attacking," is the message I got loud and clear in Arabic from everyone here I spoke to. "It's the bombs falling all around us that have caused us to flee."
Djibouti, a tiny former French colony that sits just across the water from Yemen, has made it clear it has no intention of involving itself in the war between the Houthis and the Saudi-backed Yemeni government.
And yet Djibouti is one of the most militarised nations in Africa. Since 2003, the US has run a huge multinational base here, Camp Lemonnier, once home to the French Foreign Legion. China too has a major base here, its largest military presence on the Indian Ocean and recently upgraded.
Back in Markazi camp, one of those I spoke to is Qassim Abraham Abssy. Once also a fisherman, his identity card shows him to be 100 years old.
"What led us to come here?" he asks rhetorically.
"It was the planes. The sounds of the planes, boom! That's what made us flee, for the sake of our children. It burns ours hearts. We don't know which side they are from. They are bombing everywhere, because the Houthis are everywhere, in the mountains, in the roads. A plane comes, bombs everywhere."
Image source, Ed Habershon/ BBC
Image caption,
More than 120,000 Yemenis are estimated to have been displaced by the sudden surge in fighting
Outside in the blazing 37C heat, close to the neat lines of tents supplied by the UN refugee agency, UNHCR, I met Mohammed Abdullarim from Aden, a 63-year-old former tour guide old enough to have been born when Aden was still a British protectorate.
Unlike the new arrivals, Mohammed has been here since 2015. He fled to Djibouti soon after the fighting first flared up between the Houthis and the government of the now-ousted President Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi.
He has been at the camp ever since but suddenly, as we were talking, the sadness of what is happening to his country overwhelmed him and he turned his head away, choking back tears.
"Most of the people here are in the worst condition, inside the tents here. I am very touched, I'm crying for these people, for my people, for their suffering. I want our voices to be heard by the NGOs and the Djibouti government. And I'm thankful to them for accepting us."
How long will they have to stay here? That depends, of course, on the fighting. Yemen has been wracked by a horrific civil war that has killed tens of thousands of people and displaced millions since 2014.
A shaky, UN-brokered 2022 truce between the Saudis and the Houthis has broken down spectacularly in recent months, with the two sides trading missiles, drones and air strikes.
Image source, Frank Gardner/ BBC
Image caption,
"We are willing to go back in peace if peace returns to our country," says Aisha Abdulkadir Mohammed
Yemen's war may be a remote one to most people but the effect of choking off Saudi Arabia's oil exports through the Bab al-Mandab Strait are well publicised. But as ever, it is often the human cost that goes unnoticed.
Sitting beside his wife on their tarpaulin, amid the cacophony all around them, Qassim Abssy the fisherman is wary of leaving the safety of Djibouti: "If the war continues then we're not going back because we have peace here."
His wife, Aisha Abdulkadir Mohammed, agrees. "We are willing to go back in peace if peace returns to our country, and we are praying to God that peace does return. All we need is peace, even for our children's future, they get safety first, then food, water and an education.
"As you see we just fled with our clothes, and left everything behind, because [in Yemen] there is no peace."
This is an IGN opinion piece from Ryan McCaffrey, who worked at Official Xbox Magazine from 2002-2012 during the original Xbox and Xbox 360 era before joining IGN, where he remains “the Xbox guy.” In the run-up to Xbox’s 25th anniversary, he’ll be sharing his memories from the platform’s first quarter-century.
… %!s()
Sometimes, video game release schedules converge to create memorable superstorms that live on for years after the fact. The Fall of 1998 (Half-Life, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Doom 3, Metal Gear Solid, Grim Fandango) comes to mind, as does the Fall of 2004 (Half-Life 2, Halo 2, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, World of Warcraft). But for my money, the greatest season in gaming history was the Fall of 2007. It was so unbelievably brilliant that you could take just the Xbox 360 releases from this window and it still probably takes the cake. But when you add in PC, PlayStation 3, and Nintendo Wii releases, it’s an absolute murderer’s row of video games that will probably never be topped in a 3-4 month period.
At Official Xbox Magazine, we knew it was going to be big. But looking back and remembering our Game of the Year debate a few weeks after the dust settled (Rock Band won, and no I have no regrets about that), I’m not sure we were able to fully appreciate the gravity (gun) of the moment. One first-ballot Hall-of-Famer shipped after another. Take a look:
BioShock (August 21): If you tried to argue that August 21 is still the Summer…I’d say I respect your point of view, but lots of kids are already back in school by August 21, so it counts as the Fall! Anyway, the original BioShock is an often-imitated, never-duplicated narrative-driven first-person shooter classic whose stunning underwater setting in the failed utopian city of Rapture – with its terrifying Big Daddies and mysterious Little Sisters – took gamers on a ride fit for a great novel,complete with a huge, jaw-dropping plot twist. Its only blemish is its weak final boss fight, but I’ve never seen anyone try to argue for that being enough to disqualify BioShock from the list of all-time greats. Emergent gameplay possibilities abounded, with Plasmids that let you ignite the pools of oil beneath an enemy’s feet on fire or to electrocute bad guys standing in puddles of water. This is legendary game designer Ken Levine’s magnum opus.
Halo 3 (September 25): It’s wild to think about now, but for as successful as the Xbox 360 was, it didn’t launch with a big new Halo game. Instead, Halo 2 was a late release on the original Xbox, and thanks to Halo: Combat Evolved and Halo 2 having their backwards compatibility baked into every Xbox 360, gamers were able to continue right on playing the first sequel. But when Master Chief’s first next-gen adventure finally dropped and it was time to “finish the fight” that Halo 2 had left painfully unresolved, it was hugely anticipated and it actually delivered. The Chief got a proper sendoff in the final cutscene, making it one of the few sagas that actually stuck the landing.
The Orange Box (October 10): Sometimes, Valve just does things, kinda like The Joker. The Orange Box was a ridiculous package of 10 out of 10 video games that any publicly traded game publisher would’ve split up and sold as a bunch of separately-sold 10 out of 10 video games. But not Valve. Steam makes Gabe Newell more money than he could ever know what to do with, so Valve, seemingly just for the love of the game, bundled Half-Life 2, Episode 1, and the then-new Episode 2, Portal, and Team Fortress 2 into a single $60 package. We’ll probably never see anything like this ever again…unless Valve drops Half-Life 3 out of nowhere in a “Crowbar Crate” with Portal 3 and Left 4 Dead 3. Which, honestly, we can’t 100% rule out.
Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (November 5): Infinity Ward’s third Call of Duty (Treyarch handled Call of Duty 3) not only brought the series out of World War II for the first time and into the modern era, but it also catapulted the franchise from Very Big Deal to The Biggest Deal, putting it in the same rarified air as Mario, Zelda, Halo (at the time), and Grand Theft Auto. It boasts an incredible campaign and multiplayer on which the entire last 20 years of Call of Duty have been built.
Assassin’s Creed (November 13): You know it’s a killer list when this is the “worst” game on it. No one really spends time wistfully recalling the original. It was a heck of a four-hour gameplay loop that was more or less just repeated a couple of times, and most agree that Assassin’s Creed 2 – the start of the Ezio Trilogy – is where the series really took off. And more often than not, it’s a terrible idea to launch a new IP in the holiday season against established tentpole franchise sequels. That Ubisoft not only shipped Assassin’s Creed into the hurricane-force headwinds of Fall 2007 but the series gained a foothold and rose to become a megafranchise of its own speaks to how good the core idea of this “social stealth” game was.
Mass Effect (November 20): I’ve already shared my extensive memories of this one elsewhere in this Xbox 25th anniversary retrospective series. But everything I said about Assassin’s Creed above also applies here. Maybe the lesson here is that publishers should place more big bets on bold new ideas…
Rock Band (November 20): I’ve covered this one at length as well. You want to talk about a game that has aged beautifully? Rock Band is in fine-wine territory. The only hassle is finding functioning instruments to still play it with. It’s not a software problem, it’s an equipment problem. Even typing this makes me want to go play Rock Band immediately.
But even though the OXM offices had Xbox 360s on every desk, the staff were gamers who played every platform. So now let’s add in a PC exclusive, a PlayStation exclusive, and a Wii exclusive to really cement Fall 2007’s GOAT status:
Super Mario Galaxy (November 12): My personal favorite 3D Mario game was also a bold reinvention of the 3D platformer from the masters of the genre. At this point, there isn’t a superlative that hasn’t been written about Super Mario Galaxy. Heck, it was so monumental that Nintendo and Illumination based the Super Mario Bros. Movie sequel around it earlier this year, almost 20 years after Galaxy debuted on the Wii.
Crysis (November 13): Let’s just say there’s a reason that “Can it run Crysis?” became a meme. This wasn’t just a technical showpiece for the ages. It was also a tremendously good first-person shooter from the team that originally created Far Cry before Ubisoft bought it and took it over.
Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune (November 19): The first Uncharted not only launched Naughty Dog into the upper echelon of game developers in the world and eventually paved the way for a movie starring Spider-Man, it took the mantle of third-person action-adventure gold standard from Tomb Raider, the series that arguably invented the genre. You could also make the case that this was the beginning of PlayStation’s insane run of top-shelf first-party exclusives that helped propel the PS4 to nearly the same record heights as the PS2.
The fact that you can slice up the Fall of 2007 in so many different ways – best Xbox season ever, best PC season ever, best November ever – and the argument for its unmatched brilliance still holds up is iron-clad proof that it is, indisputably, the best season in video game history.
Ryan McCaffrey
Executive Editor
Ryan McCaffrey is IGN's executive editor of previews and host of IGN's weekly Xbox show, Podcast Unlocked, and a co-host of Next-Gen Console Watch. He's a North Jersey guy, so it's "Taylor ham," not "pork roll." Debate it with him on Twitter at @DMC_Ryan.%!s()
Image source, Ed Habershon/ BBC
Image source, Ed Habershon/ BBC
Image source, Frank Gardner/ BBC
