I bought Forza Horizon 4 on Steam because it was super cheap, and everyone says it runs better than 5 (it does seem to), and it's so fun. I feel like I knew, but it didn't occur to me, that it's set in England and that might mean I would recognise parts of it. It has the Southwick Hill Tunnel (or something that looks a lot like it), and they talk about Broadway, which is a Cotswold village where we used to go and get sweets as kids when we passed our driving test. Is this how Americans feel about every other game?

It does have one thing I hate though. The licensing for all the DLC expired so you can't buy any of it any more. Fortunately, that means that all of the signposting and upselling from the game is gone, too. I mean, it wouldn't make sense to regularly nudge me to buy DLC that I can't buy so it's good that that's all gone.

Of course it's not gone. The game is still full of nags to upgrade, and there's a big LEGO logo on the map that you can't interact with unless you like looking at feature lists for dead DLC, then clicking links to Steam pages that don't exist any more. Personally, that's not what gaming is about.

It's a shame because the game is a lot of fun. I'm hoping that I can ignore the completist side of my brain long enough to play the game until I can't win races any more, then let it fall down my recently played until I fully forget about it like I did with Forza Horizon 5. In fact I should probably get the 5 DLC whilst I still can, so that that can gather digital dust in some database row with my user ID on it.

Licensing is truly one of the worst things about 21st century media. It makes me laugh that a thing designed to curb piracy and preserve ownership actually does neither.