A friend convinced me to give Star Citizen a try during the November 2022 free-fly event. The game is horribly buggy and absurd in its ambition. I am not confident that it will ever have a full launch. And yet, there is something captivating about it, the scope of what they have already created awe-inspiring. Climbing into your ship, taking off from the hanger, flying up, and up, and up out of the atmosphere and into the vast expanse of space, and then engaging your quantum drive and crossing the solar system to reach some isolated outpost adrift in a nebula on the brink of nothingness, is quite unlike anything I have experienced in gaming before. The UI is awful, quests are broken, and frustrating, accidental deaths are much too frequent, but the experience of piloting a spaceship in this game nevertheless tickles my brain in just the right kind of way. I have found myself watching YouTube guides, and reading up on starcitizen.tools, and comparing statistics with erkul.games on my lunch hours, experimenting with upgrades to the ships that I have added to my hangar. I have become quite taken with the Drake Interplanetary line of vessels, and greatly enjoy how crafty they are to fly.