Month: February 2025

PlayStation Plus Essential: The 12-Month Plan I Should Have Bought Last Year

DLC Review · Purchased February 21, 2025 · $106.39 CAD via PSN

PlayStation Plus Essential tier artwork
PlayStation Plus Essential. Photo: PlayStation Store

The Setup

After reviewing last year’s single-month PS Plus Essential top-up and explicitly calling out how much worse the per-month math was compared to the annual plan, I actually followed my own advice this time and bought the full 12-month Essential subscription upfront.

The Review

The service itself is unchanged from last year’s review: online multiplayer access and a rotating monthly selection of free games, delivered exactly as advertised without incident. What’s different is purely the math, and the math is genuinely better here. Paying once for the full year works out to meaningfully less per month than the single-month purchase I made in December, which is the whole reason this review exists as a kind of quiet correction to last year’s entry.

There isn’t much drama to a subscription renewal done correctly. It’s the boring, sensible version of the same purchase, and boring and sensible is exactly what you want from a recurring cost like this.

What I Liked

  • Meaningfully cheaper per month than paying monthly, exactly as expected
  • Same reliable online access and monthly game claims as always
  • A rare case of actually taking my own advice from a previous review

What I Didn’t

  • A larger upfront cost, even though the per-month value is better
  • Locks you in for a full year rather than leaving room to cancel if your habits change

The Verdict

Rating: 4/5

If you use PS Plus regularly, this is simply the correct way to buy it. Nothing new to report on the service itself, just a smarter purchase than the one-month top-up from last year’s list.

Where to Buy

The MOC-56649 Modular Tatooine: The Biggest Single Build I’ve Ever Attempted

Toys & Collectibles Review · Purchased January 15, 2025 · $788.51 CAD via Vonado

The MOC-56649 Modular Tatooine City Space Wars build, an 18-building modular Star Wars diorama
MOC-56649 Modular Tatooine City Space Wars. Photo: LetBricks

The Background

MOC-56649, designed by fan builder gabizon, is a modular Tatooine cityscape built from 18 separate buildings that connect into one continuous Star Wars street scene, at a claimed 9,585 pieces and a finished footprint of roughly 60cm by 40cm. It is, by a wide margin, the single largest build I have ever taken on, easily eclipsing last year’s Star Destroyer for sheer part count.

Kicking off 2025’s spending with a purchase this size was either a bold statement of intent or a sign I never really learned my lesson from the 2024 Vonado hauls. Given how this list is shaping up already, I suspect it’s a bit of both.

Living With It

Eighteen individual buildings sounds like it would make this build more approachable, broken into bite-sized chunks rather than one continuous slog, and in practice that’s mostly true, each structure is its own manageable session. Where the scale really hits you is once several buildings are finished and sitting next to each other on the table: this is not a shelf piece, it is closer to a diorama that needs its own dedicated surface, full stop.

Several of the buildings include opening panels and interior detailing, which is a nice touch that keeps a project this long from feeling like pure repetition, cantina interiors and market stalls tucked behind facades that look plain from the street side. Piece quality held up consistently across the full set, no obvious drop-off in tolerance or fit between the first building and the eighteenth, which is genuinely impressive at this scale from a compatible-brick manufacturer.

The honest tradeoff is time and space, in equal measure. This is not a project you finish in a weekend, or realistically in a single week if you have anything else going on, and once complete it demands a genuinely large, permanent display area that most people simply do not have sitting empty.

What I Liked

  • Modular structure makes an enormous build feel approachable one building at a time
  • Genuine interior detailing on several buildings, not just facades
  • Consistent piece quality across the entire 9,500-plus piece set
  • The most substantial single display piece in my whole collection once assembled

What I Didn’t

  • A genuinely enormous time commitment, easily multiple weeks of sessions
  • Requires a large, permanent display footprint most people don’t have available
  • The most expensive single item to open this year’s spreadsheet

The Value Verdict

Rating: 5/5

For anyone with the space and patience, this is one of the most ambitious and rewarding builds available in the compatible-brick space, official LEGO included. Just know exactly what you’re signing up for before you order it.

Where to Buy