Oh man. You gotta switch to Total Mayhem in Overwatch. In some ways, it's actually harder than the regular rules, but certain heroes are practically unstoppable. They only do payload maps in this mode, so comps that stall well are always going to do better. As such, it takes a pretty coordinated team, or at least…

Whoa! I guess I'm playing Monument Valley 2 this weekend! When I'm not playing Kayak Adventure: Eagle River Edition, at least. Though, I do have a waterproof sleeve for my phone, and they never said it's *only* for taking pictures…

Does your laptop do Bluetooth? I believe I've seen a few Bluetooth gaming headsets out there…

Let me know if you end up going next year!

Ugh. I feel for you.

Are you on PC? I've been pleasantly surprised with the general candor on the PS4 US servers. Sure we have the occasional asshole, but more often than not it's just silent in the Gold Tier. Even if folks join the team chat, they just aren't plugging in their mics all that often. As such, I've collected a pretty…

Hey folks! This week I've been diving back into Overwatch competitive matches and running the haphazard placement gauntlet! It was ridiculously uncoordinated as always, but the Jazz Lucio skin placed a mellow shine on the proceedings. After the last pleading "group up" was called, I had notched 4 wins and 6 losses,…

Definitely. I feel like none of the DPS heroes can actually kill anything (except each other) on their own in Mayhem. They just don't deal damage fast enough to power through the healing. I suppose if Widow or Hanzo were hitting every headshot they could take down a tank through healing, but that's just not…

Hey! We're getting our carpet removed and refinishing the hardwood floors next week, and then painting the entire first floor, minus the kitchen (since the furniture will all be out anyway). That means disconnecting all our game consoles so we can get the TV stand moved to an unaffected room for the duration of the…

I've only been on a couple teams that could win on attack. It seems like you have to wipe the defending team several times at each checkpoint if you want any chance of progress. And it's never going to happen if everybody just runs off to duel some other character, what with the incredibly long sustained fights that…

Yeah, I didn't quite do it without help. I got totally stuck when my only path forward was going to a specific place and waiting for a set period of time. So I went looking for hints on the internet in a way that pushed me in the right direction without spelling out exactly what I was supposed to do. Now that I…

I finished Year 2 in Grim Fandango! Everything kind of clicked into place after I figured out you had to wait around to lock the waiter up in order to progress the path to getting in the service elevator. I especially liked how they anticipated the player would have no idea what to do with the "26 Rusty Anchor" note…

This week I reinstalled SimCity 4 on a whim. Being in the hostile political climate that we experience every day in 2017, I decided to impose a couple rules on myself for this new fantasy city I'm setting up.

I love it when a game manages to enmesh its core gameplay mechanics so well with the narrative, or even just the head space of the protagonist. It seems incredibly common for a game to lay out a motivation for the protagonist through cut scenes or dialog, and then just expect the player to agree with that motivation…

This is a tough call. There were a billion platformers for the Sega Genesis, such that even licensed games like Aladdin and Lion King got a fairly decent, downright playable game adaptation. One admittedly terrible platformer that my siblings and I played all the time was Awesome Possum… Kicks Dr. Machino's Butt,…

I'm a millennial just finishing the first year of my mortgage, and I eat avocados on the regular. We're talking, like, more than one a week when I'm feeling it. I'm finalizing my book deal wherein I explain how to live the impossible dream.

Do you like horror novels where the protagonist is an east coast writer? The pulpy writing in Alan Wake was a feature, not a bug.

That's too bad. Alan Wake was a game that seemed perfectly tuned to my interests at the time it came out. Influences from and homages to all kinds media, from Twin Peaks, to Stephen King, to X-Files, to The Twilight Zone, to Poltergeist, etc. all wrapped up in a TV miniseries-style framing device. I'll be sure to…

Didn't you hear? The console counts as a consumable in all the new SoulsBorne games. You really have to manage that resource carefully if you want to get the platinum trophy.

Do you know about making a skeleton shoot a creeper?