Adam the Artist

I’ve been dusting off some old games in my library while I wait for Mass Effect 3 and Silent Hill: Downpour (both next month!). Lots of people will watch a movie more than once; I like to play really good games more than once. So I’ve been messing with Bioshock and Devil May Cry 3 & 4, which are old and I don’t think anyone wants to hear about them.

Saw these guys do their Mega Man 2 show recently, and I am in love. Their Castlebandia album is incredible. Stream it. Buy it. Love it.

Alex the Non-Artist

I’ve actually played some games other than Starcraft 2 (hurray!). On a sad note, I tried playing Starcraft 2 a couple days ago after a couple week hiatus and it wasn’t pretty. That game is brutal. I played Spiral Knights with a friend over the past weekend and had a really fun time with it. It has some fun MMO aspects with the auctioning, and persistent overworld, but drops most MMO tropes when you enter a ‘dungeon’ and it becomes a 4-player co-op action hack-n-slash game. It has a fair share of clever puzzles and really challenging boss battles. Coming off my disappoint from Star Wars: The Old Republic, I was really pleased to see a game that didn’t sacrifice playability for the sake of being able to call itself a “true MMO”. I don’t know if it’s sad or awesome that the combat in Spiral Knights was way more fun and engaging than in SWTOR, given that one has the stigma of being called a ‘free-2-play’ game (from an iOS app store perspective) and another a ‘premium high-budget MMO’.

I actually got to play the Diablo 3 beta for a little bit as well. But without any buddies that are also in the beta I have little to no desire to go back. I think I’ve played more Outwitters than any other game over the past several weeks really. With each iteration I’m enjoying it more and more. Some of our testers are getting hundreds of games under their belts, and I’m starting to see play-styles evolve between different players, and with a lot of them being viable I’m extremely excited to see that happen. It’s like the game is coming into it’s own! Still more work to be done on balance though…