The Queue: It’s Queuesday

The header image is one of my favorite game screens of all time. I really want it on a t-shirt, but every time they go on sale they sell out before I can snag one.

I promise the whole thing will be a little bit more relevant later in today’s Queue, but for now, I hope you all have the most garbage Queuesday.

Out of all of them? Blade’s Edge Mountains.

That place is trenches on trenches with very few ramps and random caves that are full of spiders and other nonsense which will probably daze and dismount you on the ground. With Flying you don’t have to navigate halfway around the zone and back again to quest through the plateau you wanted, and you can go to them directly across space. Even with flying it’s no picnic because of all the spikes to navigate through and anti-air cannons, but holy hannah that zone was awful stuck on the ground.

In Battle for Azeroth I’m going with Dazar’alor, for pretty much the same reasons but a gold ziggurat instead of a weird spiky hellscape.

Does Admiral Taylor count? Because Admiral Taylor. Dude was by our side through three expansions. He rose through the ranks from Captain to Admiral with a mix of force, tactics, and honestly just plain luck, shaping major story beats as he went. He defeated naga, he was the driving force to make sure Anduin was safe in Pandaria, and was in the first wave of explorers as a Commander, to give us a foothold on the strange world of Draenor.

Then we turn up to some random quest hub and welp he ded.

To add insult to injury he became a ghost, and had to do menial chores around my Garrison. It’s like Purgatory, but more boring. It was the ultimate insult to end such a storied career.

Everything is politics.

Our own Matt Rossi wrote an excellent editorial on this topic a while back, about how developers scoffing at the notion of Kratos being bisexual is in itself both a political statement and kind of disingenuous in a historical sense.

On the flip side, that puts us in a bit of a pickle if we want to stay truly neutral, because there is no true neutral. It’s absolutely political to post about how, say, a union in Overwatch League would put a whole lot more leverage back in the hands of the players and help to prevent burnout. However, just ignoring the relatively high turnover and clearly stress-related breaks that plagued season one would also be political. Trying to walk the line is a part of our jobs as journalists, which do we take seriously.

Of course, that’s before you get into games which are intentionally written with a political statement or moral in mind, or games which are fun in part because the story can be explicated on deeper levels. One of my recent favorites, an indie called Donut County, matches a really fun and bizarrely innovative mechanic with a cute little storyline about raccoons and vivid, polygonal art styling. The soundtrack is also amazing.

Oh yeah, and its creator Ben Esposito intended the story to be an allegory about gentrification driven by the tech industry.

Though the headline on that particular article is NSFW, it’s also interesting because it relates that, in its history of development, Donut County began as another game with similar mechanics which pulled roughly from Hopi religious tradition — but insensitively so. Esposito later dropped that narrative framing entirely as a result of discussing it with an Indigenous educator who was more versed in — and touched by — that tradition.

You can absolutely play Donut County and miss — or intentionally ignore — the allegory intended. It’s fun! It’s cute! You should play it! But even though games are an amazing escape from the real world, it’s a good practice to occasionally interrogate the media you consume, and the choices made by the people who developed them.

Random currency all the way.

In a vacuum I’d love for everything to use fungible currency, but the WoW Token means that everything I do in game these days is measured against that. I’d love a Longboi, but at 5 million gold, if we’re figuring roughly 130,000 per Token, that means if I got a Longboi I’d be out — well, I was an English Lit major so I’m not sure but Polygon says it’s around $500.

While the time taken to collect manapearls is also technically time I could’ve spent also making gold, it feels way less painful than when I realize I could’ve bought an entire freaking xbox instead.

Did you intentionally ask this so I could obsess over Stardew Valley? Because that’s what’s happening.

It’s available on pretty much any platform you can think of. I think there’s a Colecovision port at this point. Oddly, I find I enjoy it the most on mobile. I play a ton of mobile games as it is, but I find it easier to control and perform a lot of the actions than PC. In Stardew, you can romance one of a dozen of the various residents — the same ones regardless of the character you’re playing — while building your farm too, and after you perform some upgrades you can get married and have kids. The gameplay is a rabbit hole, and the more you get into it the deeper it goes.

I still hate fishing though.

I also think that Buzzfeed quiz style, the first person you choose to romance tells you a lot about your personality. Choose carefully, and let us know who you chose.