WRUP: It’s the weekend and oh my goodness I just learned about Cats in Time

It’s Friday, which means it’s WRUP time! This week, I’ve just discovered that Cats in Time is a thing, and I can’t think about anything else, to be perfectly honest.

And with that segue perfectly set up (nailed it!), it’s time to see what kind of trouble the Blizzard Watch crew is in for this week. This is “What Are You Playing?” and here’s what we’re up to.

Liz Patt: I have the house to myself for the next week (barring any lost fights with my cat), so I am tackling some heavy-duty CLEANING. The spouse isn’t going to recognize the place on return…. at least, that’s how I’m picturing it going in my head.

But cleaning gets to come second to Friday night D&D! I can’t wait to see what crazy adventures unfold next. And I miss my mantis shrimp wildfire spirit.

I also picked up an adorable puzzle game on steam that was released this week, called Cats in Time. The premise is utterly adorable — solve puzzles to rescue kitties scattered through space and time! Maybe next time they won’t play with their owners’ time machine. Riiiiiight.

Andrew Powers: I’ve been fully immersed in Star Wars: The Old Republic, playing through the Trooper storyline. I’m enjoying this game, despite some repetitive story points and gameplay, the overall story and cutscenes are enjoyable. I’ve been watching Pandora, which feels like a low-budget CW attempt at Star Wars. This week it was officially announced it wasn’t renewed for a third season, and I’m not sure how I feel about that.

Phil Xavier: I’m playing Persona 2: Innocent Sin for the PSP, which is a 2011 remake of a 1999 PS1 game. Yes; just from reading that, you can probably tell that the gameplay is super dated — but I’m willing to bite that particular bullet because the story and the writing are so incredibly charming. The game just oozes personality.

It’s an odd, quirky game, far more than any other Persona title I’ve tried. The dialogue is often dramatic, in a good, funny way. And I’ve heard — a few times, in fact — that it has arguably the strongest story in the entire series. While I’m still way too early in the game to attest to that, I can say with confidence that this game has already captivated me.

I’m also still playing Wargroove, from last week, as well as Tales of Vesperia — another remake of an older JRPG, and another one that I’m loving so far.

Elizabeth Harper: This weekend I’m rolling more dice. I have the Candlekeep D&D game I run with some of my coworkers on Friday night, where they continually surprise me. The next part of our adventure is pretty vague in my head — we’re playing adventures from the Candlekeep book, but the next one is more like a build-your-own-adventure kit which has lots of interesting pieces without any clear way to stitch them together into a narrative. So far my revisions of the adventure include completely crossing out the first four pages, building combat encounters from scratch, and just a lot of adding and subtracting to make a semi-coherent narrative for players to stumble into. I’ve been told that the best way to plan D&D sessions is to just sketch out bullet point plot elements or story clues that players will encounter somewhere, to keep things flexible so you can bend the story around whatever the players do, so I’m trying to embrace that philosophy.

I’m also playing in a Call of Cthulhu game with Deb, and things aren’t going great. Last week both of us suffered a bout of temporary insanity and I’m not sure this week will go any better. And on Saturday Joe, Matt, and I will be interviewing Brendan Conway, a designer for the Avatar Legends TTRPG, for the Tavern Watch podcast. I’m real hyped about that.

Game-wise, I’ve gotten hooked on an iOS game called Star Trek: Legends, but it’s crash happy to the point where I literally can’t progress, so this may be the end of my interest. It’s very “gotta catch ’em all” with the ability to collect characters from all over the franchise to add to your team, and there’s always that feeling that I could play just one more mission…

Christian “Kalcheus” Thoma: Still working in Guild Wars 2 on getting my Skyscale, and I’ve also started on the “Return to” sequence of old Living Story chapter visits. Besides that, two indie games released this week that I’ll be playing: Hoa an artistic platformer, and Behind the Frame also artistic but more of a puzzler.

In reading news I’m finishing up my current poetry jag and starting on two of my kid’s 9th grade reading assignments: graphic novel versions of the Iliad and Odyssey. As someone who had to read them multiple times in college, I’m curious to see how well they work in a different format.

Deb Montague: In my Sunday night Pulp C’thulu game, everyone except the guy who had failed all his manual checks (Spot hidden, climb, etc.) failed a madness check and went temporarily insane. We are not sure what this has done to our search for the missing expedition members, but it was quite humorous.

Attumen still has not dropped Midnight and neither Horridon or Ji-Kun have dropped their respective mounts. I really liked the design elements of Throne of Thunder. It’s a visually stunning raid. Careful. The snails will still one-shot you if you let them touch you. Primordius dropped his pet so I don’t have to go farther than Ji-Kun anymore.

My guild does its annual Terrapin 500 race this weekend. This is the 12th annual race. Five laps around Ironforge on Sea Turtles and then we’re going someplace special.

I’m reading The Lavender Scare by David K. Johnson. I knew nothing about this part of history.

Ted Atchley: It’s another sportsball weekend for me. I have Fantasy Football drafts in three different leagues. I pick 12th in both of the snake draft leagues and the third league is an auction draft. If you’ve never done an auction draft, definitely try it. It’s a completely different experience. I’ve been preparing and I think I’m ready to crush these drafts like a grape.

For gaming, I’m playing Hearthstone Battlegrounds mainly. I got the Hats on Hats on Hats achievement and finally broke 6k rating. Battlegrounds are essentially glorified Brawls. Rating isn’t something to flex about, but 6k is a goal I’ve had for a while, and it’s nice to get there.

Matthew Rossi: I have been gorging on educational paleontology material, from YouTube’s Your Dinosaurs Are Wrong (we did a post about it!) to Eons, a ton of documentaries, and doing some reading — I recommend All Yesterdays for a fun look at the shrink wrapped dinosaur effect, where paleoartists and reconstructions show us dinosaurs as if they were completely devoid of things like feathers, subcutaneous fat, or other things that keep bones and muscles from showing when we see a live animal. (We’ve also done a post about that one before too!)

As for games, still the same old same old — AC Valhalla, Cyberpunk 2077, Baldur’s Gate 3 — although that’s still in testing — and I’m considering going back and playing Tyranny again. (And yes we’ve talked about that one before, too.)

Mitch “Mitch” Mitchell: After the past several weekends, this one is shaping up to be relatively calm. On Saturday — provided the weather holds up — I’m gonna try to spend some time outside hiking and walking nature trails. Sure, it’s hot as h*ck here, but I do love me some hiking.

On Sunday, my D&D crew is finally, for realsies, definitely getting back to our Curse of Strahd campaign which has probably lasted three times as long as it should have.

Cory Taylor: We’re going in for our second night of attempts on the Mythic Eye of the Jailer, we almost made it through to the burn phase on our first night, but our damage was just barely shy of what we needed to properly ignore the mechanics like we were. I’ve got a good feeling about this week though! Outside of Warcraft, I’m still busy purging the filthy Xenos in Battlesector. They’re being very rude and putting up a fight — the nerve!

That covers us for this week’s WRUP! Thank you all for joining us, and don’t forget to let us know what you’re up to in the coming week!