WRUP: It’s time for an Awesome weekend — here’s what Team Blizzard Watch is playing!

I don’t know about y’all, but I’m ready for the weekend. And ’round these parts, when the weekend approaches, we talk about how we’re going to be spending it! This week, it’s a lot of Mass Effect: Legendary Edition and Awesome Games Done Quick — but there’s still plenty more beyond those two things.

Sit back, relax, and join us as we answer the question, “What aRe yoU Playing?”

Andrew Powers

• Hearthstone

I’ve been playing a bit more Hearthstone, otherwise, I’ve been pretty light on video games lately. I started watching a show called Preacher, it stars Dominic Cooper and Ruth Negga who were King Llane and Lady Taria in the Warcraft movie — so this is completely relevant to this site. Strange to see them together in two different forms of media. I’ve also been playing more board games lately — though I tend to replay the same ones: Settlers of Catan, Agricola, Flux, and this one with dice and pegs called Rolling Through the Ages. I have more, we just replay the same ones. Time to find some new favorites.

Matthew Rossi

• Mass Effect: Legendary Edition

Hit the keystone, Shepard.

Shepard is my battlemaster. She has no equal.

The keystone, Shepard! I’m ready!

I want to keep doing the bit, but I also want to say I’m playing Mass Effect 2, trying to get into ME3 and the Citadel DLC. Legendary Edition has def. reminded me of why I loved these games.

I’m currently working on a Vanguard in ME1, a Soldier in ME2, and an Adept in ME2 on the console who will be doing the suicide mission soon. One of the real treats of doing these playthroughs is getting to make different choices — my Soldier Shep went full Renegade in ME1, killed the Rachni, let the Council die, the works. Meanwhile, my vanguard is what I call my ‘ace’ playthrough — she only talks to Ashley because Kaiden and Liara both want to nail her and she’s really more focused on, you know, saving the galaxy. Adept Shep is my broShep, and he’s very much the long suffering, I’m too old for this character, who basically goes Paragon but takes every Renegade interrupt to speed things along.

Oh, and Grunt would like him to hit the Keystone.

Elizabeth Harper

• Mass Effect: Legendary Edition

Tune in soon for Matt and I having an all-day conversation about how much we like Mass Effect.

…Well, actually don’t, because we aren’t planning on doing that (though we probably could).

I am also playing Mass Effect, because that just seems to be what I do. Replaying the Legendary Edition has just reminded me of the many things this game series did right, for all that I don’t feel like it nailed the landing. Mass Effect 2 has such a vibrant world, with fleshed out and unique characters, and every mission sends you to a unique setting that makes you feel like you’re part of a massive galaxy full of diversity. Mass Effect 3 brings characters to life with tons of interaction and around 40,000 lines of voiced dialog. It moves seamlessly between cutscenes and gameplay with a quick camera swing that transitions the view back to the standard third person angle so you feel like you’re in the middle of scenes rather than separate from them. It’s an amazing game, and there’s still nothing quite like it. I think I need to replay Mass Effect Andromeda next to see if it captures quite the same feel… I don’t recall it doing so, but it’s been a while.

Anyway, I’m currently playing through a new game+ with a Sentinel femShep. The game doesn’t have anything called new game+, precisely, but if you load in a save from a completed ME3 game, you start with your existing gear and skill points, and can now upgrade weapons and mods further. Sentinels are already very durable, and I did my first playthrough on normal difficulty… I’ve already jumped to hardcore difficulty and I might go up to insanity, because I’m just so powerful. I also have a male Infiltrator, which I play on casual difficulty and am thinking of dropping down to narrative because I have ten bullets for my sniper rifle and limited alternative offensive capability (and nearly no defensive capability; seriously this guy is a pushover). I have been learning to love cryo ammo and incinerate combos, though, which send huge explosions of ice shards everywhere. Mass Effect 3 added combos, where you “prime” a target with one ability and detonate it with another for different types of explosions, and they’re all very satisfying… but something about sending massive bursts of ice shards everywhere is particularly pleasing. Don’t ask me why.

Joe Perez

• Awesome Games Done Quick
• Dead Cells DLC

I too, will be glued to AGDQ and catching up on any I miss via youtube.

Still trying to go through the new Dead Cells DLC. I got to one of the newest areas which led to a boss fight. That turned into fighting two bosses at once… that then turned into fighting three bosses at once. I died but the boss was at roughly 3% life. So I’ll be taking another crack at that this week and seeing if I  an push that through to victory so I can keep going. I really do love me some metroidvanias with rogue-like mechanics!

Mitch “Mitch” Mitchell

• Awesome Games Done Quick
• Overwatch
• Mass Effect: Legendary Edition

Until at least the early hours of Sunday morning, I’ll be watching Awesome Games Done Quick 2022 almost exclusively. I might try to find time for Overwatch or half-watch while my GF plays Mass Effect — she’s pretty solidly through 2 right now and hoo boy I can’t wait to see what she thinks by the end! — but my plans are pretty minimal this weekend.

Anna Washenko

• Awesome Games Done Quick
• Atelier Ryza

I plan to assauge my post-AGDQ blues with more Atelier Ryza on Sunday. But until then: all Games Done Quick all the time!

Phil Xavier

• SNK vs. Capcom: Card Fighters’ Clash
• Shin Megami Tensei V
• Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE Encore

By chance, I saw that a Bandai Namco game called God Eater 3 — which has similar gameplay to Monster Hunter, but is much easier to get into — was a whopping 85% off on the Switch. I liked what I saw from it, and I thought the price was low enough to give it a try.
I do not regret that decision! It’s a pretty fun game. The story and characters might be a bit generic, but the gameplay itself is definitely very strong — this is the kind of game you play because it’s fun, not for the story.

I’ve also been graced with a surprise release: a very old game from the NeoGeo Pocket called SNK vs. Capcom: Card Fighters’ Clash got ported to the Switch with no previous announcement. This game feels a lot like the very first Pokémon games (Red and Blue), except instead of making a team of six monsters to fight other monsters, you make a deck of 50 cards — it’s a card game, with very simple rules, and the cards are based on characters from popular SNK and Capcom franchises (which I’m super invested into). As you beat opponents out in the world, you collect more cards and improve your deck. So that has been pretty fun as well!

Other than those two serendipitous games, I’m still working my way through the final parts of Shin Megami Tensei V, as well as playing some Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE Encore on the side — but progress has definitely slowed down a lot on those two this week. There are only so many hours for videogames in the day!

Ted Atchley

• Hearthstone

The NFL playoffs this weekend will take much of my leisure time. My team is sadly about as far from being a playoff contender as you can get. For gaming, I’ll be sticking with Retro Bowl and Hearthstone Battlegrounds and Mercenaries.

Can anyone recommend a game for me to add to my library? It needs to be mobile friendly and something that doesn’t require long play sessions. I’d love to find something like Battlebots or C.A.T.S.

Anna Bell

• Wordle
• Cozy Grove

This weekend is going to be spent mostly cleaning. I just got slippers which are also mops, which I’m irrationally excited to try out. I know, that makes me a boring, boring adult. I’m also trying to get my closet in a shape to be a recording booth — my neighbors spent literally every single day last week cutting down and then wood chipping nearly every tree on their property, so I’m looking for, let’s say, creative solutions.

In terms of gaming, I’m still enchanted by both Cozy Grove and Wordle. The idea of spending just a tiny bit of time on a game every day is so novel and, in some ways, kind. While games have been using daily quests as a carrot to get you to log in for a long time, they also have you continue to grind materials or loot or that sweet transmog. With Cozy Grove, you can keep fishing or gathering seashells, but after a while they turn off the respawn tap, so aside from sitting around AFK to enjoy the music, there’s no reason to keep on playing. Since I tend to binge games, has helped me keep my interest for a longer time. It also prevents that feeling of overwhelm frequently present in crafting games, where you look up something on the wiki and realize that even though you feel like you made a ton of progress you need to find a couple thousand geegaws in order to make anything truly cool. Even though there is a bit of that element, because there is that de facto limit, it feels less like a failing on my part, that I just need to sit down and grind for a few hours and then I’ll have it.

Deb Montague

• D&D

Working on a werewolf movie script this weekend and I think I’m going to use some of what I’ve created in this script to flesh out a werewolf character for a new D&D campaign Liz is going to lead. I do love Angua in Discworld so my new character could have elements of her. Should I make a dwarf werewolf, since I tend to play dwarfs in D&D?

I have to make a new “Win My Mount” list for my Tuesday mount runs. We’re plowing through the content really fast so we have a lot of time at the end of the run when we could be going after something else. No new mounts have dropped from anything in over a month. We’re about due.

Liz Patt

• Tetris… sort of.

Packing, moving, cleaning, sleeping, so… real-life Tetris?

 

That’s one more week down in this, the year 2022. I hope your weekends are all awesome! If you have a moment, why not pop in the comments and let us know what you’re playing? ‘Til next time!