WRUP: A (Doctor) Strange Mother’s Day weekend

There are two things happening this weekend likely to steal most of the chatter: A new Doctor Strange movie and Mother’s Day. Will mothers flock to theatres to see Brenadine Cumberbun at his strangest? Will the theatres be empty because everyone’s at brunch?

I have no clue! But what I can tell you are the things happening to our dear staff here at Blizzard Watch. That’s right, you’ve stumbled onto WRUP — What aRe yoU Playing? — and we’re here to talk about everything we’re up to this weekend. Leading the charge this week, Phil “Red” Xavier.

Phil Xavier

• Persona 2: Eternal Punishment
• Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE Encore
• Ys: Origin

When it comes to games, I’m still working on the same ones as before. My gaming time has been somewhat limited lately, between short family trips and band rehearsals — so very good reasons overall. And I never mention WoW or Hearthstone in these WRUPs, but I’m always playing them as well! So yeah, it’s hard for me to make a lot of progress between each week.

Mitch “Mitch” Mitchell

• Bugsnax: Isle of BIGsnax
• Elden Ring
• Mass Effect

Since this weekend is Mother’s Day, I’ll actually be spending a good portion of Saturday with family, so I’m not sure how much gaming there will be room for. Well, family caught Covid, so plans have to shift around a bit. We’re still salvaging plans with my GF’s family, but it’s definitely been a roller coaster of a few days of planning.

Whenever we do have a bit of time for gaming, it’s Bugsnax, Elden Ring, and Mass Effect. We’re replaying Bugsnax still, working our way up to the new DLC content (which is close to end of game, so we have a bit to go). They’ve made a lot of small QOL changes, so it’s been fun replaying and seeing the little things that make it an even better overall experience.

I also recently Platinum’d Elden Ring, but I’m not quite ready to pull the trigger on NG+. Just a feeeeeew more boxes to check and I’ll be good (heck, by the time this goes live, I may already be on NG+). It’s weird playing a game for 100+ hours and still wanting to just do it all over again at the end. This game really is perfect for me.

Christian “Kalcheus” Thoma

• Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness
• Wildermyth
• Ruined King: A League of Legends Story

As a devotee of the MCU I am excited for the next entry, Dr Strange and the Multiverse of Madness, and I’m even sneaking out of work early on Friday to see it.

Picked up Wildermyth for the PC to play this weekend. Wildermyth is the only video game to get nominated for a Nebula Award for Game Writing this year (the other nominees were TTRPGs), so I’m excited to see what the story is for it to be so recognized.

Finally I’ll be starting Ruined King: A League of Legends Story on the Nintendo Switch. I’ve been looking forward to this one basically since I wrote the article so I’m glad I’ll finally have the opportunity to dive into it.

Andrew Powers

• Ultimate Werewolf
• Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness
• 7 Lives of Lea

This Saturday is our monthly board game night. Our first one in March had 5 people total, this one is going to have twelve people. Growing in popularity. As a result, we needed a party game that incorporated a lot of players. I’ve had Ultimate Werewolf on my shelf for a while, and never had enough people to play it with. Kind of like Among Us, there are those who are “imposters,” werewolves pretending to be villagers, who kill the real villagers, and the villagers have to vote them out before the werewolves kill them all. Am I inviting people over to my house just to kill them off?

Sunday, for Mother’s Day, my wife, son, and I are going to see Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness… like half the people here. This is the first movie I’ve seen at the theater this year, the last movie I saw was Spiderman, but that was in 2021.

Finally, for a TV recommendation, I binged 7 Lives of Lea (Les 7 Vies De Léa in French) on Netflix. This is an excellent show, with an engaging plot, with a bit of murder mystery, romance, and time travel. One of the best shows I’ve seen on Netflix in a while.

Matthew Rossi

• Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance 2
• The Usual™

I have been extremely sick this week — starting to get better but very much still very ill as of today. So I’ve been playing a lot of games but not really been able to focus on any of them. I finished Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance (very fun) and am now debating buying BG:DA2 on Ebay for the original Xbox and just playing it on my current Xbox, or waiting for it to get a port this year.

Of course, still playing Bejeweled, Cyberpunk 2077 and my usual stable of David Winters actors (deep cut reference but I know some of you got it) like Wrath of the Righteous, Baldur’s Gate 3, and of course my backlog (Pillars of Eternity 2, Octopath Traveler) all up in my grill lately. I’m also getting ready for the scheduling of the next D&D game or if we’re doing Avatar this month, looking at potentially running a Pathfinder 2 game on my own time (hah, as if I have any) and oh yeah, me and my wife and our family are moving to a new house in part due to awesome people in the community helping us meet our closing costs. So we’ll be doing a lot of throwing stuff out and packing and all that.

I also picked up Tunic but I haven’t even looked at it yet.

Ted Atchley

• Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness
• SWTOR

It’s going to be a Strange weekend for me. By that, I mean I’m headed to the opening weekend of Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. The trailers have been wild. Multiple Steven Strangers? Multiple Wandas? Live action America Chavez? Professor X? A variant Captain Marvel? The freaking N’Garai? Oh my! This looks like it will be a crazy movie and I’m on board for all the multiversal shenanigans.

On the gaming front, you might have heard about this little holiday earlier in the week, Star Wars Day on May the Fourth (be with you). SWTOR is celebrating in a big way. Anyone who logs in between May 3rd and May10th will get a special droid minipet. Plus, during that same time period, SWTOR will be running a double XP event, and having a huge sale on the Cartel Market (the in-game store items). I could see myself increasing my mount collection and there’s some cosmetic armor in there I’ve had my eye on.

My Bounty Hunter Sniper made it to the final planet in the “vanilla” part of SWTOR, Corellia. She already hit level 50 but hasn’t finished with the planet or class story yet. SWTOR, like the later stages of WoW, goes more by campaign completion than pure level. One thing I really like about SWTOR is that it automatically downlevels me to 50 to finish Corellia, but lets me keep earning experience. I’m already level 52 and working my way through this final chapter. I’m looking forward to the final confrontation the story has been setting up since the beginning of Chapter 3.

Finally, I’d be remiss to not comment on the the Warcraft Arclight Rumble trailer. I’m still not sure I understand what the game will be, but I feel like I learned something important from the trailer. Gnomes are awesome. I mean, I kind of already knew that, but still, Gnomes!!

Aaaaand that’s Team Blizzard Watch for this weekend. I hope you all have a lovely 7 days until I see you again, and be sure to be extra nice to… everybody! :D