The Queue: Adventures in food

I’ve done it. I have tried a Kraft Dinner Mac and Cheese… cheesecake. I saw this food crime a couple of weeks ago and made it a mission to eventually try it. I say food crime mainly out of the response I got to it when I mentioned it during the Blizzard Watch podcast a couple of weeks ago. Nobody else seemed to think that it was going to work for some reason. Cowards, the lot of them!

So I’m happy to report back after both eating the cheesecake and surviving eating the cheesecake. It was fine. I’m honestly a little disappointed that it wasn’t more of a trainwreck. I was really hoping that it was going to be amazing or horrible. I didn’t want a safe middle ground here, just pure food chaos! It turns out that if you’re already using something like cream cheese as a base for your cake, adding extra cheese via a dehydrated cheese flavour pouch at some point in the mixture doesn’t really do much to change the flavor profile. It was still just a cheesy cake. There was the barest hint of more of a cheddar flavor on the edge of the taste, but nothing that made me go ick. If you want to make it yourself, you can follow the official recipe, and maybe horrify some of your friends and relatives, but I’d be surprised if they’re also not left feeling just whelmed.

While I go off in search of new and more interesting food crimes, it’s time for our daily question and answer column — The Queue!

It’s all too overwhelming. There are so many new things coming out!

Some of which are coming out soon, and others are just getting the barest teasers out the door. I can pay attention to like three things max and come away with excitement. I’m sure there are things that I’m excited for. I watched the Fable and Doom: The Dark Ages – Revelations trailers from the Xbox event today, and they both look cool. I like ripping and tearing until it’s done, and I played the heck out of the first couple of Fable games back in the day. So those are both exciting, but a new Halo version that is just regular Halo with some tweaks and fancy new graphics for the third time is less exciting. Even with three new prequel missions, I’m not rushing to free up space on my hard drive for a day-one install.

Somehow, there’s even footage of the Wolf Among Us sequel, which I thought wasn’t actually gonna happen, so that’s fun. I hope it grabs me the same way the first one did.

A bunch of the indie stuff looks fun, and some of them I might even play if they show up on Game Pass. I’ve had a much lower track record of sticking with the games from Game Pass if they’re not grabbing me super well, though. Which I know is the point of having this low buy-in subscription service. I’ve found that sometimes an indie game is just built around one gimmick, and after a little while, I can figure out the one gimmick’s endgame and decide it’s not for me.

I don’t know why gaming companies expect me to be able to maintain hype for so long! I’ll gladly talk up a game after I play it and know it rocks, like HADES 2 (which rocks super hard), but a trailer for a game coming out in a year isn’t gonna do much for me.

I love that we all got Nicolas Cage to do a live-action Spider-Man. That’s a wonderful triumph for humanity in totality.

That being said, I haven’t gotten the time to watch any of it yet. I’m excited to jump in once a few more episodes are out, and I can watch more at once. I will be watching it in black and white, as nature intended, for a noir detective story. Even if that noir detective story involves a man with spider powers.

I’m upset that the Black and Chrome version of Fury Road wasn’t available to watch first. It would’ve been dope to see it in theaters that way.

I wear my Blizzard Watch shirt for BlizzCon!

That’s about it. I’m all for changing what I’m wearing to real-world events, where people can see me. But I don’t feel the need to dress up to just watch movie trailers or broadcasts usually. It’d have to be really special to get me to do that, like the aforementioned BlizzCon.

Unsurprisingly, Amy Lee can still sing super well. There’s something about her voice that just hits that part of my brain that makes all the little hairs on my arms stand up. ASMR might not work on me, but her singing does! I really like the album on the first couple of listens. The two singles from it, Afterlife and Who Will You Follow, are both excellent Evanescence songs, and I’ve already heard them a bunch on the radio. I’m glad that the rest of the album seems to be lining up with their quality. I like that they haven’t gone to the synth well too much for their backing tracks, and I especially like the heavier-sounding bass. I swear I can hear some stuff influenced by DOOM 2016 composer Mick Gordon, and I love his work. Although I think I heard that on one of the newer MUSE tracks too, so maybe I’m just hearing his influence where I want to…

There are a few songs on the album, like Who Will You Follow and Sanctuary that I swear could’ve been written with Diablo 4 in mind, and now my tinfoil hat theory is that Blizzard reached out to Evanescence alongside Korn for original songs, but something fell apart at the last minute, and the official branding fell through. I have no proof for this, and Diablo does pull from some standard Angel and Devil iconography, so it’s not impossible for it to get some passing references. I’ve also been playing a lot of Diablo 4 recently, so that could be some recency bias on my part.

Overall, great album, I can’t wait to buy it and leave it in my car CD player for a month straight.

Today’s Bacardi is looking at you expectantly. What have you got for him? He does so much for your luck, all sorts of wheeling and dealing with various lucky creatures like leprechauns, unicorns, and the people who put a quarter into a slot machine and win cars; it’s the least you could do to give him a little something extra for his trouble — y’know.

Would you rather

Have lots of trailers and featurettes for a game coming out in a year

Or

Have no information beyond the fact that they’re working on it, and then get a trailer the day before the release?

Today’s Anna Earworm™: Who Will You Follow

Have a great week, everybody!