The Queue: How do I keep getting myself into this mess?

There are certain game genres that I’m not really a fan of, but I somehow keep stumbling into. I don’t really like fishing in games, and yet, somehow they keep finding me. Sometimes it’s part of a larger game, like WoW, but I have at least a half dozen random games on Steam that center around fishing. Dredge, Dave the Diver,  even Ultimate Fishing Simulator and I just don’t know how or why this keeps happening.

This is The Queue, our daily column where you ask us the questions and we’ll fish up some answers.

Unsurprisingly I feel like Cast n Chill has the best set of fishing minigame mechanics, and I wish almost every game that had fishing stole this entire system.

One way to fish in that game is to go ahead and fully micromanage, pick bait and pole and hook types, then drive your boat and try to spot fish from above. After you drop your line, you can elect to reel in or let out the line a little to either make the line dance or maybe scare away the fish. This finally leads to a compelling minigame to catch the fish, using your mouse to move your pole to an advantageous position and your mouse buttons to reel in or stop reeling and let the fish have a little line which, if you’ve ever fished for real, sometimes you want to do as you let the fish tire a bit on the line.

The alternate is to go idle and just let the game do it and then come back and collect your fish. It takes far longer between each cast and you don’t catch the big trophy whoppers if you’re idle fishing. But if you’re idle fishing you can be doing anything from watching Netflix to writing a daily column where somebody asks you Qs and you give the As. And I do rather enjoy this, because it has all the quiet ambiance of actual fishing and a lovely little pixel art style. I usually fish manually when I get to a new body of water, and I’ll fish each body of water manually for a while after I upgrade my gear to land the trophy fish. But it’s nice to just sit back and let the game do the work, too.

I feel like anything between these two approaches is just annoying. I’m especially annoyed in WoW by those fish that attack you, because I’m still trying to watch Netflix even though I have to engage with the window every 30 seconds, but before this, I didn’t really need to look at the screen, at least. For WoW, you’d definitely need to levy heavy restrictions on which fish you catch, or make idly-caught fish soulbound or something. And there should probably still be environmental challenges.

I am frequently (usually?) taken aback by the passage of time so the looming specter of BlizzCon — which is in less than a month! — is no exception. And you’re right that it used to be in November… but then they sorta started pushing it back a bit. For several years it was right around Halloween which was neat for a lot of the attendees, but rough for me as a parent expected to walk several miles in an evening and then turn around and report on stuff.

That said, the shift makes a ton of sense. BlizzCon’s slew of announcements made a ton of sense when the turnaround time on a new expansion was lengthier, and we had oodles of time at the end of them. Many of them released in a timeframe where an announcement or a full-bore hypetrain in early November would make sense. Vanilla released at the end of November, Burning Crusade was in midsummer, Wrath was at the beginning of December. But now that expansions are turning around every 18 months or so, and because they want those expansion announcements to be as marketable as possible, that November BlizzCon date for either of those purposes isn’t exactly the best.

I’m not expecting a Last Titan deep dive next month, but I also think early November would be too early. Plus, many of the largest publishers have their biggest announcements through the summer, so it makes sense to try to wiggle into that space.

Lastly, this just confirms that absolutely nobody wants to compete in any way with that GTA 6 release date.

Depends! If it’s a small operation I’ll usually go a little wild, though I guess that’s subjective. I love lavender ice creams and drinks, which is both odd by modern standards and kind of trendy. Key lime pie can be a weird ice cream flavor, especially if it has graham cracker crust swirls, but obviously it’s a pretty popular combo otherwise.

The one non-starter for me is anything that has a cake item in it. Harder cookies like graham cracker or oreo or (be still my heart) gingersnaps are a great addition, but I’ve seen a few that include like, sponge cake, and that’s just yucky. I will also make a controversial admission: I usually don’t like chocolate ice cream. Chocolate in ice cream is great, and there are ways to make a good chocolate ice cream, but a lot of the time I find they usually just add cocoa powder, which I do not prefer. It’s too much of a gamble, when there’s a wide world of literally every other flavor to choose from.