Matthew Rossi

If you missed the weird adventures of our original D&D campaign, you're in luck because we're kicking off a new game with a session zero this weekend, on Saturday, January 22 at 2:30 PM Central on the Blizzard Watch Twitch channel.

Whether it’s the Suicide Mission music from the suicide mission at the end of the game, or the music from the Overlord DLC, or even the music from the final confrontation with the Shadow Broker, Mass Effect 2 had by leaps and bounds the best music in the series and possibly one of the best scores of any video game. It just manages to perfectly encapsulate the emotion of the scenes you’re playing through. Honestly, I’m almost enjoying listening to the game as much if not more than I am playing it. One of the best things about it is the way certain themes and motifs come back in different ways throughout the score, and I’m finding new ones as I listen to it.

Anyway, it’s Queue time. It’s very dramatic from my end due to the music, so imagine yourself as an action hero as I answer your question.

Back in the late 1990s/early 2000s, Blizzard had several TTRPG products out -- from licensed Diablo properties from Wizards of the Coast themselves to the Warcraft/ World of Warcraft Roleplaying Game.

Sure, Mordenkainen's Monsters of the Multiverse is a monster book -- it's right there in the title -- but it also serves as an one-stop collection and update for a host of playable races from previous Dungeons and Dragons sources, and it does a lot more than simply republish them.

I've been mulling this one over ever since the president of Square Enix, Yosuke Matsuda, penned this missive on the subject, and I'm no closer to a real understanding of how it is a good idea to move away from the model of people playing games because they are an enjoyable pastime and towards a model that says you should be playing games to get a tangible reward.

Demolition Man suffers from the same self-satisfied smugness that a lot of 90’s era satirical comedy does.  It posits the radical idea that gasp people in the future will be different and act differently! And they might thing swearing in public or eating meat is bad so really they’re going to be complete wimps who can’t stop one guy from running amok. It even has Dennis Leary in it as a brave freedom fighter holding out against the tyranny of social politeness gone too far. So in that regard, it fails pretty hard at predicting where we were heading as a country.

But the San Angeles of the movie’s 2032 — a mega-city consisting of Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, and San Diego all smushed together — does have some cool satirical moments. One is that, in the future, every restaurant is Taco Bell — not that every restaurant serves Taco Bell’s brand of ‘Mexican’ food, and yes the italics are on purpose, but that every restaurant from the quirky breakfast diner down the street to the fanciest French-Hawaiian fusion bistro are all owned and operated by Taco Bell. There is but one restaurant conglomerate in 2032, and it’s Taco Bell.

I can’t stop thinking about this in the wake of Microsoft’s planned acquisition of Activision Blizzard. By 2032, everything might be owned by Amazoisneysoftoogle. Or, heck, maybe Taco Bell? Who knows anymore?

I am still, one day later, absolutely gobsmacked by the news that Microsoft is buying Activision Blizzard for slightly less than $70 billion USD.

The upcoming patch 2.4 for Diablo 2: Resurrected already is promising to change class balance and add Ladder play -- but it turns out, it's also going to be adding some brand-new Runewords that weren't in the original Diablo 2.

I'm legally blind, the result of a condition called retinopathy that is causing the blood vessels in my retina to, well, explode.

Microsoft is in the process of purchasing Activision Blizzard for roughly 68.7 billion dollars, and they have added all of the company's many franchises to its Xbox lineup according to multiple sources, one of which is Microsoft themselves.