I’ve managed to play about 12 hours of the new Gundam Evolution beta since last Friday and I really like it. Is it a lot like Overwatch? Yes, but it’s also like Team Fortress 2 and Paladins. It’s a Hero Shooter and so it’s going to feel very similar to those other games. The question is whether or not Gundam Evolution has enough of it’s own flavor to differentiate itself from those other games. It's hard to say for sure if that is the case after only a few hours with the beta, but personally I’m impressed and excited.

I think it's totally fine for Overwatch to be a genre, and it's even finer if it's all robots instead. That's essentially the premise of Gundam Evolution, whose robots are very large indeed, and which basically plays how you expect it to if you expect it to be Overwatch with Gundams.

I played D&D and got into huge trouble when I was a little kid, so the next time I played D&D was utterly in secret. It was also on the Commodore 64 - technically, on the Commodore 128 booted into C64 mode - and I would play it in the middle of the night with a pillow over the incredibly noisy drive. That particular game was called Curse of the Azure Bonds, and was essentially a digital sequel to a book I'd never read, which suggested to my thirteen-year-old self a vast, coherent space literally beyond my ability to conceive it. Thirty-three years later I still have not found the borders of it.

Thursday night is Race night for the Penny Arcade iRacing league!

The comic is about this:

Take a culinary journey through the Continent with The Witcher Cookbook — created by Anita Sarna and Karolina Krupecka of @WitcherKitchen & @NerdsKitchen, it includes 80 mouthwatering recipes inspired by the world of The Witcher games!

Pre-order now: https://t.co/RG8os78PRS pic.twitter.com/QPvEK4ipKH

— The Witcher (@witchergame) March 31, 2022

I don't really know anything about Moon Knight, except that he looks cool; the main thing you gotta know is that if Star Wars is your only sample of Oscar Isaac you're about to learn that he fuckin' kicks ass. See Ex Machina if you haven't. Or, see the first episode of Moon Knight, which will make you long for a second episode of Moon Knight that does not yet exist.

It must have been a very difficult time for professional observers of pop culture, this Morbius business; clawing and scratching at one another for the best vampire-related metaphors in their headlines. Dead on Arrival. It lacks bite. It's batty. It's anemic. It treats us like suckers. Well, that last one is marginal I guess. It's possible they meant the regular kind.

I couldn't be more pleased with Dabe's new Good Game collection:

There's a lot of conversations about what Sony's gonna do about whatever Microsoft is doing, and how they gotta do stuff, and they gotta counter this, or address the other thing. So, this type of rhetorical framework makes Sony's bog-standard service refresh - with a side of trying to make PlayStation Now happen - into some kind of console war salvo when it's actually just whatever.

As you might know, I was first introduced to Dungeons and Dragons while I was in my 31st year and the game was in its 4th edition.  It’s true, Acquisitions Inc. was my first time ever playing D&D!

Ziply originally offered Gabriel fiber service in November. Their Internet was barely up to regular tasks, let alone trying to have three people work from home, and the rumble of that truck must have been like the arrival of a sacred reliquary, laden with assorted saintly niblin's.

I made sure to have a notepad with me, because that's what you do when you are playing tricky games with your friends. You write important things in the book! That is, you write them down if you are a good and true ally. You pay close attention to the shadows that are cast when the sun is at its zenith - you ponder the reliefs and objet d'art, the statuaries, the occasional mysterious shrub. That is certainly what I did. Some do not do this! Some do other things.

Thursday night is race night for the Penny Arcade iRacing league! It’s like your parents bowling league back in the 80’s except we drive pretend cars around laser scanned virtual race tracks.  

I showed these special Sonic & Knuckles controllers to Brenna, the hairy ones, and her face turned inside out. The middle part just kinda went in and then all the other face parts swept forward to claim the rest of the space. I itch just thinking about the clumps of matted cheese-hair and the waves of hatching larvae you would have to shake off every time you picked the thing up. Both hands are held in front of me, palms out, and my head is turned slightly in judgment - I am become ISO 3864-1, the international sign for no.

At this point, what else could you call it but a "doom"? A judgment passed, the cruel sentence revealéd?

Gamers Give Back day is a massive concentrated effort to raise funds on one particular day for Child’s Play. This year it will be on March 26th which is next Saturday and I along with tons of other gamers will be streaming and encouraging donations to CP that day.