Jason

Too little space.  Too little time.  So, I’ll just try to hit some of the highlights…

One of the coolest things I’ve been doing lately is delving into the world of board games again.  I totally blame Noah for this rediscovery.  Especially for getting me into the Battlestar Galactica Board Game.  We’ve already lost countless hours of sleep to this frakkin’ thing.  Look for us to get into a more thorough discussion about it at the beginning of May during “Tabletop Board Games Week.”

They have a plan…sorta.

Android games have also taken a decent chunk of my time.  Again, I’ll get into more later in the week when I do my “Mobile Gaming” article. Speaking of which…tomorrow I’m getting my grubby paws on a HTC Thunderbolt.  A much needed upgrade as my first generation Droid phone is slowly crapping out on me.

One final thing – due to my insane need to rule the World of Warcraft Auction House, I’ve hit over 100K gold!  Now that I’m filthy stinking rich, I’m going to take a break from virtual Wall Street and actually start playing the game again.  Gee.  Imagine that.

Mark

I managed to experience a couple of hours worth of Dragon Age II goodness and the rest was all League of Legends.  As Noah will explain in his section of this post, we had one incredibly epic game of LoL which really inspired me to play more.  Unfortunately, when I tried to play recently LoL was going through some stability issues after the latest patch.  I, and the rest of the unfortunate player base, was the subjected to this horrifying screen:

Yep, queues suck!  It reminded me of trying to play WoTLK on Arthas when it launched.  Eventually it cleared up and gaming goodness was had by me all, but not before I slummed it a bit:

Wow, HoN still sucks and the player base should get awards for their patience and tenacity.  I don’t know how anyone endures the PoS that is HoN.

Noah

My Dojo-Show-Go cohosts taunt me each week that whenever I talk about what I’ve been playing, League of Legends is always in the mix. That remains true this week, as I got a few matches in as my favorite mains, Garen and Kog’Maw, both in 3v3 and 5v5.

The match of choice was definitely last night’s, though, when I naively agreed to play a 5v5 with Mark at 11:20 PM. The game went on to last an hour and 23 minutes. What were we thinking? But oh, how epic it was. The opposing team was a little disorganized in acting together, often bouncing around, but they did push through to our core base’s defenses, even taking out one of the two turrets defending our nexus (that’s the thing you have to blow up to win). I was at first frustrated by this because the start of the game, in which me and my Singed partner killed our two opposing enemies repeatedly, suggested these players just sucked. Said Singed player did not help, either, with his juvenile taunts against the other team, which he later turned against us in a stronger fashion when he felt we were playing poorly. Remarkably, no one ever suggested a surrender, not even the vocal Singed, and we were able to push all the way back into their base and win.

League of Legends 101: This is a nexus

Games like those are what make League of Legends so great– when the odds end up against you, either by your own fault, by a wonky teammate who connects and disconnects over and over (one of the other main challenges of that epic game), or someone who just plays bad… and then you win. Yet you should have lost! How does that happen? I can’t say for sure; sometimes it feels like dumb luck; but no matter how long I play the game, even with higher level players, that random degree of chance can make for the most epic of victories and defeats. That’s why I love the game.

I also am in love with Okamiden on DS– the chibi-styled sequel to the Japanese mythology-infused PS2 and Wii title. The game’s an epic adventure in the Zelda vein, with plenty of quests and subquests peopled by colorful characters whose backstories are zany, ordinary and even somber. But what’s most fun is using the DS’s stylus to draw symbols on the game world– much more engaging than swirling the PS2′s analog stick or whisking Wii’s remote around.