Risking military action by the NFL by showing this picture of Drew Butler. Here’s a grammar thing I learned, regarding the word “punt.” I’m American, so the word “punt” has always meant exactly one thing: Punting a football, as in kicking the ball to the other team. (American football, that is.) Occasionally I also see “punting” used metaphorically, as in something like, “I’m going to punt on making that decision.” In that sense, it means you’re going to put off making the decision, or give it to someone else to make. (439 words.)

Why yes, I \*am\* still looking for a picture for these posts. From [Wikimedia][1]. I strive for timeliness here at the ol’ blog, so here is what I played in March. You might possibly detect a theme. Besides the nearly 100% lack of MMORPGs. Mass Effect 3 - 42 hours 7 Days To Die - 39 hours Mass Effect 2 - 31 hours Mass Effect 1 - 23 hours Mass Effect Andromeda - 2 hours Factorio - 2 hours Shroud of the Avatar - 1 hour Revelation Online - 1 hour Just for the record, I also spent 39 hours in Movie Studio Platinum. (119 words.)

Streaming… get it? [via Wikimedia Commons][1] I saw that the makers of Persona 5 made the odd choice of limiting streaming of their game. (I use the word “streaming” here to include Twitch and YouTube Let’s Play videos.) Liore and Eri also weighed in on this with contrasting viewpoints. I’d never heard of Persona 5 before this, and never heard of or played Persona 1 through 4, either. (I think it’s a console game from The East. (762 words.)

Possibly some spoilers below if you haven’t reached Kadara. So this game has pretty much taken over my life, as I figured it would. Honestly I think this is why I put off playing Mass Effect 3 for so long. These Bioware games are really hazardous to your health. :) The first three games took over my life, too, but I played them more quickly than I might have at the time they came out. (1395 words.)

Whoops. Forgot to publish this dramatic conclusion to Mass Effect week. I finished Mass Effect 3 on Friday night, March 31st, completing my play through of the original trilogy. I spent a total of 42 hours playing it, but I restarted it twice so you can probably throw 6 or 7 hours away. (And if you’re keeping tracking of days and hours played, yes I played these games a ton in March. (1367 words.)

Mass Effect week continues… I don’t know how far into Mass Effect 3 I’ve gotten at this writing (March 29th), but I’ve just gotten the Quarrians on board the Normandy. Percentage-wise, I have no idea where that is in the game. I’m just guessing it’s the half-way point. I have some initial impressions which I’ll write down, and as usual, I’ll follow it up with another post when I finish the game. (1849 words.)

Continuing with Mass Effect week… I’m writing this Mass Effect 2 “review” on Tuesday, March 28th. I finished ME2 on Saturday. It took 31 hours, according to ManicTime, which is actually a lot less than I expected. I thought ME2 was huge compared to the first one and would take at least twice as long, but apparently it only felt bigger. There were definitely more cut scenes to watch in ME2. (1187 words.)

Continuing with Mass Effect week here on the ol’ blog… I’m starting this draft on March 22, but again I probably won’t publish it until after I finish Mass Effect 3. There are story spoilers below if you haven’t finished the game. Mass Effect 2 is a much, much larger and longer game than Mass Effect 1. I’m well over 20 hours into the game, and I don’t even think I’ve gotten to the halfway point yet. (829 words.)

No razors in the future. There are no story spoilers below, but I totally understand if you’re on complete blackout and want to skip. (I was, and did, and still do.) I finished the first three Mass Effect games and finally started Andromeda. First, if you’re like me and were way behind on the series, there is no connection between the original trilogy and Andromeda. Much to my chagrin, there is no need to play the first three or know anything about the previous story. (982 words.)

I’m writing this draft on March 21, launch day for Mass Effect: Andromeda. I probably won’t post this until much later, because I’m very paranoid about exposing myself to Mass Effect story spoilers right now, and my vivid imagination sees everyone running to the comments to post their Andromeda thoughts even though this post has nothing to do with Andromeda. Not only do I not want to hear about Andromeda, but I also don’t want to hear about Mass Effect 2 and 3. (1572 words.)

Totally ripped off from https://secretworldlegends.com/ There is some interesting MMORPG news out! Well, “shared-world” news, that is. Some time back, Funcom mentioned in an investor report that they were planning to “re-launch” The Secret World, and Internet speculation ran rampant. Nobody knew what that actually meant. Today, we found out. Funcom is planning to launch a new free-to-play game called Secret World Legends (the official acronym is apparently SWL, judging from my Twitter feed). (333 words.)

Over the weekend I tried to do three new gaming things: Play Mass Effect 2 (to finally finish it), play Mass Effect 3 (for the first time), and play Mass Effect 1 (over again). I installed Mass Effect 2 from Steam, hoping beyond hope that by some magical time-space temporal vortex I would be able to pick up where I left off years ago (probably at least two computers ago), but of course I had to start over. (710 words.)

I read on MassivelyOP that Shroud of the Avatar was having a free trial “test” (whatever that is) so I downloaded the game and tried it out last weekend. I’ve seen increasing buzz about the game and I was curious to see if there was anything to it. I only played for about an hour, and while I can’t say I was dying to play more, I did find it interesting enough to leave it on my games to continue watching. (1012 words.)

I’m now 56 days into my Navezgane 7 Days To Die game. I’ve built a forge and a workbench and a cement mixer and my base is getting upgraded to concrete and reinforced steel. Just in time for the bigger zombies like policemen, soldiers, and weird alien “feral” zombies. I also found some iron veins to mine. I had a hard time finding them because I kept hearing that you’re supposed to dig where you find gravel but it’s not actually “gravel” that comes out of the ground, it’s sand and stone (which combine to make gravel). (1208 words.)

Yes, that's a miniature panda on my head. Last night I took a look at Revelation Online for the first time. I played for about 45 minutes. I don’t have much to say about it, except I didn’t particularly care for it. It’s a solidly average anime-style MMORPG that takes no chances. It’s an Asian version of a WoW-clone. (A Lineage-clone?) I saw nothing that advanced the MMORPG genre in any way. (692 words.)