This week the column is going to be fairly short. Part of this is due to the fact that my winter break from school is over, so I have been focusing more time on that. Aside from having played through Devil May Cry, I also only played my two standby MOBAs. I’ve also had a renewed interest in my Netflix queue, and have been trying to watch something from my list once a day. So forgive me if this all sounds repetitive.

As I already posted previously, I played through DmC in three sittings. The game was pretty short, although I was pretty good at it, only having real trouble with the mid-game boss and a little with the final one, who really just came down to knowing the trick. If you need to know the trick, save your Devil Trigger until the shadow of your brother is protecting him. Once that happens, utilize your trigger and attack as normal. Don’t say I never gave you any useful information. If you missed that post, click here. Otherwise, on with the other games.

In Awesomenauts, I have continued on the path of improvement. I have really seen my skill level in the game take leaps and bounds. I am frequently the teammate with the most kills, least deaths, and focus on objectives with the best of them. My win percentage isn’t indicative of these facts though, and as a result I have been recruiting more people to play with. I have had the good luck the last few days to end up with good players, good enough that I have added them as friends and played with them more often. I used to think me and my roommate were pretty good at the game. Now I feel like he is holding me back. It seems the higher I climb on the leaderboards, the more I find better players, and keeping them on my team has helped to climb the leaderboards even more. Unfortunately, there are times when no one is playing, or I just go solo and sometimes that ends up in defeat, which then drops my rating more significantly than the wins raise it. That being said, I am consistently sitting in the 1600-1700 range on the leaderboard, currently around 1640. I went through another prestige level, and am nearing the tenth and final one. Once I have max rank and max prestige level, there will be no stopping me. Prestige limits your performance because you get stuck with the low end abilities, and once you get to the high end ones, it’s time to prestige again. When I don’t have to worry about going back, I’ll have the best stuff all of the time, and that will be great for my ranking. More on this as it develops.

In League, it has been more of the same. I have still been playing a few ARAMs here and there. I noticed that my LP was going to start decaying, but the 2014 season (season 4) just started today, and as a result the leaderboards will be reset soon. Because of that fact I am not worrying about my rank or LP, and won’t start playing ranked again until the reset. Might as well get started when everyone else does. I am looking forward to getting back into ranked play. I felt I had some good development last season, and this time I am setting the bar higher, I want to break into Gold tier at minimum this season. There is a new information site dedicated to the new season now, and they have already said that the Team Builder feature is going to be added sometime during this season, so that’s good news, although that doesn’t affect ranked play. Featured game modes are also still supposed to be utilized here and there. Speaking of which, yesterday there was some news on my favorite featured game mode thus far, Showdown.

Apparently it was supposed to be made into a fully supported game mode, though instead of being played on Howling Abyss, it was supposed to be on a new map called Magma Chamber. This was shown off at last year’s all-star game, but I wasn’t paying as close attention to League news at that point in time and missed it altogether. That game mode/map idea has been scrapped altogether, and from some data that was gathered during Snowdown, Showdown has been eliminated from becoming a full game mode. That’s a bummer for me, but they have already said that they want to explore the options of 1v1 and 2v2 modes in the future, so perhaps there is still some hope. More on this to come, and more on the upcoming seasonal changes that are sure to be in the works.

That’s really all for this week. Bioshock Infinite has already been offered for free this week through Plus, and I have already installed it. That will be the game of the week for me, barring it being crap or me being otherwise distracted. Until next time.