In This Episode: We discuss a bunch of the games and movies that are finally releasing this summer!  We cover things like Mario Maker 2, Spider-Man Far From Home, FFXIV Shadowbringers, Magic The Gathering Arena Core Set 2020, Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night, Stranger Things Season 3, and more.  Plus we sneak in some bonus geekery near the end of the show and Beej gets a new furry friend. Things are finally releasing again!  The late spring / early summer slump looks like it’s over. Mario Maker 2 BJ - Making levels is a lot more fun than I thought it would be New components Void likes infinite Mario levels with more variety, but I don’t really do the level building We have an awesome Mario Maker 2 channel on our Discord server that you should totally join and share your creations! Mario has always been Void's favorite platformer The story mode is fun since you get ~100 levels designed by nintendo in the mario maker engine BJ - I love just taking some time and seeing what the “Newest” ones that have been uploaded are. I think that’s the most fun to me. I’m not generally a fan of the most popular ones Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night Void forgot that he never really liked the PS1 era of Castlevania games. He is having a decent time with it but thinks he had more fun with the 8-bit version, Curse of the Moon. This feels like a modern iteration of the PS1 era of Castlevania games, so if you really enjoyed Symphony of the Night and want a modern version of that, then you really can't go wrong here. Magic: The Gathering Arena - Core Set 2020 Core cards and concepts that relaunch for the year They only use evergreen keywords It’s made to be much more approachable for new players Not as strong of a theme, which made more of an impact on Void than hethought. He didn’t realize how much the theme worked for him in the last few sets until he saw this core set that is basically theme-less. Mastery pass is like a season pass for the mastery tree and gives you bonus rewards Void is a bit less excited now that he sees what the Core Set 2020 is. He was most excited for premade decks because he loves piloting a good deck You earn stuff at every level if you have the season pass The free tier gets you things every few levels No unlocking premade decks It’s a new way to unlock card packs and cosmetics by leveling up XP is capped per day This replaces the 3 packs per week you could win before…(boo, hiss) The actual mastery orb tree is an offshoot of the leveling ideas… but it only unlocks cosmetic card looks The core of the system isn’t the mastery tree, it’s just the Fornite-like level up system No more collection resets even though it’s still technically beta Historic is any card currently in MTGA. Think Type 1 for physical cards. FFXIV Shadowbringers Character stories are as strong as ever. Expansion by expansion they keep getting better and better at writing really good emotional moments for characters  Political stories are less interesting than normal since this is set on a new world that we are not nearly as invested in Threads don’t get dropped, though. They’re paying off things they set up years and years ago in previous expansions. Villains are much much sympathetic and understandable (for the most part).World consumed by light and they need to bring darkness back They have legends about the warrior of darkness It’s doing a great job of tying into past events and characters while still being a completely new setting Kind of the Outland of FFXIV in a way… but executed a lot better. They mostly get away from the politics we know and it lets them tell more compelling character stories Duties (dungeons) pull no punches, even right from the beginning. Everyone who has gotten to this point has made it through so many complicated mechanics in past duties that they know they can challenge us Queue times are short because of the new tank class, Gunbreaker, which people are super excited to play. Stranger Thin