If there was one takeaway from CIGS this year, it was that there is a growing appetite for independent video games in the Midwest. Like a katamari rolling through the cosmos, CIGS continues to get bigger as it rolls along.

Recently in my internet travels, an angry forum user labeled me braindead because I like Gundam and giant robots, which irked me. Not because someone was mean to me online, that shit happens all the time. No, I was irked because Gundam doesn’t deserve to be called braindead.

On a blisteringly hot Saturday in June, I had the opportunity to run a game of Dungeon Crawl Classics for a group of four strangers. This was not the start of a monthslong campaign, just an enjoyable evening of adventure made possible by Free RPG Day.

The Fire Emblem series is partially responsible for my pansexuality. There’s no shortage of queer coded characters, especially in the most recent entry, and there’s quite a history to it. Sometimes the series really drops the ball, but I think that there’s a fair amount of positive and important representation in the series.

On a cool spring evening in April surrounded by the sound of laughter and shouted conversation, Sly McMahon Jr, his face wet with tears, watches a mechanical rat shoot a slime with a heavy rifle before rocketing across a bottomless chasm.