Games, Prize Pools, and High School Werewolves

--But mostly the first. Here are the video games and tabletops I've been playing around with since I've gotten my desktop back up and running:

• Monsterhearts
  This table top is all about teenagers who are monsters. But seriously like supernatural monsters instead of the traditional rigamarole of just social incompetence. Play about the same as Twilight: The Movie: The Game except fully aware and embracing all the absolutely broken, destructive, confusing, and manipulative behaviours that come with it. Brilliant, beautiful, and fun.
  
• Diablo 2 and Diablo 3
  After waiting to play the successor to my childhood favorite "Kill the Big Evil Dude: Save the World", I've felt like I've been in a bad relationship. I played the second, mostly to try and alleviate any nostalgia I might have. But even now I feel that with slowly aging graphics and often blatant clique usage, it is the better game narrative wise, and I think it has a lot to do with tone.
  The 2nd feels like you are barely succeeding. The hero is not coming in to save the day--they are two steps behind and trying desperately to perform damage control.
  The 3rd is all about the chosen hero having witty banter with the lords of hell and then defeating them even as the armies of hell bear down upon them.
  With a second expansion slated for D3, I can see a glistening path that would make me finally happy with it's narrative direction. I'll hold my breath to see if they manage to salvage it.
  
• Transistor
  A beautiful, tactical, and complex game in a similar style as SuperGiant's first major success, Bastion. Cyberpunk with heavy art deco influences, it follows the escape/revenge of Red, a singer who has lost her voice, with a giant talking computer-sword as they uncover the plots of a mysterious organization that created it.
  Transistor does not want to give up its narrative easily. The plotline is broken into tiny bits and hidden within both the world and also combat itself, as using certain abilities unlocks longer biographies of the city's residents. That combined with the narrator, who is an absolute treat, makes the game highly replayable. I'm going to be sinking a lot more time into this game in the near future.
  
• DOTA 2
  A free-to-play 5v5 isometric wizard'em up produced by Valve. A complex and difficult game which rewards teamwork and communication with a community that often ignores both of these. An exceedingly fun game to play with friends, it is about to start the International 4 (TI4), its 4th international tournament with a staggering prize pool of Ten Million Dollars. (Well, $10,507,475 to be exact.) This is not only the highest monetary prize in all of e-sports, but it is more than all the previous DOTA prize pools combined. This is also impressive as it also held the highest prize pool at $2.8mil from TI3 last year.
  So, if you are interested in witnessing the most heated e-sports event in the world, you can grab a stream or watch from the in-game client as the games start today.