WINNER ANNOUNCED: Congratulations to Justin Forsythe (@rogXue) for winning a Diablo 3 code and 3 Guest Pass codes! Thanks for participating, and good luck next time!

Diablo 3 has had a lot of bad press from those who have applied Blizzard’s failure with the always-on DRM and their own servers to the review of the game’s quality. Thom managed to separate the issues, as a good journalist would, and review the game on the game’s merits, instead of knocking the score down because of a server failure. Now, you too can experience your own adventures in server failure. We have one copy of Diablo 3 to give away for one lucky winner. Mixing it up a bit, this one won’t be a caption contest, but a random word association contest. I’ll say a word, and you give me the first word that comes to mind. It’s that easy. Read the full story

Nearly a decade in the making, Diablo 3 finally decided to grace the gaming public with its presence, and after all the login errors settled, what were we left with? A solid Diablo experience that saw upgrades to many of the core systems and a pretty, though not overwhelming, visual presentation. In the end I was satisfied but still wanting more; read on for more details. Read the full story

Today’s episode goes just a smidge over our general hour-ish limit, clocking in at about two hours. Ok, maybe more than just a smidge, but it was fun, and screw you for judging me. Episode 031, titled “Too Cool for E3,” covers a wide range of topics. Insert a clever segue here, leading into Dawnguard and its beta, Injustice: Gods Among Us, LEGO Lord of the Rings, Castlevania: Lords of Shadow 2, Hitman: Absolution, Diablo 3, cats, Mists of Pandaria, Bulletstorm, the Gears of War prequel, the Wii and Wii U and Nintendo’s future in the hardware business, Marooners’ Nosh as a response to Kotaku’s “Snacktaku” ridiculousness, and the hypocritical nature of Polygon’s creation as a counter to the standards of the industry while doing nothing more than rehashing the same practices that…well, nevermind. You’ll see. Read the full story

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With my step-daughter’s birthday last weekend being the extraordinarily exorbitant affair that it was, I was, in the simplest of terms…pooped. Therefore, there was no podcast episode last week. Problem? Tough. This week, “Old People Talking About Cartoons,” Episode 030 of Marooners’ Talk, starts off with a group of almost-30-somethings (the titular “Old People”) discussing (the titular “Talking About”) the recent return (upcoming return at the time of the recording) of Cartoon Network’s Toonami programming block (the titular “Cartoons”). I say “starts off,” because for the FIRST TIME EVER IN A MAROONERS’ TALK PODCAST, we go off on multiple tangents that end up taking up nearly two-thirds of the extra long one-and-a-half hour episode. Read the full story

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