Playing League of Legends on the release day of a new champion is an interesting affair. If you’ve bought said new champion, obviously you’re looking to play it, and queuing up becomes a crazy luck-intensive game of whack-a-mole as you race to load in and pick the champion before anyone else.

If you didn’t buy the new champion, you watch team after team get reset as someone queue dodges because they didn’t the new champion, and they’d rather take the 5+ minute time out and try again. I see more queue dodges on new champion days than any other time.

A friend who has been playing League a lot longer than myself told me that it used to be far worse, when the champion pool was smaller. As the number of available champions grow, the release day race gets less and less intense. I’ve still had strings of 10 or more queue dodges in a row when a particularly OP-looking champion comes out that people are excited about, but I can definitely see it being worse back when there were so fewer awesome champs to pick from.

The Mass Effect 3 demo hit XBL yesterday, and I downloaded it but decided not to play it. It’s not like there’s any question as to whether or not I’ll buy it. I don’t need a sneak preview for any sort of pre-purchase quality-assurance purposes, and I guess I’d rather not play through a section of the game that I’ll just have to turn around and replay in a few weeks anyway.

Plus, I don’t want anything distracting me from continuing Kingdoms of Amalur. I’ve been having an incredibly good time with the game, and I’m finding myself doing a lot of the side quests, something I hadn’t planned to do. But it’s tough not to want to do them. While the lip-synching is pretty terrible, most of the voice acting is really engaging, and that pulls me into the side quests. I’d still love to see a game patch to fix some of the issues, but having played the game at some length now, it definitely gets two thumbs up from me.