I’m being jumped by Winston everywhere I look, and I don’t even have Overwatch installed. Fans have been flooding social media with a new copypasta involving the game’s super smart gorilla from the moon, and I can’t help but enjoy it.
The premise is devilishly simple. It starts off by leading the conversation in one direction, but it closes in on a nod to Winston, usually with some variation of “smart gorilla from the moon with a Tesla cannon and a dome shield to counter AoE slop.”
I haven’t really been invested in Overwatch since before the fiasco that was Overwatch 2. The promised and undelivered PvE mode was bad enough, and the shift to an absurd monetization model made me happily stop dedicating any time to the game. And that’s without diving into the company’s chilling cornucopia of controversies.
Yet the game seems to be back on track, thankfully dropping the “2” from its name and delivering quite a lot on the gameplay front. It feels a lot better to play now that it has content rather than just being a way to print money with Kiriko skins, as it seemed to be early in OW2 (and no, the shift to five-vs-five and three new heroes weren’t nearly enough to warrant the rebrand).
Read what’s behind the latest news in gaming (with a bit of snark) by subscribing to the Destructoid Checkpoint newsletter!
As someone who played a lot of Overwatch before dropping it for good, there’s something comforting about seeing it touch the lives of so many people that, 10 years since its release, it still has a place to bring silly joy to avid and lapsed players alike. This seemed to be organic, too—a nice change of pace from when the community has to band together to ask for more than crumbs.
A part of me misses the halcyon days of my 20s, before the pandemic, when I’d check if my friends were up for some games before I’d even gotten home from work. I miss tuning into the Overwatch League matches, the build-up to new hero releases, and even the lore crumbs. We finally got Junker Queen, D.Mon, and Jetpack Cat, which have been teased in some form for years. That alone would have made 2018 me freak out (though Mama Hong is still nowhere to be seen).
I’ve stopped playing Overwatch, but I still watch friends grind ranked a couple of times a week on Discord. I once heard an enemy Genji ulting on stream and pressed Q to use Transcendence out of reflex, which would have been impressive if I weren’t in the middle of a different game entirely (old habits die hard).
I like to think there’s some maturity in recognizing you’ve outgrown something yet still carry fondness for it, be it a game, a decision, or even a relationship. Certain memories don’t always fully leave us, and that’s fine.
Likewise, I see bravery in not rushing toward a situation just because it’s familiar, especially if it’s not right for you. Sometimes old ghosts chase us, and they might just catch up if we’re not careful.
But you know what would make those ghosts scarier? If they were super smart gorillas from the moon, with short-range Tesla cannons and a dome shield to counter AoE slop.
