Here’s what the Heave staff has been into this week:

Meghan Bongartz

I’ve been playing the Starbound beta (http://playstarbound.com/). It’s a lot like Minecraft I think, which is bad because the reason I never played Minecraft is that I knew it would be the most massive time sink and I have no free time. Starbound is great, though. Everything in the game is procedurally generated, which means that you’re exploring an infinite universe with an infinite combination of creatures and plants and weapons and things. Also, the creatures are basically Pokemon, and you can capture them as pets. I haven’t actually accomplished that, yet, but I think it’s an important reason for playing the game. If you want to watch other people play, this is fairly entertaining.

Anthony Hoffman

As a child of the ’90s, I was a shameless, unabashed Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers fan. I watched it every day after school. This video from the sick bastards behind Fox’s Animation Domination High-Def captures some of the cornball spirit of the show (which I thought was awesome at age 10, because all kids are dumb) and some wonderfully warped humor.

Dominick Suzanne-Mayer

The year’s almost over, which means it’s time once again to scramble to finish all the music I missed this past year. I mentioned this briefly when I got on the Haim train nice and late last week, but it’s been in overdrive this week. By far the best thing I’ve heard this week is Freddie Gibbs’ ESGN, in which the Gary, IN rapper proves that getting picked up and subsequently dropped by Young Jeezy hardly threw off his game. In fact, this is some of Gibbs’ best stuff to date, and proof that Gangsta Gibbs is keeping hard, street-level hip-hop alive in a way few other MCs are bothering to these days.