PixlBit

Hey! Pikmin demo - Got this through spot pass this week and played it. I really like it. It’s in 2D but uses the pikmin similarly. You use the stylus a lot to send pikmin around the screen. It looks great too. I want to buy it right now, but I’ll have to wait for my rental to come.

Mark and I played some more co-op in Kane & Lynch 2 trying to get a few more achievements. I was trying to get the one where you have to get the kill on an enemy your co-op partner knocked down but not out. I shadowed Mark and shot at anything he did that still moved. I only got a couple more and was still far from the 30 needed for the achievement. So, I just helped Mark get a few other achievements and just had fun with it. Then I switched to Valkyria Revolution, since it installed so quickly.  

I loaded up my 3DS with Project STEAM the other day. It plays a whole lot like Valkyria Chronicles, maybe exactly like it. The battle system is the same. It’s turn-based, but you move freely about the field. You can save your action points to use when it’s not your turn. This is called overwatch mode, just like in XCOM, and it lets you automatically shoot at targets that move into your line of sight. The world is steam-punk and you fight an alien menace. I’m liking it.

Duke Nukem 3D: Played three episodes and got tired of it. Tried to play Duke Nukem Forever but found out it’s not backwards compatible on XBO. I could have sworn it was. It’s just as well, I don’t really want to play it again. Thus ends my retro revisits. Onto games of relevancy.

Let me explain. I have this long running music listening project I started this year. I’ve been focusing on a single year in music every month starting with my birth year, 1967. Well, I’m up to 1973 this July, and I thought I’d review what I added to my playlists, and then mention video gaming, because. . . well. . . why not.

I tried to go through Halo Wars 2 again, looking to do a lot of the extra bonus objectives, but when I got to level 7 and finished it for the second time, the completion achievement still didn’t unlock. I found out there’s been a glitch with achievements in this game since it was released, and there doesn’t seem to be a solution to it yet. Weird. So I handed the game off to Mark, who wanted to play it and started in on my last favorite series from the list I made end of last year, Duke Nukem.

I played my rental today, Crash Bandicoot’s N Sane Trilogy on PS4. It took me about an hour before my patience wore out. I’m sorry, but platformers task me. I don’t like repeating levels for a perfect performance. It’s just not my thing. That being said, if you love Crash, you’ll love this collection. Vicarious Visions did a great job remastering these games. They looked and played great. The games themselves are great too. They have so many creative ideas and so much variety of gameplay. I really wanted to stick with them longer. I just didn’t want to jump on another box in just such a way. These games ask you to repeat precise moves over and over. I don’t like that. I liken it to multiplayer shooters where you seem to do the same thing over and over: you circle through the never changing arena and twitch kill noobs in ever more quick and precise ways. It’s not my thing at all.

This is one of my favorite lineups in Skylanders. There's a spider robot, a robot with a giant magnet for a head, a fighting wind-up toy, Sprocket in a tank, Trigger Happy riding a bomb like Slim Pickens and a living bomb. There's a lot of action in this crew. I like it. 

Fable Fortune (XBO, Win). I wish I could rent this, but it will be a downloadable title. A Fable themed anything, even a card game, is ok with me.

I bookended my day today with Halo Wars 2 and nearly finished it. In the middle was Minecraft, and I acquired Kane & Lynch 2.