PixlBit

Monday I had to truck Mark over to the doctor and so I had some time to kill in the waiting room. I brought my DS and played some Contra 4. This game looks great. Makes me think of Contra III Alien Wars on SNES that I played years ago. You have a grappling hook that can move you up to the upper screen on the DS. That mechanic was pretty cool. The game plays great too, but it's darn hard, as most of the Contra games are. I could stand it only a little while, so I took a gander at what else I had on my old DS. I hadn't used it in quite a while. I found Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Anniversary Edition there. I think it was given away free at the 30th anniversary of Zelda and I must've grabbed it. Well I dug in again and got really into it. You can play it solo and just switch back and forth between two characters. You solve puzzles and fight Zelda style. It was fun and it took up the time I had to wait, which wasn't all that long it turned out. I wanted to keep playing it. I put it on my backlog list just now. I think I forgot I had it. So I'll dig into it for real sometime in the future. 

Half day today (Sunday) playing games after I got culture at the art museum during the daytime, but it was enough to finish the campaign in Gears of War Ultimate co-op with my friend Mark. After finishing that we went back to pick up the few Cogs we hadn't found yet. I used the XBO menu system to look up a walkthrough to figure out what ones we'd missed. It was really easy to do. Much easier than going to Mark's computer and looking them up. I had saved some screenshots and video clips during gameplay and then watched them before I left - so fun to watch replays of some wacky moments in the game. I'm really loving the XBO experience right now.  

I got up early enough today, so I went to see Suicide Squad in IMAX 3D. It's a much bigger action flick than I expected, so it looked great in 3D. I thought it was fine but I wondered why they had to focus so much on the one note of humanity in each of the squad members. These guys and gals are fun for their craziness. I want to see that unleashed. And maybe that's the word for this movie, the squad members seemed leashed up most of the time, either litterally, or psychologically. But it was fun; just could've been funner if it took a note from the Crank movies. That's what I was hoping for.

Oh boy, here we go again. I'm gearing up to play Skylanders Superchargers in a week or two. The buy-2-get-3-free sale is still going on at Gamestop, so I stopped by one today and picked up what's shown below:

I went to Gamestop today to chew the fat and check out Lego Dimensions and Skylanders Superchargers. Both of those are high on my short-play games list. I might get to one of them as soon as two weeks from now. The Lego Dimensions starter pack for XBO was $60 on sale, regularly $90. Too much for me to spend at the moment. I have Skylanders Superchargers starter pack and a handfull of vehicles and figures, but I'd like more. They had nothing used though, so I dug into the clearance bin. I bought what's shown below for $20:

Mark and I finally went and saw Star Trek: Beyond today. I thought it was really good. I got a strong feeling of the original series in this one. It's still very different from TOS, but I got serious nostalgia goose bumps hearing the original music theme, Chris Pine looking so similar to a young Shatner, and all the Scotty, "It's impossible, sir, but I'll do what I can." attitude. It was kind of sad too. The actor for Chekov died tragically this year as did Leonard Nemoy (or was that last year?). 

I'm back to my backlog, playing through everything in order of shortest to longest play. I don't even want to think about that game that has to do with spelunking and fabricating. 

Thought I was going to play Gears of War Ultimate Edition today, but Minecraft sunk it's teeth into me again, leaving me with a kind of sickness. 

I jumped in Mark’s Minecraft survival game on XBO where he had accumulated a lot of resources. I made myself a suit of leather armor and dyed it red. Then I got myself a horse. All I needed was some iron horse armor so I could say I was riding my iron horse (Motorhead song title - I’m kinda of into motorcycles right now). I realized I could repair and enchant leather armor, so I did that. The suit held up pretty well as Mark and I took on the Ender Dragon and killed it. Then we tried to figure out how to respawn the thing. We figured out how to pick up the dragon’s egg but then we couldn’t figure out how to hatch it. Seems the rules for Minecraft XBO Edition are different than the PC version because there are lots of easy ways to do it on PC but not on XBO. Then I lost connection to Mark’s game and couldn’t get back on. I don’t know what was going on but I gave up after several attempts and built my own world instead.

Started Monday playing Halo: Master Chief Collection. Mark and I are playing the cross game playlist that includes all four games. We were in the last parts of Halo 2 when the power went out in the neighborhood due to a storm. I'm feeling like 343 has tweaked gameplay in Halo 2 a little bit. It feels less like a run-and-gun power trip and more like a strategic cover based shooter. Weapons are less powerful and enemies are a little tougher. I used to melee enemies with one mjolnir powered fist, but now it takes several hits. It just doesn't feel right. A grunt should go down with one punch from a Spartan. Anyway, I'm feeling like Halo has gotten the COD treatment across all the games now and it disappoints me. This is not a realistic game. You're supposed to be a super soldier not just another vulnerable combatant. That being said, it was still fun, just not as fun as it could have been. After the power outage, Mark and I played Minecraft instead.