PixlBit

    Monday I played World Series of Poker: Full House Pro on XBLA with my friend Mad Krammer. I've been choosing tournament play because it's a shorter, elimination type game. Standard Ring games can go on forever with people popping in and out at random. I'd do ranked games but you can't bring your friends with you. You have to play alone against other ranked players. That's no fun. There's a single player mode too but again, no party, no fun. It looks like Monday nights are the only times I'm going to get with my friend anymore though. WSOP is fun, but I wonder sometimes why I'm playing a card game on a system that can render whole worlds like in Skyrim.

     I began this week with a major restructuring of my collection. I gave up my ridiculously ambitious quest to play every single 360 game for achievements for two reasons: one – probably won’t finish all of them until 2020; two – I don’t get much gaming time in with my friend anymore.  I decided to focus my play time and collecting on just those games I have in my must-play category. This means trading in a bunch of games I got just to play for achievements and picking up others for the permanent collection, some I’ve played already, others not.  This picture shows the result for week one.

    Finished the Fighter's Guild quests today. There's an interrogation segment but all you do is the persuade mini-game until it's maxed and then bribe a few times. The guy who tells you to interrogate the prisoner then does a stick figure painting of it later on. I got a chuckle out of that. And I caught Vampirism but cured it right away. I killed a whole bunch of Ogres, bandits, and what I thought were goblins, but were actually innocents, because I was on a drug given to me by the Blackwood Company, a rival of the Fighter's Guild. It reminded me of the PS3 game Haze where you're a soldier on a drug, doing the dirty work for some evil corporation. I was redeemed though and got to the top rank of Master in the Guild.

My first question to you for HQT is: One breakfast or two?

   I was so blue today, that I went to the park and played Etrian Odyssey Untold in my car while listening to podcasts. I love the upgrades to the menus and look of this remake of the first game in the series. It looks a lot like Etrian Odyssey IV that came out earlier this year.