PixlBit

I played about five different video games today while my friend Mark played Minecraft. It mostly confirmed the fact that I'm not much of a platform guy or a puzzle game guy. Still, there's always something of interest to me in these games that makes me want to play them. I don't often finish them though. 

First up was an attempt to play the rest of Uncharted 2. For some reason my disc must've picked up some grease or something because every time I tried to load my save, the music playing would start skipping, and the game wouldn't load. Then when I quit out to restart, the whole system would shut down. After having no luck even after cleaning the disc, I gave up, and decided the game was too much a pain in my butt to bother finishing it anyway. Oh well. Beautiful game, but the combat was kind of annoying. 

Then I popped in Little Big Planet and played for a few hours and many levels before platformingitis started forming in my brain. When I was a kid, and everything was going smoothly in life, I was much more keen to learn the levels and replay them until perfected, but I have a low tolerance for repeated failures these days. Adult life is too full of that stuff. I will say this for Little Big Planet. It's probably one of the most creative games I've played. Design wise, it couldn't be more interesting. The platfroming controls are a little bit floaty, but you can get used to them in time. I played several levels online and sometimes I'd be put in there with several other players. It was usually pretty chaotic, and sometimes I couldn't tell who was who. I dressed my sackboy as a penguin with a rainbow of stickers all over him, but he was still tricky to see, espectially in the dark Little Dead Space user level I tried (I love the jetpack by the way).

Then I packed up my PS3 to take home because I only have room for two systems at Mark's place, and I want to bring the Wii over for some Super Mario Galaxy tomorrow. Then I was back to Xbox 360 and couple of oldies I wanted to revisit.

First up was The Orange Box and Portal. I almost finished this a year or so ago. I started over and got to a part where you have to use your portals to create momentum and then shoot new portals while flying through the air really fast. I was fine for several rooms of this, but a trickier room came up, and I lost my patience. I got past this early room before, but this time I just had enough of missing my target. 

So I put in Bioshock and set the game to Hard. I played through the first few areas until I ran out of ammo and plasmids and kept dying a lot. Playing on Hard is cool because the tension is high, which is the right mood to play this game. However, it is pretty brutal, and once you're out of supplies, it's crazy difficult. I hacked everything I saw, stunned before shot every enemy to save ammo, and used water to my advantage, but it wasn't enough. It's fine though, I wanted to reexperience the opening sequences and the first few rooms. I almost turned the difficulty to Normal to play through the whole game again, but I decided it was better to move on. Lots more games to try out there. 

Then I got back into Skyrim. I took a close look at that Claw item and saw the combination for the druid's inner sanctum (I think it was druids). Then I battled it out with a corpse warrior and then fast traveled back to town to return the Claw to the shop. After that, I started in on the main quest and got to Whiterun. Along the way I used the blacksmiths shops as much as possible, learning to create armor and improve them. Then I had to battle a dragon outside the town with some guards. Those dragons are so awesome! I got toasty fried over and over, just barely surviving each time and escaping into the lookout tower. The guards killed the dragon with their arrows while I waited for an opening to run in for melee strikes. I never had a chance becuase that dragon breathes a lot. Then I got my first dragon shout and started on the quest to meet the Greybeards.

I got seriously lost around the mountain I had to climb, and ended up in a den of thieves, which I dispatched with my housecarl. The thieves had an alchemy set, and I made my first potions. It's total guesswork but it seems the game remembers what combinations worked for you, so that's good. I did some mining with a pickaxe too. No Minecraft this, but I got some ore to use in blacksmithing. I read a bunch of books in there too. 

Then I got lost again and ended up on a sacred stone platform in the wilderness. There I got attacked by a mage and his pet skeleton. I head butted the skeleton and my housecarl took out the mage, but I couldn't find the body in the dark to loot it. Darn it!

Then I followed some path, wondering if I was going in the right direction, when I came to a river. My housecarl shot at a shadowy figure across the river and it came over after us. It was a troll and I had a tough battle with it before I put it down. I ran out of health potions but, luckily, I had made some cabage stews at a cooking site in the thieves den and healthed up. Yum!

Then we crossed the river, went up a hill and came to a town. The people there mentioned it was on route to my goal atop the mountain - Hrothgar, or something like that, I forget. So I was happy again and talked to some NPCs and entered an Inn and listened to a woman play the lute. It reminded me how much I love classical guitar playing. I think I'll trade my rock bass rig in for a classical guitar again and learn some tunes (this in the real world mind you).

Then I went to sleep, and saved, and had to stop for the night. Skyrim has so many amazing vistas out there in the wilderness. I just love roaming in that world. Give me a lute at the end of the day, and I swear, I could live in that world for real.