PixlBit

This week I added a lot more of my collection to my playlist of games arranged by completion time. So a bunch of games got put into my travel pack for Mark's place. Those I finished with will be put in the trade bin to go towards new purchases. I've heard the Amiibo's are more plentiful right now and I'd like to have an Olimar one. 

First thing I did today was take a look at Xbox Live's Indie section. There was an announcement that MS is going to end the program by 2017. That makes me nervous about the possibility of some titles being removed. So I got a few things I've always wanted such as: Cthulhu Saves the World and Penny Arcade Adventures 2 and 3. Then I tried to find Protect Me Knight, which was mentioned here at Pixlbit as a good tower defense game. Well it was hard to find on the Xbox Live menu system. i looked under "P" and I looked under "strategy games" and couldn't find it. So I went to xbox live on the PC and there it was with a Japanese name at the top. Also, I discovered it's not really a tower defense game. It's more like a 2D Dungeon Defenders. You have a princess in the middle and you have to protect her from the hoards with basic attacks and by building static defenses. There is only one catapult you can build and use. So it's not a tower defense game, but just a defense game - if that's a genre. I bought it from the PC web site and then downloaded it to my 360 that way. I still don't know how to find it in the 360 menu system. But anyway, read on, because it was awesome!

First up was NBA Live 06. I admit it. I got this purely for achievements. You get them all very quickly. Half of them by beating the AI once on each difficulty level and the rest by setting up a simulation of a season and watch it, and the chievos roll in. I, however, couldn't get the hang of the controls right away and so pouted and handed it off to Mark, who proceeded to beat the AI on most of the difficulties and then start an actual season and play it instead of simulating it. He started to like it by the end of the night. 

I moved on to Protect Me Knight. This little Indie game is no joke. It was created by Yuzo Koshiro, the legendary chip tune composer. He did the music for games like Actraiser and the Streets of Rage series. So right away, the music in this Indie game is awesome and totally along the lines of a NES game. The graphics of the game are also like an NES game. All the monsters, bosses, your player, and princess are gorgeous little sprites. The gameplay is pretty simple. The princess is in the middle and you choose from four character types with different attacks and specials and defend her from the badies which approach from all sides. You can build wood barricades and then upgrade them to stone and then a catapult. You can have only one catapult though, and you have to enter it to fire it. You resist several waves of enemies and then fight a boss. You can play Arcade mode where you respawn after defeat, or Survival where the game ends if you die. In either case, if the Princess dies, the game ends. You can level up your character after each set of waves to gain better health, damage and reduced magic cost for your special attack. I think there are 12 waves total, but I'm not sure, because I'm bad at gaming and didn't get probably half way to the end. I did see several bosses and defeat them. That was fun. I could've kept playing, but I had other stuff to get to. (oh yea, you can play four player co-op, but I think it's same screen only and not online. I didn't check though).

Next was three original Xbox games that were backwards compatible with 360: Dead or Alive 3, Panzer Dragoon Orta, and Hulk (based on the movie, not Hulk Ultimate Destruction - which is awesome). DOA3 is a fighting game and I have low tolerance for such things. I did play as Hyabusa because he's who Yaiba is hunting for in Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden Z. One win, one loss, and I was out. Panzer Dragoon Orta is an on-rails shooter where you ride a dragon. I should say, semi-on-rails, because you can steer your dragon a little bit. It's fine, but it reminded me of Rez where you paint targets with your cross-hair and then let fly a barrage of missiles. This style of gameplay is not all that exciting to me. So onward I went to Hulk. I stayed with Hulk a bit longer. You just go from small area to small area and beat up soldiers until an arrow appears and you can move on. Then there are stealth sections as Bruce Banner and you have to resist being seen and forced to turn into Hulk. I got to this one stealth area I kept failing and quit. I dislike stealth gameplay A LOT. I wonder why there is any stealth in a Huik game. Hulk Ultimate Destruction did it right. You are always Hulk and always smashing things. Onward.

Back to Mayhem 3D to give that race in a car garage one more try. Got seventh after what I thought was a pretty good effort. I'm done with Mayhem. I beat the game and had only five stars left. It was a great game, but sometimes you got to say enough is enough.

Then I returned to Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden Z. I got to the final boss fight with Hyabusa. The main thing you have to do is stun him with one of the elemental attacks and then get into a battle of strength with him. This is the button mashing stuff. You have to mash a single button as quickly as possible 'til the meter fills and then you win. I can handle that a few times in a game, but in this section, if you fail one of them, you go back to the beginning and have to do them all over again. There's at least three of these mashy battles. I swear the game maker wanted to give me an injury. After about six of these stupid events, I'd had enough. I wasn't going to mash another button. What, am I a robot? Along the way to that final boss fight though, I had a lot of fun performing executions on every type of enemy and reading all story elements you can find in the environment. The writting in these is super funny being full of crazy, over-the-top, potty mouth nonsense. I had fun reading those. 

For the last few minutes, I popped in Angry Birds Star Wars, which I'll get back to tomorrow. There's a lot of puzzles in this game. I have three more worlds full of two dozen puzzles each to do, and that's the second half of the game. That's a lot of content. 

Pip pip cheerio.