PixlBit

Too many words for a blog again, so I'll get right to my Sunday game fest. 

First thing I did on Sunday was hook up my new Xbox One. Of course there was a large 2GB update to be downloaded and installed. So while that was going on, I played my DS. 

i had Konami Classics Series Arcade Hits on my DS and I played through all the games. There are 15 of them. My favorites this time were Time Pilot (always a favorite, but I hate using the d-pad to control my plane), Roc 'N Rope (an interesting game where you shoot grappling lines to traverse platforms while avoiding monsters. You have a flashlight that can stun enemies while you climb to the top. When you get there, you fly off on the tail of a golden bird. That's level one. I didn't get a whole lot farther), and RainbowBell (actually TwinBee but called that in the U.S. It's a cute -em-up). All the games play great and sound just like the originals on the DS. It was fun to revisit these and check out a few I'd never played before. 

Xbox One was ready, so I checked out everything I could see on the dashboard. I think it's super cool that the system lets anyone on that specific console play any game I purchase and have their own save files. Mark can then play it during the week. Then I pinned Overlord: Fellowship of Evil to remind me to get it when it gets cheaper. It's already at $23, but I feel like, since it's a spin-off the main series, I want to buy it when it's under $20. Then I almost put in Rare Replay, but I wanted to knock some games off my list of short-plays, so I went back to Xbox 360. 

I checked out Crazy Taxi on Xbox Live. I have it on Dreamcast, but, I thought, if it was a reasonable price, I'd get it so wouldn't have to set up my Dreamcast. But it was $10 and I wasn't really up to paying that. Anything less and I might've bitten. Then I checked out Costume Quest but it was $15. I just got Costume Quest 2 for $5, so I was hoping for $10 or less. I pinned it to remind me in case it gets discounted.

So next on my short-play list was some original Xbox games I already had on hand that are backwards compatible with Xbox 360.

First up was Flatout. This is a racing/destruction derby game by Bugbear Entertainment. I played it way back when but wanted to revisit it one last time. It's pretty darn good. The graphics are good for it's time and the long tracks in country settings are really interesting and fun to race. There are also destruction derby arenas, short tracks and target shooting events. Yes, target shooting. In this game, when you crash, your driver catapults out of the car and soars through the air in ragdoll fashion. In these events, you can launch him or her even father for distance and height challenges. I like everything about this game. My only issue is the car controls which seem a little bit sensitive. By that I mean, your car tends to react strongly to the tiniest of movements of the analog stick. I wish you could dial down the sensitivity because I had trouble keeping my car from fishtailing. It was fine for a while, but eventually the control issues got to me. 

Then I popped in MagicThe Gathering Battlegrounds. This is an attempt to make the Magic cardgame a bit more actiony. You play a character that can cast spells on one side of a kind of tennis court battle ground. You can't go over the line in the middle for very long or start taking damage, so you conjure monsters that attack the opponent directly. You can buff your monsters in various ways too. It's a cool system but it plays way too fast. The opponent mobs you with monsters and you have to rush to counter them. Being rushed like that seems the exact opposite of the Magic experience. If the battle grounds were bigger and you could plan a little bit more, I might have loved it. 

Then it was Rogue Trooper. This is a thrid person shooter by Rebellion Developments. They do a lot of movie/tv licensed games and PSP versions of console games and the Sniper Elite series. This is a decent shooter where you play a kind of gentically created soldier in an army of near clones of yourself. An interesting aspect of it is all your fellow soldiers have their consciousness stored on a chip in their neck, so if they die, you can pry out the chip and insert it into a weapon or into your backpack robot buddy and get various boosts as well as extra snarky conversation. What pissed me off about this game was this area that asked you to stealth kill a bunch of enemies on a dock. Well, if you alet them even a little bit, mortar shells come raining down on you from some mysterious locaiton. It really seemed incredibly unfair. So I rage quit. Call me a baby, but I don't like nasty penalty kills. 

Onward to Gears of War Judgment, an actual Xbox 360 game. I started this right away in co-op with Mark, and boy are we going to be glued to this one for a while. It took me a little bit to remember the Gears control scheme, but when I got a hold of a Retro Lancer, it all came back to me. I love bull rushing the enemy and impaling them on my bayonet like a middle linebacker tackling the quarterback. Which brings me to football. 

Eagles vs. Cowboys, a traditional rivalry. I watched the first boring half and then went back to Gears for a while. Then came back for the end of the fourth quarter where things got very, very interesting. Cowboys tied the game up in the last minute, thanks to two passer interferance calls on Maxwell (both seemed highly questionable to me). But it didn't matter in the end because the Eagles won the toss in the overtime quarter and marched down the field for the winning touchdown. I was very happy; although, being Phily fans both Mark and I, we bad mouthed and complained about the Eagles the whole time up until that last pass for the win. Hey, thats just Phily for ya.  

Enough words for one day. Peace.