PixlBit

I had to work around my neice's dance recital today, but I got some gaming in. 

First up was Dexter's Laboratory: Robot Rampage based on the kids TV show Dexter's Laboratory, which I really like. I played it on my TV via Nintendo's Gamecube Game Boy Player. I actually got quite far in it before the steam burst from the top of my head and I rage quit. In later levels the enemies are incredibly unfair.

Robot Rampage's gameplay is very simply copied from the old arcade game Elevator Action. For those who aren't familiar with the Elevator Action gameplay, it's a 2D veritcally, sometimes side, scrolling game with straight platforms and elevators that move between them, like in a building. Sometimes there are also escalators or sometimes a slot that mails you to another level. The platforms are full of doors where enemy robots come from. You have to enter all the red ones on a level to pass to the next level. Well, technically not all the red doors but just the ones with the codes, but it's wise to do them all because some give you a random item like a weapon or more health. Once you've got all the codes, or just opened all the red doors like I did, you move to the top or bottom of the screen and you go to a new stage. 

You can shoot and jump but movement is pretty limited on these 2D platforms. I didn't realize it until I couldn't stand it anymore that you could control the elevators while you're on them and you can shoot out the lights. I think when the lights are out, the robots can't see you, but the one time I did it, they shot at me anyway. It seemed like a good strategy anyway but, until I realized you could control the elevators, it seemed difficult to get the right angle to hit them. Perhaps very carefully shooting out the lights before entering the red doors is the way to go, but I got annoyed at robots camping outside the door I just entered and rapid firing as I came out. By the Ocarina of Time, that sucked. 

So then I went to watch my neice's recital and returned later to watch the Peguins win the Stanley Cup and finish up with Disney Infinity 3.0. I played the rest of the Toybox Takeover missions. Syndrome, villain from The Incredibles, takes over the Toy Box by stealing the wand of The Sorcerer from Mickey's Sorcerer's Apprentice and the Toy Box creation wand. He then constucts a bunch of levels to challenge you. You can use any character and I took this opportunity to play with all the figures I hadn't already used in the playsets like: Kylo Ren, Darth Vader, Hulkbuster Iron Man, Anakin Skywalker, and Ultron.

The levels are pretty good. You fight enemies from all the Disney Infinity games. There were pirates from Pirates of the Carribean and robots from The Incredibles both from D.I. 1.0, , Marvel enemies like Venom's spawn from D.I. 2.0, and stormtroopers from D.I. 3.0. There's some platforming and simple puzzles along the way. My favorite part was finding food and using them to boost my sidekick's abilities. My sidekick was so badass by the end that I hardly had to fight. He actually took out a boss for me with his tiny grenade launcher. You go guy. 

Then I tried the Toy Box Speedway extra content. You are put in a new hub world and have dozens of races taken from all the various playsets in the three D.i. games. I did a handful of them, but I don't really like kart racing that much, especially when playing against A.I.. You can play online with friends, but I had none, and, in any case, the servers are soon to be turned off this month anyway. I actually couldn't get into my cloud saved games earlier in the day and thought the servers must've been turned off, but later they came back online. I figured maybe Disney transfered its saves to Microsofts' servers because why would MS let one games' saves be erased when every game has to support cloud saves. I've always assumed cloud saves were on MS servers, but apparently, in this case, they aren't. I transfered all my D.I. saves to my harddrive just in case anyway. 

Finally I played some Peggle while the Peguins celebrated in San Jose to a crowd of booing spectators. This is why championship games in other sports are done in neutral cities. Why can't hockey do the same? Anyway, Peggle is fun and a great game when you only have a half hour or so to kill. It's a digital take on Pachinko basically. Shoot the pins and score points. What's not to like? Plus is was free this month with Games with Gold.

And that's a wrap. Tomorrow is the E3 press conference for Microsoft at 12:30pm EST. I'll be watching that live on my 360 and then try and find out about the Sony and Nintendo ones. Bye there.