PixlBit

Cold Winter: It’s a good FPS. I believe it was exclusive to PS2 but I’m not sure. You are some kind of spy and get jailed and interrogated by the Chinese police. You spend a year in jail before a fellow spy breaks you out. Then it’s on like Donkey Kong. Controls aren’t bad for the time. I have to do a lot of side stepping to get my target reticule in the right place, but it worked fine. You can upturn tables for cover, and you have to combine items for lock picks. The game is dark though. I think a lot of games back in 2002 wanted to show off lighting effects, and gloomy rooms seemed the best way to do it. It’s just annoying today. I was fine until I got to the open yard where there was a gun emplacement. This requires some stealth and I loathe that sort of thing. So, I never got out of prison. Whatevs.  

Dai Senryaku VII Exceed: Turn-based modern warfare strategy game on a hex grid. I played the tutorials for a good while and then the first campaign mission. I really like it and it’s not as complex as I feared it would be. Learning the controls wasn’t that hard. It reminded me of Advance Wars but less cute. I played it a good several hours and will keep it. I just need a box for it. This, and the others I played today, are all loose discs.     

Deus Ex: Didn’t even boot it up because last time I played it it was all about stealth, and, you know, not my favorite style.  

Escape From Monkey Island: What annoys me about point and click adventures, I discovered, is – just like platformers – the repetition. If you don’t choose the right question, you get the same answer. I really, really dislike that. But I was practicing my patience and kept at it. What bugged me more was the terrible controls. You can easily walk right past the text pop up for a sign and walk through a door by accident because it comes up so fast and walking through a door is automatic and doesn’t require a button press. Argh, that annoyed me. The game is funny and all, but I just don’t have the patience for it.  

Onimusha Warlords: Third person beat-em-up in a 3D world, fairly linear progression, at least at first. Movement is put on the d-pad and not the analog stick. What the? This makes for jerky movement at right angles instead of smooth movement. In a battle it’s annoying as heck. I was doing ok at it for a while, and it was fun, but I ran into some doors that needed a certain gem to open and I couldn’t find said gem. Exploring in a kind of military march: run, turn 90 degrees left, run straight, 90 degrees right; really made me not want to search any more.  

Risk: Global Domination: Back in the day, this was a good version of Risk, but it wouldn’t play in my PS2. It’s a blue disc and a CD not a DVD. My other PS2 would do the opposite and only play DVD games. Maybe it was just the disc though. Anyway, I have like seven copies of Risk as it is, so I can let this one go.  

Back to Xbox One finally and Banner Saga 2. I finished Chapter One and got deep into the next chapter. I was going to stop after a while to play some Witcher 3 but I couldn’t stop. I got to the part where you are traveling in a cave and battle a strange new Skurge boss. I beat that thing and was running from a cave-in when I stopped. This game’s just great. I hope I finish it soon so I can see about Banner Saga 3.  

That’s a day. More tomorrow on this my last week of break from school before that starts up again on Monday. I might get into an internship, and if I do, I will have very little time for this gaming stuff. Such is life.  

PS: Oh, and I watched some episodes of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex. Good stuff. All is exactly like the first movie like it picked up where it left off. I’m liking it but it’s not dubbed, so subtitles. It’s ok. The second episode was quite moving about a guy who put his brain in a battle tank. The cyberpunk elements are super cool in this series.