PixlBit

I picked up a few games on sale today and spent the time with mostly retro arcade games. I caught up to HaloChief90 and surpassed his achievement score. I'm on top of my friends list for the moment. Here's what I played. 

Doughlings Arcade: I discovered secret levels. I'm not sure what made them appear, but I started playing them once I had 3-stared levels 1-10. New ones kept opening up. I did about five of them before taking a break for the day. I also leveled up the Smash character all the way up. Your paddle changes into a variety of different characters with special abilities when you pick up the DNA piece during gameplay. I like Smash because the paddle gets much bigger. 

Lifeforce: I discovered my secondary attack, missiles. These shoot out and go high and low, straffing enemies near the top and bottom of the screen - very helpful. I played really badly today, though, and didn't even get to the first boss. 

8-Bit RTS Series: This was on sale today. It's exactly like Warcraft II which makes me overjoyed. It's also like Starcraft in that it's scifi. It plays great, controls great, and I can't wait to play more of it. I played the tutorial and the first level several times in order to get all the special objectives. I'm going to have a lot of fun with this one. 

Dig Dug: I got the 3 game bundle of Dig Dug, Galaga and Pac-Man today on sale. In Dig Dug I popped Poojas anf Frygars like mad, crushed them with rocks and tried to dig out the whole screen. That last attempt was in vain. It is a serious challenge to be able to do that. I like the way the music only plays when you are moving and slows as you do. I can't think of another game that does that. I ended up, after my usual 4 plays to simulate a dollar spent in the arcade, with a high score of 14,430.

Galaga: I did quite well this time by getting to stage 10 and scoring 67,160 points after 4 plays. 

Pac-Man: After 4 plays only 21,820. In all these old arcade games that originally controlled with, I believe,a 4-way, or maybe an 8-way joystick, the Xbox's thumbstick is a problem. If you are not exactly pointing in a cardinal direction you may not move that way. I had this issue with Dig Dug and Pac-Man mostly. It just takes some self awareness. You can't be sloppy with the modern stick that moves in so many directions. 

Borderlands 3: I discovered the new Borderlands Science puzzle minigame that is supposed to help real scientists remove errors from microbial studies. It's a fun little sliding block puzzle that awards you points which you can use to buy temporary buffs for your character in the main game. There is a lot of new dialog from the various characters in the game too. I played through the Clap-Trap and Brick's puzzles but stopped because Mark and I were going to play co-op to take advantage of great loot drops for co-op play this week. 

We played through the second to last boss battle and beyond, grabbing loot and trying new weapons. I love the miniboss, Traunt. He's so funny to me with his silly yelling, TRAUNT! We were playing on True Vault Hunter and Mayhem 3 for most of it, but i secretly upped it to Mayhem 4 when Mark wasn't looking. It was a little too easy on 3. 4 was maybe a little tough, though, and battles took a long time. 

Well, that's a day.