Angel Faction: High Five Together

On 08/24/2020 at 06:49 PM by KnightDriver

My angel faction is so rad! These winged badies can wreck demon butt and perform a mean flying circus to boot. I got them tricked out with platinum wings, diamond mind bullets and radiance shock halos. I'm taking down RAID bosses with ease in this MMO. Thing is, Darla can only play on Wednesdays, Bob on Thursdays, Jeremy on Saturday night and Tamara on Sunday afternoon. It got so tricky getting people together, I played the following three games, watched a tv episode and downloaded two new games instead.

Retro: Dark Angel: Vampire Apocalypse [PS2]

This is a 2001 PS2 game I played all of 15 minutes or so. You get no opening cutscene or even text scroll to tell you about the story. You just appear in a dark room surrounded by demonic enemies and have to slash and shoot your way out of it with no explanation of how to do anything. I didn't even realize I had a gun until I tried one of the buttons by chance.

After you hack and slash your way through all the enemies you are told to hit start to see the world map and go save two new villages. I saved the next one and then got killed in the third. It let me respawn there, but all the enemies were gone, and I had no more quests. I had two choices: run around aimlessly until something happened or stop playing. I chose to stop.

Games with Gold: Red Faction II and Override

Two recent freebies for Gold members. I've played Red Faction II on OG Xbox a long time ago, but I think it might be worth a replay. Override looks like some MMO hero shooter/brawler, but I'm not sure. I'll try it sometime. It was free, so why not.

Video: High Score Episode 2

I watched episode 2. This one it all about Nintendo. They talked about the creation of Mario and the law suit over Donkey Kong with Universal. I had forgotten Nintendo named Kirby after their lawyer in that fight. It seems that legal battle was key to allowing Nintendo to make big money in America in the years to come. They also featured the Nintendo games championship held in 1990 and the winner of that. I was at college at the time and knew nothing at all about this. I was meditating by a lake at my maintenance job at a woodsy club in upstate New York.

Rewards Quests: Gears 5

I got that last achievement I needed for the rewards points by playing Versus mode and then Escape mode. Escape mode is interesting. You have to find a way out while enemies attack you and a strange poison gas fills up the environment. I died in a supply room but a teammate made it to the chopper, so we won, and I won my monthly rewards points.

Current Obession: Farm Together

I moved a farmhand from crops to flowers and limited my area of planting. I got real tired of harvesting that stuff. I also bought a water filter for the ponds. This increases how much you make from fishing. You can level it up too. Most of my quests were hung up on getting fish, so I thought this might help. I'm not sure it does, but I have a lot of fish, so it'll at least give me more cash.

Finally, I started creating fields everywhere I could and planted long term crops. I figure, I don't even have to harvest them until a quest comes up that asks for them. They don't go bad ever. There's no rush to harvest unless you need the cash or have a quest for a particular crop. So, I find myself riding my train from house to house and checking on my cooking, painting and music projects while my farm hands take care of just about everything else. Funny. I used to have to work a lot.

Cary Woodham

08/25/2020 at 08:21 AM

Kirby was named after the lawyer only partially. He also got his name from the vacuum cleaner company, since Kirby sucks in enemies. Also, in Japan they liked the contrast of a soft character having a harsh sounding name like Kirby. The documentary also claimed that Kirby got his likeness from the lawyer as well. But that's not true. Kirby was originally a placeholder until they came up with a regular character. But the team liked the placeholder character so much they just went and used that as Kirby's design!

I actually attended the Nintendo PowerFest that was shown in the video when I was a kid. Except since Dallas was one of the first cities they visited, they just called it Nintendo World Championships 1990. They changed the name during the tour. I even wrote a blog about the Nintendo World Championships a few years ago.

http://www.gamerdad.com/blog/2015/06/15/nintendo-world-championships-1990/

One thing I like abou the HIgh Score videos is that that talk about a lot of things I was able to experience. I was a little kid in the early arcade days. I was an older kid during the NES heyday and got to experience all that fun. It just makes me feel lucky and fortunate to be able to have all these experiences with the video game industry.

SanAndreas

08/25/2020 at 02:48 PM

It's funny you say how Kirby is soft but has a hardcore name. It reminds me of how Nintendo of America markets Kirby as this tough, angry character in ads and on the packaging, to the point where Kirby named an entry on TV Tropes: American Kirby is Hardcore. This was probably my favorite Kirby commercial even though I never actually played the game.

KnightDriver

08/25/2020 at 05:53 PM

Interesting. I noticed another slight discrepency. They suggest that Nolan Bushnell stole Jerry Lawson's cartridge idea, but it was just one of those things. Good ideas get copied. That's just business. I wonder, though, what the copyrights were on the Fairchild's cartridges.

08/25/2020 at 08:24 PM

They also didn't mention Ralph Baer at all.

08/27/2020 at 06:53 PM

Yeah, they didn't talk much about Pong at all or the Odyssey.

08/25/2020 at 02:41 PM

I need to watch High Score, especially the Nintendo episode. On Facebook, I am friends with Trip Hawkins, the founder of Electronic Arts, and he's in High Score. His version of EA was awesome, but by the time he left they'd started turning into the studio-killing behemoth we know it as today.

08/25/2020 at 05:55 PM

I guess, similar to Activision. Started out so cool and then became a soul eating monster.

08/25/2020 at 07:48 PM

Hawkins even spoke in a video which talked about how EA Sports went downhill after EA got the exclusive NFL license for Madden.

08/27/2020 at 06:51 PM

Well, I'll be watching episode 3 tomorrow. Can't wait for that.

Super Step Contributing Writer

08/25/2020 at 11:55 PM

"I was meditating by a lake at my maintenance job at a woodsy club in upstate New York."

That sounds amazing. I think I fell asleep watching episode 2 (not cause it was bad but because I was already sleeping).

08/27/2020 at 07:00 PM

I loved that job in most ways, but I had some troube with the staff at times. We were from two different worlds: I college kid and they working class. But, I was on my own most of the time, and they weren't bad guys. The main thing I liked was the variety of chores linked to the seasons and the forest. Fantastic.

Matt Snee Staff Writer

08/26/2020 at 08:40 AM

I remember my friend playing Red Faction on PS2 (I think) when I visited him in New York when I was living in San Francisco. I like the idea of those games, but never played one.

That Dark Angel game sounds terrible.

08/27/2020 at 07:03 PM

I think I was then transitioning from PC to console gaming. I remember playing both PC and console versions. Same with Serious Sam and Painkiller a little later. Mark and I were always into shooters. No co-op in that one though, if I remember right.

It may have something cool if I persisted with it, but with all the games available to me right now, it's not worth the time.

goaztecs

08/27/2020 at 12:08 PM

Oh cool someone else is watching High Score. I haven't finished the first episode yet but it seems like one of those shows where I can camp out on the couch and just go through the entire series.

I liked Red Faction, but II was the first person game. That doesn't work as well with me but I did play some of it. Fun game.

08/27/2020 at 07:04 PM

Red Faction II just got free for Gold Members last week. I don't remember it at all but I'm sure I played it. I hope I can find time to try it again on Xbox One.

PixlBit