PixlBit

The weekend's gaming went quite well. On Xbox One I completed a monthly and all the weekly rewards, knocked off all my Game Pass quests, and tried a few new games. 

Baldur's Gate Dark Alliance: I noticed this in the Xbox store and my friend Mark bought it immediately. I did some research and saw that at present it does not have two-player functionality. It's likely to get updated with 2-player couch co-op but will it ever have online co-op? That is what I'm waiting for. I did watch Mark play this game solo. I remember almost every moment in it because we both played it a lot when it came out originally somewhere around 2002. 

Farm Together: Another land has been bought. I have 11 left. 

Gnomes Garden: A New Home: I replayed the levels of part two and several of the final third adding a few more 3 star levels to my record. 

Pinball FX3: The Champion Pub and Safe Cracker tables: Champion Pub is like a pinball version of Punch-Out. There is a mechanical torso and head that rotates into view that you hit with the ball. The head stays the same but the voice changes from fighter to fighter. I fought one Irish the other Spanish, but I'm sure there are others if you do the right things. Safe Cracker is an interesting table in that it has a digital board game that you can play on the headboard of the table if you do certain things right. I played both tables to set records in the challenges and in tournaments. 

Lego Batman: I finished episodes 2 and 3 in free play. I'm still missing either one minikit or a red brick on most of the levels. Along the way, I've been going for achievements like using Mad Hatter's mind control to direct a victim to their death. Lovely. I also smashed Inspector Gordon with Haley Quinn's hammer for another. I enjoy exploring the levels in free play and getting into every nook and cranny with the 6 or 8 allowed characters. 

Resident Evil 7 Biohazard: I played it for a monthly Game Pass quest. Last time I played it I got brutally murdered by the father in the room just off the kitchen before I could unlock the trap door. This time I made it into the trap door, had a riotous battle in the garage with the father before escaping to the main part of the house, leaving the father behind as a burning and head-blasted corpse. He never seems to stay dead though. Somewhere on the second floor, I got myself killed but right now I can't remember how. Maybe one of the other family members got me or my girlfriend possessed by some supernatural force. This is a pretty fantastic game. It's brutal as heck but exciting as you struggle to survive it. 

The Evil WIthin: Another one for a monthly Game Pass quest. I watched myself get decapitated by a butcher knife. That was fun. I kept going until I was shooting my way through zombies covered in barbed wire in a cemetery. You can sneak around pretty successfully and stealth kill zombies if you want. Don't forget to drop a match on the corpse or it'll come back to life later. Reality is fuzzy in this game as your base is a mental asylum where you upgrade your abilities with electro-shock therapy. You travel through a mirror to get to the "real" world to complete some task I wasn't quite sure of. I imagine you're trying to figure out why the world has gone upsidedown with zombies and earthquakes. The only annoyance was the camera view. That over-the-shoulder view, but pulled back just a bit more than usual, makes me constantly try and look around the back of my own character. He takes up just a bit too much screen for my taste. But the game plays excellently. 

Dragon Quest Builders 2: I got to the second island and started a farm. Not much more than that. 

Path of Exile: This is a free-to-play MMO RPG exactly like a Baldur's Gate Dark Alliance. I only had time to get to the first town but it's clear that this will be good and that my friend Mark might join me in it next week. 

That's a weekend.