PixlBit

Good to hear from you here!  Hopefully you can stick around and post some blogs and read some of mine, too!

I'm not really reading much of anything.  High school and college kind of drained the fun of reading out of me.  But in May, there is a book I'll be getting: The Official Pac-Man Cookbook.  Oh who am I kidding, I won't be reading that either, just looking at the pictures!

I've been reviewing lots of games, but I finally finished Ys X: Nordics the other day.  It's getting harder and harder for me to finish long games anymore.  At the end of this month, I'll be getting a physical copy of Hello Kitty: Island Adventures.  I'm such a MANLY gamer! It looked like Animal Crossing so I'm going to have to try it!

Not realy listening much of anything lately except for my usual 80s stuff.  

If you want some good point and click adventures, I highly recommend TellTale's pre-Walking Dead stuff if you can find it.  There's the Sam & Max games, Tales of Monkey Island, and Wallace and Gromit's Grand Adventures.

I actually have most of those TellTale games because you recommended them to me and they were on sale in the Playstation Store.

I hear you on not having time to finish long games. I've had DQ III since November, and I just started really digging into it this month. I start at the park on Tuesday, and the first few weeks, I will probably be so tired I'll fall asleep with the controller in my hand. It's a good thing DQ games are turn-based, or my parties would be continuously wiped out.

I told you this already, but I've actually been tinkering around with emulators on my Steam Deck. I limit my emulation to stuff that isn't available on Switch, PS5, or Steam. So that means a lot of old computer systems like the TRS-80, Atari 8-bit, and a bit of Apple II, though I wasn't really into the Apple II like I was the Atari or TRS-80. Right now I'm trying to get the TI-99/4a working, and it's proving to be frustrating. I'm pretty much stuck with online emulators for that one. I also got Saturn emulation working, and Saturn emulation was notoriously tricky to get right because of how bizarre the design of the Saturn was. But I've gotten Shining Force III, Sakura Wars, Albert Odyssey, and Magic Knight Rayearth working on it, and I think the huge cult status of the Saturn has pretty much resolved most emulation issues now. I've also been on a SRPG kick on Switch, getting back into Fire Emblem Engage, Advance Wars, and Super Robot Wars.

I also play a lot of old arcade titles on Switch as well as abandoned arcade games on the Deck. Recently, an old favorite Neo-Geo puzzle game of mine dropped on Switch, Senkyu (released in the U.S. as Battle Balls), and I play Atari 50 and Donkey Kong fairly often when I want some light gaming.

When I get off work for this week, I will probably pick up Xenoblade Chronicles X. I missed out on that on the Wii U, so this will be a new experience for me.

I'm thinking of picking up some Looney Tunes DVDs and Blu-Rays, since David Zaslav seems determined to strip Warner Bros. for parts and is now rumored to be looking to sell the Looney Tunes. 

Congratulations on getting stuff to work. I am the opposite of most people - I started out PC gaming and switched to consoles. I hate to tinker, I just want the game to play.

My dad and I could hold entire conversations consisting of Looney Tunes quotes. For Christmas one year, I bought him a two disk set of Looney Tunes cartoons on DVD. When he died, my step-mom made sure I got them.

I do sometimes enjoy tinkering, but the stuff on the Deck is stuff that's not available on Switch or PS5, for various reasons. And every once in awhile, a game that was not available for wide distribution suddenly becomes available on Switch and PS5. When that's the case, I'll play it on Switch/PS5. The most recent example of this was Senkyu (localized in the 90s as Battle Balls), a very rare puzzle arcade game that wasn't available commercially for decades. Guess what? It just got an Arcade Archives release last week, so going forward, I'll play it on Switch (or PS5) instead of on the Steam Deck. Generally, I do just want  games to play, but I want to play old abandoned stuff from time to time. In that regard, Arcade Archives has been a godsend, especially when it comes to Nintendo arcade games like Donkey Kong and Mario Bros (I still have to use an emulator to play Popeye, though).

That, and the Steam Deck's official dock from Valve is complete dogs**t. Unlike the Switch's dock, which works instantaneously and consistently, the Steam Deck dock frequently doesn't display when it gets turned on or changes between game/desktop modes, and apparently this is a Valve issue rather than a user issue.  So every game that shows up on Switch saves me a lot of aggravation of plugging, unplugging, and restarting stuff when I want to play old games. That said, it plays my favorite Atari 8-bit games, plus a lot of arcade games that are almost guaranteed not to get re-released, as well as old RPG favorites like Ultima, Nethack, and Umoria. 

Funny you mentioning ghosts. I'm currently into Gothic fiction, although I've had some trouble finding copies of some of the classics. I started a blog at wordpress, monthly, where I record what I've been reading, watching, playing - as well as here on a weekly basis, although, I only talk about gaming here. 

I'm desperate to watch The Expanse and read the related books. 

I try a point-and-click adventure every so often. Those Five-BN games look familiar like I might have seen them on the Xbox store. I can't wait to try the remaster of DQ III. 

I'm part of a Music League group right now with Facebook friends. The host chooses a theme and we all pick tracks from Spotify to form a playlist and then vote and comment on them. Anything at all can come up in that. I'm currently on Romantic era classical in my own listening. I can't wait to get to the early 20th C with Stravinsky, Bartok and the like. That'll be May since that's my plan. 

Great to hear from you! It is very quite here, but I've been chugging along anyhow. 

I'll definitely check out your blog. 

The Expanse is fantastic. I've enjoyed what I've watched of the series a lot, and I really enjoyed the first book. The second one is on my to be read pile. A pile that is currently almost as tall as I am, I might add.

Point and clicks are a lot of fun when done well. Many of them, unfortunately, are not, And there's often no way to tell until you play the game, unless you can find a decent review. I usually pick them up when they're on sale in the Nintendo Store for $1.99 each. That way, if they suck, which many of them do, I'm not out of pocket by much.The first Five-BN game I played, Lost Lands: Dark Overlord, is available as a free download from the Nintendo Store. Took me three, maybe four hours tops to complete the story and then go back and find the hidden goodies. And DQ 1 & 2 HD-2D was just announced for release this year. I am beyond excited.

That music group sounds cool. 

DQ1-2 remastered? Oh great!

Music League is an app I use on my phone and then stream Spotify to my car radio. It works really great.

Oh man, the Murderbot Diaries are so good! And I love Asimov! And I saw in a previous comment that you'd read the first Expanse book! All great choices. I started the first Expanse book at the beginning of last year, thinking I would read two or three of them over the course of the year, and liked them so much that I read the first six books. I still need to get the last three but I am looking forward to reading them. This year has been kind of scattershot on reading so far. Right now I'm reading Jeremy Parish's Virtual Boy Works book.

I've read a ton of Asimov's short stories, but this was only the second novel of his that I've read. The other one was David Starr, Space Ranger, a YA book written under a pseudonym. And I know what you mean about binge reading a series. I did that with The Rivers of London series two years ago.

You need to read the rest of the Space Ranger series! It's really good!