PixlBit

I'm on a kind of staycation this week. I made some real life journeys to NYC and some virtual ones to WWI France, a fanciful place called Teyvat, baseball land, and Marvel's NYC. 

Wings 2: Aces High (SNES): Well, not a great game but I sort of enjoyed a half hour flying biplanes. You have a squadron of five pilots each with their own missions, some are dogfights, some are bombing missions. They're short missions and they are easy to fail resulting in certain doom and the demise of that fighter pilot. I RIPed all five pilots in short order resulting in a game over screen. 

Battlefield 1 (XSS): I replayed the first solo mission in the tank on "normal" difficulty. Presentation is top notch, missions go from driving the tank and fireing it, to going on foot to clear the way for the tank. I got excited when I found some tnt and proceeded to throw it at everything. BOOM. Nothing like runnin' and booming. Got myself an achievement for taking out five foes at once and most of a building. Victory! Tank to tank battles are pretty great too. I love those German tiny tanks with the wildly colorful camo designs. I eschewed playing more of this or Battlefield V this week though - not in the mood for grim battles at the moment. 

Genshin Impact (XSS): For a free-to-play game this offers a huge amount of content (122 GB game) and no in-app purchase pressure for many hours. I probably played about fifteen hours of this in complete delight wondering when the wall would come and the pressure to pay, but it never came. I actually just stopped because I felt it would be an endless game, and I like knowing there's an end in sight somewhere.

So, as to gameplay it resembles recent Zelda games quite a bit or maybe Xenoblade Chronicles as well. It has a huge open world in a land called Teyvat, lots of missions to do, an elaborate and deep storyline, engaging battle system, puzzly challenge zones, gliding, cooking, and I don't know what all else. I loved exploring the world and fighting random critters and harvesting plants and minerals. But, it was a little weird always playing as mostly tween girls, having cook offs and getting hit on by slightly older women. Fun though. I was tempted to just keep playing, but I really felt like switching games. 

Backyard Baseball '09 (Wii): A fun much simplified baseball game with kids but with the names of then current players. Weird. I played an All-Star game from '09 with pitcher Roy Halliday (then on the Bluejays but would later be on the Phillies) and second baseman Chase Utley (a favorite Phillie of mine). I have to say, though, the AI controlled teams are darn good, stealing bases at will, and fielding perfectly. I lost 15 to 9. Still fun though. You can unlock Babe Ruth in season play, but I'd rather play against a real player. This AI is just too good. 

Lego Marvel Super Heroes 2 (XSS): I'm about ten hours into this and still haven't finished the main storyline. Presentation is well above the first game in the series. The powers are a little different here in a few cases since there are some other Marvel heroes like Venom, Medusa and Ms Marvel just to name a few. I'm guessing this game combines events in the Guardians of the Galaxy, Thor Ragnarok and Doctor Strange movies and maybe others? I don't remember exactly. There are a lot of locations in this game, some of which I don't recognize from any movie. In any case, it's a pretty fantastic Lego game but even I get tired of these Marvel mumbo jumbo stories eventually and took a good break from it. I'll finish it though. I gotta rescue those Stan Lees again. 

That's a week. Happy Memorial Day.