PixlBit

I got a little break here waiting on an oil change. Here's what I've played this week so far. 

McDonald's Monopoly game. It's back, but this time works through the phone app. I scan the pieces and spin a wheel for prizes. As usual, I have all but one of most of the monopolies. Odds are low that the last one will appear, but I'm not really playing it with any hopes. It's just a fun little thing. Plus I get free food rewards pretty fequently. I think I still have four still waiting to be used. I like the mini McFlurry reward. 

Tamagotchi (GB) - I put this in my Super Game Boy player, hatched an egg and fed the little blob. You can then train it in three different ways, strength, intelligence and discipline. I didn't notice any changes, and I'm having a little trouble recognizing its expressions, but I imagine over the course of a few days I'll see some changes. I'm wondering where the save file goes. Is there a battery on the cart or does it save to the device? I'm hoping it's the cart so that when I switch back to my GBA, I'll still have my critter. 

Borderlands GotYE - I finished the Claptrap Revolution DLC and wrapped up my replay of the game on Xbox. I found it a little annoying that I got a lot of new weapons just as I was about to stop playing. I could go after a few achievements I don't have, but they are tedious and I don't want to. 

Borderlands 2 - I started this. I created a Krieg (psycho) character, named him Severian, the hero from the Gene Wolfe New Sun novels, dressed him in an executioner's hood and all black clothing. I focused on rate-of-fire (I love SMGs) and shield respawn rate for weapons and shields respectively. It worked for a while but, as usual, I kept finding myself in underpowered situations. The frustrations of this made me stop playing.

The transition to B2 from B1 is striking in the matter of voice work. This is where the series got seriously chatty. Every enemy taunts you and your own character makes comments all the time. Battles are filled with a cacophony of voices yelling and screaming, often in humerous ways. 

My favorite things are the goliaths. These enemies have helmets you can shoot off which turn them into rampaging berzerkers, attacking anything near them. I like to set them off and retreat to a safe position to watch them wreck the place. They level up as they dispatch foes, getting bigger and more ferocious. They also spout funny lines at you constantly, which I've been repeating since the game came out in 2012: "Satisfy me!", "I want everything you got!", etc...

Metro Last Light Redux - This is the remastered version of the game I played several hours of in original form a few years ago. I am a lot farther in this already. It's visually stunning as you cross ruined urban landscapes and underground sewers and subway tunnels. I like the story too and can't wait to read the books the game was based on by Dmitry Glukhovsky. It's gritty and realistic. You are tasked with surviving a post nuclear Moscow with political factions fighting each other, mutations running around and, possibly, aliens mixing it up. Everything and everybody is trying to kill you. 

There are striking similarities to Machine Game's Wolfenstein games in some respects. Weapons feel very realistic and you are often escaping from emprisonment, sometimes from post Nazi Nazis. The game involves a lot of stealth, or at least, carefully executed firefights. You have limited ammo and it's always better to take someone down with a knife in close quarters if you can. I tried to run-and-gun it in a few spots just to see if it would work and it doesn't. You can upgrade you weapons but it costs ammo, the currency in the game. I'm enjoying it. 

Only two weeks left in this month for me to get through the rest of my PS and N64 games.

I decided  to do things differently next year. I own 17 consoles. I'm going to go through one at a time, chronologically, for as long or as short as it takes instead of trying to make each one, or a whole console generation, take a month. I think I can get through it all in a year this way. Earlier systems take less time and modern ones more time in my experience. I'm bundling handhelds with the consoles. So when I play SNES, I'll be also playing Game Boy, GameCube with GBA, etc... . 

That's about all for now.