PixlBit

     I began this week with a major restructuring of my collection. I gave up my ridiculously ambitious quest to play every single 360 game for achievements for two reasons: one – probably won’t finish all of them until 2020; two – I don’t get much gaming time in with my friend anymore.  I decided to focus my play time and collecting on just those games I have in my must-play category. This means trading in a bunch of games I got just to play for achievements and picking up others for the permanent collection, some I’ve played already, others not.  This picture shows the result for week one.

    The games on the left half of the picture are ones I haven’t played yet, and the ones on the right are ones I’ve played but I want for the permanent collection and to replay for trophies, achievements or 100% completion. Starting from the left is:

Ready 2 Rumble: Revolution [Wii]: I heard someone mention Facebreaker as the spiritual successor to the Ready 2 Rumble series and suddenly I got all excited. I didn’t know there were other arcade style boxing games out there besides Punch Out!. Now I gotta try this series with this, the latest entry.

God of War: Origins Collection [PS3]: I was looking for the PSP version of Chains of Olympus but GameStop only had it as a loose disc. I wanted both PSP games anyway, so I went for the collection for PS3. I played the demos of both Chains and Ghost on PSP and it was clear to me that these are must plays for God of War fans. One day I may get the originals on PSP.

Resistance 2 [PS3]: I’ve played about half of the first Resistance and have always wanted to go back and play the whole series to completion. It’s funny, now that COD and Halo so dominate console FPS’s, is there room for another unique FPS like this anymore? I wonder.

Dawn of Discovery [Wii]: Known as Anno: 1404 in Europe, this is a Renaissance era city building sim. The graphics for the Wii version remind me of World of Keflings on XBLA or Civilization Revolution. There seems to be some sort of story that goes along with it too and some real time strategy elements as well. All this adds up to making me crazy to play it.

The World Ends with You [DS]: So many people raved about this over the years, that it made its way into my must-buy list.  Shopping in Shibuya, an art style that makes me think of graffiti art or Jet Grind Radio, and action RPG gameplay where you control two characters at once on both screens of the DS, all make for a very appealing package.

Halo 3, Civilization Revolution, Facebreaker, and Haze are all games I’ve played before and loved except Facebreaker. I got the PS3 version of Facebreaker because you could take a picture of yourself with the PS3 Eye Toy and the game would make a character out of it. This feature turned out to be a disappointment because the image was very distorted as it wrapped your image around the head of the character. It also took a long time for the PS3 to do the work. On top of all that, the gameplay was devoid of strategy as blocking seemed to do nothing at all. It was a button masher, and I wanted a little bit more out of it than that. Still, I love the genre of arcade boxing so much, I had to have this around. Maybe I’ll read a guide and try and get through the game this time.

      As for what I actually played this week, I got obsessed with Etrian Odyssey. I played the demo for Etrian Odyssey Untold to the max of level ten and then, because I was so thrilled by it, went back to EOIV and started over from the beginning. Now I’m level 12 in that game and totally loving it. I'm playing it at every spare moment, even while my computer boots up. This time I’m playing on Easy, but easy in EOIV is like Normal in most games. It doesn’t feel too easy at all.

                            

    I’m playing on full 3D all the time now. It’s fine as long as you don’t shift the 3DS around too much. It gets blurry at the slightest shift of the angle of the screen. I love the effect though and it doesn’t hurt my eyes at all.  EOIV is so beautiful to look at and the menus are so easy to navigate. One problem with some RPGs is the density of data that can seem intimidating. This turns it all easy peazy and effortless. You’ll be a stat tweaker in no time.

    There’s a little bit of humor in the game mostly coming from the shop keeper who talks in what I think is a Jamaican accent. I came across this comment below that had me chuckling.

                            

   Finally, my buddy and I got together to game on Saturday and played the free XBLA game World Series of Poker: Full House Pro. We were able to play on the same table over live with random other players dropping in and out. The game uses your Xbox Avatar and I wondered at most of the Avatars that came to play with us. Almost all of them were just close approximations of the real people playing. Why on Earth would anyone want to do that?! Wild and crazy was what I expected to see. My friend had a complete suit of Halo armor on and I a Viking battle helmet.  Seriously, if online is just going to be a Sim of the real world, I want nothing more to do with it. I gotta think of how to make my Avatar more extremely strange now.