PixlBit

                               

                              Mini Ninja says, "shhhhhh, don't tell anyone he's not drinking a

                              Guinness on this St. Paddy's Day"

    On my way over to my friend’s place to play video games today (yesterday now), I picked up Mini Ninjas for Xbox 360 based on playing the demo and Last Ninja’s recent blog. It was a little pricey at $19 but I was still within budget for the month, and it had an appropriately green box cover, so what the heck. The game, developed by Hitman devs IO Interactive, got pretty good reviews back in ’09.

   After getting to my friend's place and setting up my Xbox 360, I quickly downloaded the free game on Xbox Live, Dungeon Defenders. I’m sure I played the demo for it and seem to remember it being a kind of real time tower defense game. It does what Pixel Junk Monsters does but in a 3D environment. You set up defenses but also run around in third person and fight or do maintenance. This will go on my backloggery page and may come up to play in a random Fortune Cookie pick sometime.

                   

                   It's not shown here, but it was hilarious to see my friend wielding a sniper rifle in

                   one hand and a rocket launcher in the other.

     Then I played Borderlands 2 all day using Sal the Gunzerker (I called him Krighty, mixing the word Knight with Krytie, a nickname given to Kryten, the character on the British scifi/comedy TV show Red Dwarf, of which I’m a fan). Krighty was level 12 from last week and I got him up to 14 playing solo, continually trying my gunzerking skill to see if I could get it to last 90 seconds for an achievement. After a while I realized it would be impossible to do until I reached level 25 and put points in the appropriate slots to boost the skill’s duration, so I jumped in my friend’s game. He was playing True Vault Hunter mode with a level 50 Gunzerker. This meant my level 14 Gunzerker had to hide and just soak up shared experience points. I literally could not do enough damage to kill even the weakest enemy and one shot my way would put me on the edge of being knocked down. I knew what I was getting into though. I just wanted to shadow my friend in order to power-level my character to 25.

     I didn’t realize it right away, but it my friend was entering the last few missions to win the whole game on True Vault Hunter Mode. I hid and watched as he battled wave after wave of robots. At times I actually served some use by restoring him when he was down, but that was rare since I really couldn’t be in the line of fire.

     It was kinda fun following him around like a news camera man, getting footage for some imaginary news source. I leveled up like crazy and when we entered the very last level, my friend managed, on his own, to beat Handsome Jack and then the Warrior. It was a crazy long fight; a war of attrition, and both of us died many times. At the end of it, I leveled up twice to bring me to 26. I filled out all the skill points needed for extending gunzerking time, and went back to my own Normal Mode game and played solo a little bit trying to try getting 90 seconds of gunzerking. I noticed it lasted much longer, but I needed to find more enemies to keep it going and the day ended before I could do that.

     It’s amazing how time flies playing these games. A whole day from 10am to 10pm went by like nothing. I think next time I’m going to limit it to eight hours because I feel like I shouldn’t be playing so much. I played 23 hours this week. I figure 10% of my time is for entertainment and that’s roughly 12 hours a week. So I’ve gone way over the mark and should rein it in. It’s hard when you’re so into games like I am right now.