PixlBit

Well Happy Monday good people of the 7 Pixlbit Nation (you’re not humming that bass line, and the hardcore folks are playing air drums). I hope your weekend was filled with fun/rest/games/pickups/and any other fun random things you folks like to do. This past weekend I had the ultra rare CD Friday. I didn’t want to have CD Saturday/Sunday because this weekend I wanted to spend the weekend doing nothing but camping out in front of the television. I did have one big goal for Friday, and that was to get my Dreamcast connected to my television and go back to 1999.

 

So my day started with a trip to some of the surrounding stores before hitting the local mom & pop at the mall.

 

So we are going to skip Halloween and Thanksgiving. I’m taking this as a sign that it is perfectly ok to fill up my iPod with Christmas music the minute Halloween is officially over. Speaking of Halloween I want to buy a pumpkin this year. I have an idea of what I want to carve into it. Oh before this trek into the aisle that Christmas threw up on, I was at the store next door searching for the next pair of sneakers, didn’t find anything, and I figured why not look through the local Home Goods because they usually have one aisle with random toys *cough there could be Lego

 

Next stop was the mall. Before making my way to the mom & pop to stare at their wall of $1.99 CDs I visited the new game store. By new I mean the guy who owned the kiosk by the food court now has an actual store. He has a ton of stuff, with a lot of it going for what I assume are a good price for stuff. Many of the games start at $10, but I think he’s crazy to sell a FFVII for $80. The green label for you black purists out there. There wasn’t anything I really wanted in his Dreamcast section so I asked if he has the video cables for the Dreamcast

 

Yes it is official; I think my cables that came with my Dreamcast are lost, so I brought in some new ones. He had a couple of those retron consoles that I thought about getting for the classic plastic, but I didn’t want to spend a lot. I now have my cables so it I should be set. I finished up my mall trip and went home, not realizing that there was a new problem I was going to run into.

 

Flash forward to a couple of hours later. I was ready to plug in and play some Dreamcast goodness, so I hooked up the console to the living room television…and there are no composite hookups. I did the trick where you can plug into the component hookups that sometimes work, but this time the screen was black and white. Blah. After sometime on the internet (in between invading various bases on Star Wars Commander, more on this later), I found an old school fix. Off to Target!

 

All my problems with this were answered with a dang $20 box that I would have used…back in the late 90s.

 

I really should have kept the Pelican one I had that had like five different hookups and all you had to do was push a button to activate connection. I blame the excitement of my first Flat screen for getting rid of it. Since the cable now runs through an HDMI cable, I have that plug on the back of the TV open so it was off to connect it and play some Dreamcast goodness…. right after dinner

 

I was hungry. All the Internet stuff took a toll and plus I do like the local grill that is willing to serve breakfast all day.

 

Ok back to the Dreamcast, it worked and I proceeded to setup the system and get a game of Metropolis Street Racer. As I was setting it up it wouldn’t save my game save. It turns out I had to clear some space and that feature was useless on the game menu.

 

I got rid of some duplicate game saves and freed up around 100 blocks, and finally the game works and I was able to get some game time in on MSR.

 

This is the current setup of the Dreamcast. It isn’t pretty, but for right now it will do, until I get a better situation set up. I am now ready to go back and play some games I’ve ben neglecting, and add to my Dreamcast library. There are quite a few games I do want to get for it, and hopefully I will run into some of those games at the local Swapmeet.

 

In other game news

 

I ran into a nasty glitch on Star Wars Commander. I was dropping the hammer on this guy and all of a sudden my forces just stopped. His defenses worked fine but my armored forces wouldn’t move. It sucked, I took the loss and ended the battle.

 

Transformers War for Cybertron – 360

I made it to the last level for the Decepticons. This game is so much fun, and it seems like Fall of Cybertron is similar so it looks good that I will enjoy that game as well. I’m a little disappointed I can’t go further with the Decepticons but the Autobot section should be fun.

 

Driver: San Francisco – 360

I finally gave this game a try because it has just been sitting on my 360 hard drive. At first I didn’t care for the direction of this game, because it is different from the previous Driver games. The one hold over is that the driving is still a lot of fun, and I am kind of familiar with the surroundings.

 

Picross 3D – 3DS

Still moving along, but there have been a couple of puzzles where I’ve said “What the hell is that”.

 

Fat Princess: Piece of Cake – iPad Air

Originally I was playing this game just to unlock the PS3 game, but like I said in a previous blog, the game is growing on my and I am enjoying it. I’m trying to upgrade my team to level 6 in time for the 3^rd unlock able world.

 

The final thing I did this past weekend is something I usually share on Quick Hits but I thought I’d add it to today’s blog as well.

 

I started watching Gotham on Hulu because the NFL games that were available in my area where complete garbage (I’m looking at you Carolina vs Seattle). I’m starting on my third episode and the show hasn’t wowed me yet.

 

Its fun seeing the names you recognize from the previous movies (sorry comic book fans I would occasionally read the books). While watching I have a theory on who killed Bruce Wayne’s parents….it was Alfred. I know you’re thinking I’m nuts but this is why I think he did it: 1. He gets everything left to him. 2. If you were mega rich wouldn’t you have a driver? 3. Why in the world were they in the bad part of town? I think Alfred was the Tessio of the Wayne family, but eventually had a change of heart and kept up with the Batman secret especially the part where he was trained by Qui Gon Jinn (yup three different movie references for a crackpot TV Show theory). I think the thing that bothers me the most about the Gotham is that they introduced all these characters at once instead of slowly bringing them out. Oh and why does Bruce Wayne’s vocabulary sound like he’s in his early 20s getting ready for grad school?

 

Well Pixlbit it has been fun. I took a round about why of setting up a Dreamcast, watching some so-so comic book show, and hopefully by the end of today I will have a kick ass pumpkin!

 

Since it is Halloween week, I thought I’d share a video that SDSU posted of the Halloween game played by the SDSU Baseball Team (I believe the Dance Team was also involved)

 

 

That’s all for now, more later!

-Chris