PixlBit

Part II is the peak and decline of arcades, years 1982-1985. I was in high school those years. Weekends I'd get on my bike, and with a friend, head down to the mall to play arcade games. 1982 was the absolute peak with just a ton of new games. After that the decline began as home consoles began offering more elaborate experiences to challenge the two and half minutes per quarter the arcade machines were giving. Here are my favorites.

Mark and I played about 2/3rds of it today on XBO via Master Chief Collection. It is clearly longer than Halo C.E.. We had some connection issues with it here and there. Mark eventually quit in frustration. I kept going. I found some new terminals and got a few achievements for various gunplay. I'd say this game might be Bungie's biggest effort as far as story goes. It seems the most epic of the series with long elaborate cut scenes and very dramatic dialog. I think, talk of a movie started about this time and I can see why. 

I was a teenager when the video game arcades were big in the 80s. I rode my bike everywhere and arcades were all around me. I would go to a pizza shop, a hotel lobby, a department store or the mall and find them. It was fun to go to different places because they often had different machines. I got to play a lot of different games, so I'm breaking this blog up into three parts. This first one is the years 1978-1981.

I finished Halo Reach, number 2 on the chrono list, on Sunday in about 7 hours. First off, the opening minutes reminded me how much I love the O'Donnell/Salvatore music. It adds such majesty to the game. It has just the right amount of melodramatic emphasis. Music for Halo should be a little bit over-the-top. Then, I saw the environments in Reach and remembered how much I like the design of this game. It still looks amazing. Most of the game takes place in natural environments dotted with a few buildings. I just like the look of the game very much. There is a lot of variety of gameplay: you go to space, fight within a Covenant ship, fly a Falcon helicopter, and drive a tank. The story is a downer but it's still a heroic story. I love the way it dovetails into Halo: Combat Evolved. Your last task in Reach is to deliver Cortana to Captain Keyes' ship, The Pillar of Autumn. There is a spartan with green armor near the end, but I could have sworn the voice work for him wasn't Master Chief, but I could be wrong. Maybe that was him as you link up with the Pillar of Autumn's crew. It would make sense. Anyway, the next day Mark and I ran through Halo: C.E., co-op, via The Master Chief Collection. 

And it started with Halo Wars 1. I played it all today in about 8 hours. I got very excited during the first few cut scenes because the game begins on planet Harvest where first contact with the Covenant was made. It felt like the true beginning of the Halo story; the true beginning of the human/covenant war. So here it is. 

Armada, by Ernest Cline, is about Zack Lightman (that name's words are almost Luke Skywalker) who plays the MMO space shooter Armada. Zack's father dies suddenly so he becomes obsessed with his dad's interests in 70s and 80s gaming and pop culture. Eventually, as a teenager, he finds his dad's journal outlining a conspiracy and from there the plot thickens.

I finished up Tales from the Borderlands today. The last chapter has you doing a few more button presses, which is good. I seem to detect certain scenes as new to me from the last time I played. I know I made a few different choices this time around. I was getting a kick out of the end of chapter breakdowns and any choices I made that were in the minority. I think I made more low percentage choices compared to other players this time around. I suppose that might account for a few different scenes and a slightly different progress through the story. These choices don't change that much but at the end you can choose your team against the final boss and different choices result in some different scenes. The end is always the same, though. 

This is a collection of short stories written by different authors. Some have written other Halo books. Others are, or were, employees at Bungie directly involved with the Halo franchise, and there are more still.

I played the first two chapters of Tales from the Borderlands on XBO the other day and, oh boy, what a difference from the Xbox 360 version. The XBO version ran perfectly smoothly, no frame rate drops or anything. I enjoyed it so much more. I'm noticing things now in the game I didn't notice before because I was so distracted by the technical problems. I now realize how these issues can so badly effect the experience of a game; the whole pacing of the story was ruined on Xbox 360. I didn't even play the last episode on 360 for over six months because I was so annoyed by it. I'm glad I bought this for XBO. It's exactly what I had hoped for, an error free experience.

I began today's gaming by playing Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel solo for a while and avoiding the final boss fight with the Empyrean Sentinel. I went to play the Holodome DLC instead. It's just a large arena and you have to survive five rounds and then one more crazy hard round. I just did one because I dislike arena fights unless I have friends in there with me.