PixlBit

Let me tell you the story of the villager and the emeralds. A villager was minding his own business: he traded with strangers, mumbled nonsense, opened and closed doors for no reason, and huddled with ten others in a house to avoid the terrors of the night. Then, one day, he found himself the last villager of the village. The zombies had finally taken them all. Then, he was taken as well.

More Minecraft this weekend. I ticked off two more achievements with six to go. Mark's got more left to do but he'll catch up really quickly when he wants to. Right now he's winning the diamond hunt. He digs down to bedrock and clears out gigantic areas. I have a different method. I dig channels about every three blocks. That way I don't have to mine out every single block. It can get tedious doing every block. Now that we both have diamond pickaxes enchanted to the max, though, it's a lot faster. Not only that, but we discovered that the enchantment "fortune" on a pickaxe increases the yield for certain mineral types. The most important one is diamond, of course. Use a Fortune II or Fortune III enhanced pickaxe on a block of diamond and you'll usually get twice the normal amount of gems from it. In this way we've been able to get plenty of diamonds for equipment. Mark has gotten so many that he made a full suit of diamond armor. I'm close to that, but not really. 

Mark and I are still chasing achievements for the XBO version of Minecraft. This day was like a mini lifetime.

It always seems like I die in Minecraft for the dumbest reasons. It's usually not dying at the hands of a ghast or wither skeleton but just backing into a pool of lava, falling off a cliff, or drowning. My deaths are a long list of accidents. The Three Stooges theme should be playing at all times. Aside from those recurring and very annoying moments, I did a lot of things in this game over the last few days.

I don't consider myself overly nostalgic for the time of my growing up but there are still lots of memories of those times in my head that are unavoidable. It always seems like pop culture effects one most strongly in the high school years. My high school years were firmly in the 80s, 81-86 to be exact. So when a book comes along that is chock full of 80s pop culture references, and I mean stuffed to the gills with them, I can't help but be pulled in even without a strong sense of nostalgia. 

Now that I had my original Xbox working, I was able to do what I wanted to do today: use all three Xbox systems. I played Capcom Classics Collection vol. 1 on Xbox, Peggle and King's Quest: Chapter 1 on X360, and Minecraft on XBO. Here's how it all went. 

Saturday I played some Peggle, Overlord Fellowship of Evil, Defense Grid 2 and the LocoCycle demo. Sunday was all Halo: Master Chief Collection and Minecraft. Details follow.

I used to, back in the 90s, be into getting classic board games to play on video game consoles. There was Risk and Monopoly on Genesis that both played very close to the originals. So I looked for others and one that landed in my collection was The Game of Life for Playstation. I had played the board game back in the 80s and thought it was pretty neat. Last night I played the video game version and was less impressed.

I just played this Playstation game. It's by Climax Entertainment, a Japanese company that did thie Shining in the Darkness RPG - go figure. Felony 11-79 is a racing game with destructible environments. That's why I got it - sounds like Burnout. Well, you are given a mostly linear route through city and country (kind of like Road Rash) and have to navigate it, picking up items, and, I think, crash into things, , . Or not crash into things, I'm not sure only that it keeps track of how much damage you've done.The more important thing though is time. You have a timer that counts down and you have to get to the end of the route before it ends. It also keeps track of your overall time, but I don't know why because if you don't beat the countdown timer, the game doesn't save your overall time. I don't get it. Plus if you crash a lot, and that's really fun - driving through a mall or hotel is not to be avoided - you lose a lot of time which made me lose against the countdown timer, thus no reward. I don't get that either. 

I wanted to run through all three Xbox systems today (Monday) at Mark's place but I couldn't get Metal Slug 4 + 5 to load right on the original Xbox. I think it was due to my TV having too high a resolution because the game came up with doubled images and without color. That happened to me before with a Wii Virtual Console game. With that one I changed some settings and it was fine but not this time. My TV doesn't have manual resolution settings that I could find. So I'll play it at home on my older TV.