PixlBit

Saturday Mark and I beat The Wither in Minecraft, but it took some failures. We summoned it in the front yard of Mark's house. It was probably a bad idea. The yard became cratered like it was hit by a barrage of WWI artillery. I got The Wither's health down about half way with arrows, but then it killed me. By the time I got my equipment back and attacked it again, it had regenerated its health back to full. So we reset to a save point and built a cage for it out of obsidian (hardest material in the game) and summoned it in there. That worked for all of a minute before it blasted its way out with its exploding skulls. I ran into one of our mines to hide from it and it didn't follow me. That got me thinking. We reset again and summoned it underground surrounded by a cobblestone barrier, then, before it could blast its way out, Mark hit it with his diamond sword, and I shot if full of arrows  That worked and we both got the achievement for defeating it.

I spent another day chasing achievements in Minecraft with Mark. This time I joined his world and we got really close to finishing the tasks required. 

My friend Mark told me about these six new achievements added to Minecraft this week and so I dumped all my other gaming plans and got back into it. I thought it would go quick but it sure hasn't. I got half of them done after 15 hours of gameplay and I'll be at it again on Monday to try and get the last three, which are much harder. 

Yesterday I picked up some things at Gamestop. First was the Disney Infinity figure Fear for the Inside Out playset. It was on sale for $10, cheaper than the used figures. I think I can start the Inside Out playset with Fear, but we'll see. I couldn't start the Force Awakens playset with Darth Maul, but that's a character not in that story, so that makes sense..Here's a picture of Fear and the rest:

I was so worried about rumors of online shutdown for Disney Infinity that I didn't play my backlog game today - today being Monday - so that I could try and get the online required achievements. There were only two. One was for knocking out another player, so Mark and I jumped in a predesigned arena map and killed each other once each for the achievement. The other was for playing 10 matches in any game in Flynn's Arcade. I didn't get that one because all the games there require four online players and there were no randoms to be found. I may try one more time on a Saturday or Sunday next week just to see if there are more players those days, but I have a feeling I'm just not going to get that one - and it'll be the last one I need. As it stands now, I have all but two achievements left: the one I just mentioned and the one for getting 75 Feats. Feats are like achievements just within Disney Infinity. I'm not sure how many I have yet but after playing almost three full playsets and all the Hub tutorials, I should be close. 

I didn't have time to blog on Saturday so this is really about the whole weekend. Saturday I played Episode 5 of Tales from the Borderlands finally. I had the season pass and played ep. 1-4 as they came out, but with almost six months to wait for ep. 5, I kind of lost interest. Well I finally finished it. Great story, predictable, but still very entertaining. My big gripe with it was the way it chugged almost constantly on my Xbox 360. Load times were long but worse than that was very regular slowdown that came near to ruining the experience for me. I'm not sure what the issue was. Maybe this runs better on XBO or PS4. I'd be tempted to get it again to play it without hiccups. 

So just as I begin playing Disney Infinity 3.0, they cancel the whole series. In fact, Disney is cancelling their whole games division. That's just crazy! D.I. was beating Skylanders for Pete's sake! Well, it seems toys-to-life stuff is dipping in sales across the board and they're getting out before it gets worse. I for one, am still crazy for toys-to-life stuff, so here's what I picked up today:

Started off with Metal Slug 2 on Monday. This one has an Egyptian theme. It's also about twice as long as the first one. It's full of fun stuff like getting turned into a mummy in the early stages. You fly a plane, drive a tank and the screens scroll up sometimes; lots of little improvements and the same great music and graphics. It also has the same great difficulty. This one has continues but they are not infinite. At some point you get a game over screen (I never counted the deaths), but the game does save your progress but only up to the beginning of the chapter you are on when you died. So if you have a tough time with the level end boss, you may find yourself repeating the whole level several times. This is what happened to me in chapter 5 (I think there's 8 chapters). I just wasn't up for any more today. I tried using the classic controller, it's suported, but I went back to the Wiimote for somet reason I forget why right now. My mind is completely blotted out with the next game I played all the rest of the day. 

Played through the whole of Metal Slug 1. I love it except I don't love the arcade, quarter munching, game mechanics. They throw at you impossible waves of bullets and bombs so you die and have to put in another quarter to continue. I don't have to put the money in, but it's still frustrating to die so much. I never did get really comfortable with the Wiimote ( the classic controller wasn't supported) but it was ok. I downloaded Metal Slug 2 on virtual console for Monday. I can use the classic controller for that. 

I saw Captain America: Civil War on Friday with Mark. I'm not a huge fan of the Avenger's movies but they're fun. This one was pretty good. I liked Bucky, Winter Soldier, the best. He has the best look and fights very agressively. I liked every fight he was in. Yea, he's troubled, being partially mind controlled and all (not a spoiler if you know the comics) but I actually like him better for it because he's more human than these mostly pristine do-gooders (Iron Man has his flaws, sure, but he basically has good intentions). I didn't like how they left Bucky though. No spoilers, but it was a boring wrap-up. I wanted to see more of him riding motorcyles.