PixlBit

       All week I was playing Etrian Odyssey: Millennium Girl: 63 hours now and level 54. It’s interesting to figure out how to get monsters to drop certain items. Some have to be paralyzed first, or frozen, or fought only with smashing weapons. There’s a huge variety of approaches that will elicit certain items. Occasionally, a person in the pub will tell you how to do it, but most of the time you just have to figure it out by trial and error.

                I renewed my Xbox Live Membership today. I almost thought twice about it, but I still play with my friend fairly often, so it was worth getting it for another year. However, I had to search around the dashboard to change various privacy settings to allow my renewal. I think it was to ensure that I saw the new Terms of Agreement and accepted it. They sent me to Settings/Privacy, but there isn’t any Privacy listed in Settings when you use the menu that you get when you push the center button on the controller. No, they meant the Setting blade on the dashboard which has a different menu that lists Privacy as a choice. Wah?! Microsoft sure knows how to make things unnecessarily confusing sometimes.

     Lately this has been the only day I can play games with a friend of mine. We play from 3pm to 10pm, not really enough time to make a whole lot of progress in a full console game, but ok for smaller games like those on XBL.

      I played about 13 hours of Etrian Odyssey Untold [3DS] this week. I’m at 45 hours total since I got it on Oct. 1. I’m at level 43 and on the 15^th floor of the third strata of the labyrinth. I like the Activity Log on the 3DS. You can see the number of steps you’ve taken; gameplay time by day, by week , or by game; and the number of notifications via Street Pass. I’m somewhat regretting setting the game to Picnic difficulty because it’s very nearly effortless. I feel the only way I could lose is if I did auto-attack on a boss and walked away from the system. I can’t bear to switch it though. It would change the whole experience. I laid my bed, now I gotta sleep in it.

      I just bought Uncharted 3 for under $10, and with that, I am finally feeling pretty satisfied with my games collection as it stands. I have a handful of titles from this and last year that I have to get, but they are not in any danger of being hard to find, and the longer I wait, the cheaper they will get. I can bide my time with them and watch for sales. In the mean time, I have plenty to do with what I have.

    Today I started the second half of the Mages Guild Quests in Oblivion but had some trouble because I contracted Prophyric Hemophila or Vampirism. OMFG!!!

    Ok, so here's a great video review of the movie Aliens by James Rolfe in his Monster Madness series for the month of October. It shows the connection and influence of this movie to video games very well. I never really thought about it too much but this movie was and is a huge influence on video games (Contra and Metroid especially) and vice versa. 

     Finally Microsoft has locations on the map for the Xbox One Tour here: http://www.xbox.com/en-US/onetour. They have a van go 'round with X1 decks to try out. I missed the early October dates in my city, but they're coming back later in the month.