PixlBit

     Most of the week, I played Etrian Odyssey Untold. I’m up to level 34 in experience and down to level 12 in the dungeons. I’m playing on easy. Nothing has seriously challenged me except for this one Golem. It was on what I thought was a pretty routine side quest back to one of the earlier levels (the game periodically sends you back to earlier levels to fulfill a request by a townsperson). I was supposed to pick up a treasure but instead got suckered into confronting this giant Golem creature. It tasked me by healing itself every time I got it down to a low level of health. Persistence won out though. I used up all my items to keep my TP (magic points) up so I could activate skills to do the big damage. The fight got me to search in my skills for the highest damage ones for each character. So it helped me focus on the most valuable skills to level up. I almost wanted to raise the difficulty level in the game, but I know everything will get much harder and my progress will slow to a crawl.

 Monday:

    Monday I played World Series of Poker: Full House Pro on XBLA with my friend Mad Krammer. I've been choosing tournament play because it's a shorter, elimination type game. Standard Ring games can go on forever with people popping in and out at random. I'd do ranked games but you can't bring your friends with you. You have to play alone against other ranked players. That's no fun. There's a single player mode too but again, no party, no fun. It looks like Monday nights are the only times I'm going to get with my friend anymore though. WSOP is fun, but I wonder sometimes why I'm playing a card game on a system that can render whole worlds like in Skyrim.

     I began this week with a major restructuring of my collection. I gave up my ridiculously ambitious quest to play every single 360 game for achievements for two reasons: one – probably won’t finish all of them until 2020; two – I don’t get much gaming time in with my friend anymore.  I decided to focus my play time and collecting on just those games I have in my must-play category. This means trading in a bunch of games I got just to play for achievements and picking up others for the permanent collection, some I’ve played already, others not.  This picture shows the result for week one.