PixlBit

I guess a lot of people were watching American Idol and Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest; playing Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter, listening to High School Musical and reading yet another James Patterson book, but I was somewhere else (except for Pirates, I do like those movies). Below describes just where. 

This is about the waning years of the Battletoads as they sit in their rockers on the porch of their farmhouse reminiscing. Each of them remembers differently, so the object of the game is to push your own memory as the true one. You do this via a casual card battle game like Magic the Gathering. After Rash, Pimple and Zit talk and come to a disagreement, the card battle game begins, and the winner moves the conversation their way. There are multiple endings that encourage replay. It's a short game. I won as Pimple and got the "Brutal Fist" ending. I won't spoil what that meant. I would've replayed the game, but the card battle system was a little too simple, and I moved on to the following five games. 

I got started on Farm Together on Sunday thinking I was just going to do some maintenace and move on to the Borderlands 3 DLC, but I never finished tweaking my farm. Here are some things I did as I passed farm level 70. 

It's a strategy game, a resource management sim, a shooter with a card battle minigame in a sprawling open world environment full of wise cracking NPCs. Honestly, I got kind of confused trying to get my head around all the stuff this game throws at you. So, I went and played the following five games instead. 

Don't ask me. I jumped into the portal and found myself in a swirl of psychedelic color with strange creatures and farm implements circling round me like I was in the eye of a tornado. Every single button made me sick to my stomach with zero-g movement, so I quit, watched a tv episdode and played the following seven games instead. 

Here are my media picks for 2005. They're not CSI, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Resident Evil 4, Green Day's American Idiot or Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code, but I like what I like.

Shadow Score is an old board game made digital and then fused to a romance simulator. It's online, streaming, 5v5, mobile, and asynchronous; use your webcams for added intrigue. I hated it because no one liked me even when I won, and I had to watch all the other randos complete the story paring up with faeries, furrys and fembots. So I played the following three games and watched a tv episode instead. 

Dual weilding is a great mechanic, but a whole game based on it? Use the left and right analog sticks to swing Okage's giant muscled arms to punish goblins and orcs on a super colorful farm of Yggdrasil trees. Thought there was only one of those, didn't you? There's always a least two of everything in this game including two ways to annoy: one is the camera which contantly zooms in and out as you punch to dramatise the action but which makes you dizzy as heck; and two is the glitchy gameplay. Yeah, it's fun to see goblin parts flying all over but when your fists get stuck in a ygdrassil and don't come out, it's game over. I played the following four games instead. 

Just an interactive novel where you learn the true depth of sorrow as a valkyrie who rescues the souls of dead soldiers and brings them to valhalla. Did you know crying is quite exhausting after a while? I mean, who can do ten hours of this? I wiped my eyes and played the following three games instead. 

An anthropomorphic animal high school where young furries have to perform trials, not unlike those in Hunger Games, or face starvation. I found the story and relationships gripping, but the targeting controls were terrible. I had to play a pin-the-tail-on-the-furry minigame that was near impossible. That tail looked funny on a nose though. I went and played the following four games and watched a tv episode instead.