PixlBit

It's a tough choice between the Advance Wars series and Pikmin. I guess I'd have to give the edge to Advance Wars. I love the look of the game. It's like playing with military toys as a kid. I find the gameplay a little bit frustrating in the higher levels. Someone described it as a kind of puzzle to solve. There's not a lot of different ways to win, you just have to solve it the way they want you to. 

I sort of wish all these difficult strategy games with somewhat cartoony visuals, like Civ Rev, had some mode that frees me from the actual strategy. I think I want to do like I did as a kid and run simulations from both sides and see how it plays out. Maybe a mode that let's you set up and then it plays itself or just that you control both sides, i.e. no A.I. .

Yea, you need at least a century to become a master at civ. 

What would your name be then? Helilicker? 

Yea and there are undead, machine, magic skylanders too. Well, techically the Arkeyans are both magic and machine, so Chop Chop is all three. 

What is it about water? It's always problematical in games. I guess we're land creatures and like land games. If Dolphins made video games they would be the best at the computer design of water and all their games would be based on Ecco The Dolphin instead of Zelda or Doom. 

I've got five achievements left. One is practically done and the rest are about winning on Deity difficulty. It's weird because last I played it, probably in 2009 because I saw a save file labeled that, I had trouble beating it on King difficulty, two levels below Deity. It must've taken 8 years of my brain silently working on it to produce this kind of mastery in 2017. But we'll see if I can handle Deity level. 

It's strange it hasn't been rereleased. The characters have been in all sorts of other Sega games. Apparently the game didn't do well financially when it came out. 

Yea, the basic outline is similar but you haven't lived until you reel in a Hammerhead Shark to some ripping tunes with the Dreamcast's fishing controller. Yea!

I like the fire and tech characters as well, but there's cool characters in every element. I call them elements but their really just categories. There are 8 of them: Fire, Air, Earth, Water, Life, Magic, Tech,  and Undead. Those divisions are the same in every Skylanders game, although there is a Light and Dark category in some of the others but those are for special figures and there aren't many. 

I don't know how I got it. I wasn't buying expensive games. Just like you I was always looking for deals and cheaper stuff. I guess I got it at just the right time. 

I didn't play any other game that used it. 

It's funny because the title does not suggest a NBA Jam like game. It suggests a more simulation game. It has the current rosters of teams from 2000, though. Shaq is on the cover. 

That's cool. I know I still have the demo on a OXM demo disc. I wish I had time to go back and play this game again. I really don't remember what I thought of the gameplay, only that I doubt I finished it.