PixlBit

That's how episode 3 of Tales from the Borderlands played, all two and one quarter hours of it; constant stutters, stops, and freezes. No outright crashes, but jiggy jaggies all the way through. It actually got me killed in one segment where I couldn't target a flying object because the animation kept stuttering. Oh! And load times. Why are there so many longish loading moments in a game like this? It's not pushing state of the art graphics or masses of gameplay mechanics. It's a long cutscene with some interactive moments. It should run smooth as silk. It was a great story though. The writing and voice acting were all top notch even though the mouths hardly ever matched the dialog. I tell you, somthing needs to be done about the programing in Tell Tale games. Telling great stories can be practically ruined by technical faults. 

So that's what I started with today. That is, after I bought Kirby's Dream Collection for Wii at Gamestop for about $33. Kinda pricey, but, I think worth it. Got a lotta games there and a soundtrack of Kirby game tunes as well. I'm ready now for any Kirby game that comes up in my history of games research. 

                               

                                        More Nintendo Voice Cast podcast today too. 

Then it was going to be playing Phantasy Star II, but Mark was playing Minecraft, so I jumped into his world again to chase the last few achievements. Of course, this ended up taking up the rest of the night, and I still have two achievements left. 

I got the achievement for building an Iron Golem. That was easy. Just lots of iron and a pumpkin head. The golem just wanders around and attacks anything that bothers it. It ignores creepers though, and creepers ignore the Golem. That was disappointing. 

Then I got the one for visiting 17 of the 26 biomes in the game. I basically wandered around Mark's world and then created a new one of my own, and wandered around that. Eventually the achievement popped up. The trickiest area to get to is the Mushroom island that sits just off the coast on one side of a map (maybe any map?). It has giant mushroom trees on it and a "mooshroom" cow that lays mushrooms. I guess that could be useful. Maybe. 

Then I tried to tame an Ocelot (lion) with a fish, and had no luck with that, and then went to one of Mark's other worlds and started building up supplies to heal a zombie villager (the other achievement I don't have). You need a weakness potion which requires a potion stand that requires a blaze stick to built it. The blaze stick is in the Netherworld, so you have to build an Obsidian portal to get there. That takes a while, but Mark had a world where he'd built one already and where he hadn't killed all the villagers. We just had to go kill a Blaze and take his stick. Sounds easy, but I nearly burned to death. Then we needed gold to make golden apples - a lot of gold. Well, we had to mine for it and didn't find any by the end of the night. I found some diamond though. That's important stuff. 

Another thing you need for this achievement, I'm pretty sure, is to play on Hard difficulty, because last week we played on Easy, and I had led a zombie into a house full of villagers and the zombie didn't attack anyone. So you have to be on Hard.

Tomorrow we'll probably get that achievement once we find some more gold and then figure out how to tame an Ocelot. Feeding it a fish is supposed to turn it into a kitty cat. MEOW!!!