PixlBit

Again I'll break it down between games played for Xbox Game Pass/MS rewards and my own choices. All Xbox One this week. Wish I could mix it up more with the other console makers, but I only have room for two systems up at once at my friend's place and right now it's Xbox One and Xbox 360. 

Rewards Points Games:

The Long Dark: Last time I played this for rewards points I didn't survive even the first night in the wilderness after the plane crash. This time I made it all the way to the town, talked to the blind woman there, and explored the town. I had some trouble figuring out a way to make a torch, got stuck in the dark a lot, and stopped playing. I only had to travel a certain distance for the rewards points anyway. 

This is a first-person view survival game. It doesn't tell you much in the way of what you can craft or even how. I was more patient this time and figured it out by messing around in the menus for a while. I guess it really wasn't that hard after all. 

Back 4 Blood: I needed three achievements for the rewards points. This is the new successor to the Left 4 Dead series just out on Game Pass. I played solo campaign with bots for a while but got bored of that and started a multiplayer session. I got in with another person and two bots, which sometimes became real people. It seems like you play through the campaign in segments. Cooperation becomes kind of crucial after a while. I didn't have a headset but listened to the other person through my TV speakers and tried to cooperate. We got almost all the way through the first act, which is a lot of rounds. 

I became slightly annoyed at the objectives in each level which only appear in very tiny text in the upper left corner of the screen. Often I was told to go somewhere but had no idea where it was on the map. Sometimes I would see a location marker on the screen, but sometimes not. Along the way, you get gang rushed by lots of zombies, which were really fun to fight, but there are so many of them, if you don't know where you're going, you can get overwhelmed pretty quickly. Still, after some initial difficulties figuring out the goals on each map and lack of team communication, it got quite fun. When I finally was exhausted with it, I left the game thinking I hadn't got any of the achievements, but they all popped after I ended the multiplayer session. I wouldn't mind playing it again for rewards points, or even just for fun sometime in the future, hopefully with more real people in the game. 

Peggle 2: Got a single achievement I needed for the daily rewards points. I cleared the final "story" mission for one of the characters. It was a tricky last mission that had me repeating it over and over to finally clear it. Why isn't there a Peggle 3? I guess Peggle Blast for phones is 3. I want it for consoles. 

My Own Interest Games:

Wargroove: I stumbled across this in the Xbox store and remembered that I owned it already and loved it. I reinstalled it and went after an achievement I didn't have. This was to complete an arcade mode run. This is five battles that complete a mini-story. I had forgotten how much I love this fantasy-styled Advance Wars clone. I also had forgotten how long each of these battles take. I spent half a day completing the five battle arcade run. I didn't expect to beat it either since I haven't finished the campaign because of difficulty. 

You can choose from the various leaders to start. I chose the dog, Caesar. Each battle took 20 something rounds except for battle 4 which I beat in 11 because I discovered dragons and had a ball surrounding the enemy leader and burning him to a cinder. The battle animations are really cool. It's a very colorful game with what looks like hand-drawn characters and environments. The user interface and use of pop-up windows are really elegant, simple, and easy to understand visually. I love that. 

Minecraft: The new thing this week is Realms. I signed up for a subscription and created a realm. I'm on a free month and after that, I can pay with my rewards points, $7/mo. I invited my friend Mark and we can now independently work on this same world (I now wonder if I can connect to it on PS4?). Only thing is, on survival mode, it seems to be set to hard difficulty. Mobs are numerous and spawn anywhere anytime, no coordinates are shown, no starting map, and you drop all your stuff on death and return to a spawn point. I tried to change the settings but it doesn't seem to let you tweak it at all. I need to do some research to find out how to use Realms better. 

That's a weekend.