PixlBit

I finished Halo Reach, number 2 on the chrono list, on Sunday in about 7 hours. First off, the opening minutes reminded me how much I love the O'Donnell/Salvatore music. It adds such majesty to the game. It has just the right amount of melodramatic emphasis. Music for Halo should be a little bit over-the-top. Then, I saw the environments in Reach and remembered how much I like the design of this game. It still looks amazing. Most of the game takes place in natural environments dotted with a few buildings. I just like the look of the game very much. There is a lot of variety of gameplay: you go to space, fight within a Covenant ship, fly a Falcon helicopter, and drive a tank. The story is a downer but it's still a heroic story. I love the way it dovetails into Halo: Combat Evolved. Your last task in Reach is to deliver Cortana to Captain Keyes' ship, The Pillar of Autumn. There is a spartan with green armor near the end, but I could have sworn the voice work for him wasn't Master Chief, but I could be wrong. Maybe that was him as you link up with the Pillar of Autumn's crew. It would make sense. Anyway, the next day Mark and I ran through Halo: C.E., co-op, via The Master Chief Collection. 

And it started with Halo Wars 1. I played it all today in about 8 hours. I got very excited during the first few cut scenes because the game begins on planet Harvest where first contact with the Covenant was made. It felt like the true beginning of the Halo story; the true beginning of the human/covenant war. So here it is. 

Armada, by Ernest Cline, is about Zack Lightman (that name's words are almost Luke Skywalker) who plays the MMO space shooter Armada. Zack's father dies suddenly so he becomes obsessed with his dad's interests in 70s and 80s gaming and pop culture. Eventually, as a teenager, he finds his dad's journal outlining a conspiracy and from there the plot thickens.

I finished up Tales from the Borderlands today. The last chapter has you doing a few more button presses, which is good. I seem to detect certain scenes as new to me from the last time I played. I know I made a few different choices this time around. I was getting a kick out of the end of chapter breakdowns and any choices I made that were in the minority. I think I made more low percentage choices compared to other players this time around. I suppose that might account for a few different scenes and a slightly different progress through the story. These choices don't change that much but at the end you can choose your team against the final boss and different choices result in some different scenes. The end is always the same, though. 

This is a collection of short stories written by different authors. Some have written other Halo books. Others are, or were, employees at Bungie directly involved with the Halo franchise, and there are more still.

I played the first two chapters of Tales from the Borderlands on XBO the other day and, oh boy, what a difference from the Xbox 360 version. The XBO version ran perfectly smoothly, no frame rate drops or anything. I enjoyed it so much more. I'm noticing things now in the game I didn't notice before because I was so distracted by the technical problems. I now realize how these issues can so badly effect the experience of a game; the whole pacing of the story was ruined on Xbox 360. I didn't even play the last episode on 360 for over six months because I was so annoyed by it. I'm glad I bought this for XBO. It's exactly what I had hoped for, an error free experience.

I began today's gaming by playing Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel solo for a while and avoiding the final boss fight with the Empyrean Sentinel. I went to play the Holodome DLC instead. It's just a large arena and you have to survive five rounds and then one more crazy hard round. I just did one because I dislike arena fights unless I have friends in there with me.

I just got to the final boss in Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel today. I fought it once but it's clearly going to be a tough battle that will take some time, so I stopped for the day. 

I think I'm about half way in the main story for Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel. I've been doing side missions along the way. I like doing all the side missions. It's not a completionist thing, I just like hearing all the stories and being sent to all the locations in the game. However, I did start to get hung up on trying to open all the chests that require 40 moon stones. I did five of them and thought the sixth one was going to be the last for an achievement but there are actually 10. I went for this last time I played the game and got to within one of getting it. This time, I backtracked three different times to open moon stone chests that I had found but didn't have the moon stones when I found them. I finally realized I was getting really obsessive about it and just stopped. Maybe I'll come across that one I never found, but it's not important. The story, the environments and listening to all the dialog are my main interests. 

Started Pre-Sequel today. My first impression (on this second playthrough) is that it is way less aggro than Borderlands 2. Enemies say less ultra violent things. There's even an option in the settings to tone down the gore. I don't think that was in B2. The game is a little bit less chatty overall. However, it still makes me chuckle frequently. I can't help thinking about the difference in developers in this regard. 2K Australian toning down the violence from the Gearbox, based in Texas, USA, developed B1 and B2. My friend Mark perfers B1 and B2 over Pre-Sequel, but I like it just fine.