PixlBit

     I watched my nephew play some Angry Birds Star Wars 2 (ABSW2) on his phone (it’s not set up as a phone. He uses it more like a DS).  The levels in ABSW2 are really creative. Each Star Wars character has its own abilities. Darth Sidious was my nephew’s favorite because he shoots out lightning as he hurtles toward the target.

    I am presently at the North Carolina shore with my Mother and Sister’s family for Thanksgiving week. I’ve been playing Mario & Luigi: Dream Team before bed every night and so far, nothing else, but I still think about games a lot and my 8 and 9 year old niece and nephew play some video games. Here are some of my thoughts for this first full day of vacation.

     Picked up Ratchet & Clank: into the Nexus on Tuesday and played the first hour or so. Controls work great, jumping around to different platforms in zero-g. I love all the characters. I’ve been singing that Wang Chung song, "Everybody Have Fun Tonight", all week after seeing it humorously placed in one particular cut-scene to great effect. Graphics aren’t as brilliantly sharp and detailed as I expected though. I seem to remember being more wowed by the graphics in Crack in Time when that came out. It could be that, being exposed to next gen graphics recently, I’m already expecting more from games. Still, it’s colorful and the environments really interesting, so I’m not complaining. I'm having fun tonight. I'm having Wang Chung tonight!

         On the night of the PS4 release I began thinking about what game got me to buy a PS3. It was launch day game Untold Legends: Dark Kingdom.

       All week I was playing Etrian Odyssey: Millennium Girl: 63 hours now and level 54. It’s interesting to figure out how to get monsters to drop certain items. Some have to be paralyzed first, or frozen, or fought only with smashing weapons. There’s a huge variety of approaches that will elicit certain items. Occasionally, a person in the pub will tell you how to do it, but most of the time you just have to figure it out by trial and error.

                I renewed my Xbox Live Membership today. I almost thought twice about it, but I still play with my friend fairly often, so it was worth getting it for another year. However, I had to search around the dashboard to change various privacy settings to allow my renewal. I think it was to ensure that I saw the new Terms of Agreement and accepted it. They sent me to Settings/Privacy, but there isn’t any Privacy listed in Settings when you use the menu that you get when you push the center button on the controller. No, they meant the Setting blade on the dashboard which has a different menu that lists Privacy as a choice. Wah?! Microsoft sure knows how to make things unnecessarily confusing sometimes.

     Lately this has been the only day I can play games with a friend of mine. We play from 3pm to 10pm, not really enough time to make a whole lot of progress in a full console game, but ok for smaller games like those on XBL.

      I played about 13 hours of Etrian Odyssey Untold [3DS] this week. I’m at 45 hours total since I got it on Oct. 1. I’m at level 43 and on the 15^th floor of the third strata of the labyrinth. I like the Activity Log on the 3DS. You can see the number of steps you’ve taken; gameplay time by day, by week , or by game; and the number of notifications via Street Pass. I’m somewhat regretting setting the game to Picnic difficulty because it’s very nearly effortless. I feel the only way I could lose is if I did auto-attack on a boss and walked away from the system. I can’t bear to switch it though. It would change the whole experience. I laid my bed, now I gotta sleep in it.

      I just bought Uncharted 3 for under $10, and with that, I am finally feeling pretty satisfied with my games collection as it stands. I have a handful of titles from this and last year that I have to get, but they are not in any danger of being hard to find, and the longer I wait, the cheaper they will get. I can bide my time with them and watch for sales. In the mean time, I have plenty to do with what I have.