I'm close to finishing season 3 of Better Call Saul on Netflix and while Mike is my favorite character in either show, I'm a little annoyed his Breaking Bad antics are interrupting my realistic crime room and sibling rivalry drama. I think this show has a different, much more relaxed feel I actually prefer to Breaking Bad. 

Here are some more second hand finds I'd like to read. The BioShock prequel, Rapture, is more rewarding the more familiar you are with the series. Much of the BioShock story takes place before the game, and so characters that you only hear of or encounter once they're crazed or deranged figure prominently into the story. The Witcher should need no introduction since that series is still all the rage these days. This is the first book. My wife picked up the Quantum Break novel entirely on the surprising strength of its reviews. The game looks pretty interesting too, so if I ever get around to the one, I'm sure I'll get to the other after that.

Ooh I almost forgot to post something today. Earlier I took a trip to the Target across town to check if they had any supplies for baseball cards and they don’t. Looks like I have to hit Amazon, but more on that later. Anyways here I am, it’s a nice warm day here in Southern California and here is a song I am currently listening to. Have a good one!

I've missed too much for that but thought I'd post this in case anyone else is looking to by a Switch Lite to serve as their travel Switch or just as a portable.

Well, I finally decided on Tactics Ogre and have been playing it on my Vita. I continued a saved game that was early along, but skipped the beginning. I'm using different strategies now, using more magic, both with my mage and cleric, but also with my other classes that can use it. I decided to play it differently than I've played it other times. 

This is the second half of the 80s and my college years. Nintendo revived the video game industry with the NES but what did I know about it? I played games on an Apple Macintosh and in the arcades. I had no home or handheld consoles, so sorry NES, Sega Master System and GameBoy.  

Finally, something I've read through! (I promise, folks, I do actually read things.) I love the Deus Ex franchise and have read both of the novels you see below. The first one, Icarus Effect, is a prequel to Deus Ex: Human Revolution and stars original characters. It is pretty good and really helps to set up the world that the games take place in. This novel was followed by a mobile game that was an honest to goodness full Deus Ex experience that continued the story of these characters. The game is supposedly quite good but when I tried it I could not grok the controls. The screen was so cluttered with buttons and icons and menus! The second novel, Black Light, stars Adam Jensen from the console games as well as some other familiar faces like Pritchard. Of the two it was the novel I enjoyed more, perhaps because of its intrinsic fanservice qualities, but they were both good. I don't know that I would recommend them to someone who was not a fan of the games (there are so many great science fiction novels that stand alone, after all) but if you enjoyed that world and are looking for more, by all means dive in.

Good morning Pixlpeeps! So earlier this morning I was grinding away in Gems of War so I could hit my 200 or so shields or whatever those things are called (you earn them by playing a certain amount), and when I went to log it in I was no longer part of a guild. Apparently I was kicked. I didn’t do anything wrong, I was hitting the weekly requirements, donating 200k in gold for the greater good of the guild and now I am guild-less. I found a new one that is laid back where there are no requirements and to make myself a useful part of the group I kicked in another 200k in gold again for the greater good of the guild and to show that I wasn’t some lingering dude. Oh get this I kicked in another 40k to get the mound of orbs or whatever it is called so the guild can get it, and I wasn’t allowed to. Crazy, right?

I made a list of my favorite games, and it's so darn long I have to break it into 8 parts, roughly following console generations. This, the first part, is about the Golden Age of video games: arcades, consoles by Atari, Intellivison, and ColecoVision and PC. 

Speaking of my wife (which I did yesterday), here is her collection of Dragon Age books. DA is her favorite game series and these novels are supposedly quite good. Similar to our Halo novels, these have not been read yet and three of the four were picked up second hand. But she'll get to them! And I wouldn't be opposed to reading these myself, perhaps, once I finish with the fourteen thousand other books I have.*

Good evening Pixlpeeps! I am writing today’s blog on Monday night right before bed. I figure this way I get my random thoughts down now before I forget them and I like using my little keyboard that I bought for my iPad. I wish I would have read the description and got the one that was backlit instead of getting one that matched my wallpaper. Oh well.

Like I mentioned I might do in a previous BaD blog, I dug my Vita out of the storage area of my ottoman, cleaned it, and charged it. Now I'm debating playing either Xenogears, Trails in the Sky, or Tactics Ogre. Tactics Ogre is winning, because Xenogears is pretty tough, and Trails in the Sky is a huge, two game story. However -

I had an unexpected afternoon to play on Sunday since my work schedule suddenly switched to Saturday. I was in a casual mood and so, to the tunes of bucolic flute music, managed a crew of Gnomes around a pre-industrial town of mines, mills and mage towers. 

One time in high school we had an away football game that was so far away that we stayed overnight. One of the other guys brought the first Halo novel, The Fall of Reach, with him but then proceeded to socialize rather than read it. Weird. So I borrowed it and got about halfway through the book that weekend...and then never finished it. But I did like what I read. Fast forward the better part of a decade and I'm married to a wonderful girl who likes both reading and Halo. So while neither of us has actually read through any of these books yet, we always pick them up when we see them at Goodwill or a second hand shop. One of these days I'll have a Halo novel marathon.

Good morning Pixlpeeps and Happy Presidents Day! Special shoutout to the 29^th President Warren G. Harding!

So as I'm typing this, it's 11:29 p.m. on Sunday, Feb. 16, so if I want to make the deadline with a new BaD blog, here we go. Good news is, this'll be brief.

This list’s games are chosen from IGN’s Top 100 Games of All Time, published in 2019. These fill in some gaps in my now 141 game list.

I turn 40 later this year so to show that I'm truly on my way to cranky curmudgeon status, I'll start off by saying how much I hate winter weather season. My house is the kind that usually keeps cool during warmer weather so trying to heat this place makes my electricity and gas bills go up (honestly, that I spend more time gaming or using my tv rather than freeze to death outside also contributes to that). After this month, it should start to get warmer so I'll be happy then. 

I played a lot of different games the last two days, mainly for rewards points, but also for fun. I would start a game for rewards points and then stay with it until it started to not be fun anymore. My real goal was to get to my legacy game, Bioshock, and delete all these Game Pass games so I would have enough memory to install Bioshock: The Collection. So here are all the games played.