As is my usual weekend activity, I headed over to my friend Mark's place. First thing I did was set up my NES, but then I booted up the 360 to check the sales and watch the Fallout 4 announcement trailer on youtube. Sky ship? Oh yes! Then I put on Netflix and looked up something to watch from 1986 in keeping with this week's theme. Mark and I watched season 1 episode 3 of The A-Team and about half of Ferris Bueller's Day Off before something crashed the system. Thank you MS for having such a reliable system for doing non-gaming things (sarcasm). I thought that was what you wanted it to do most. But it was just as well, because I was getting a little bit tired of Ferris Bueller and wanted to get to some gaming. 

And first up was Dragon Warrior, right on the original NES. Every time I've played this game it has frustrated me, but this time I got just a little farther before the grind bored me too much. I got to level 5. The main issue I have is how you never feel like you've accomplished much on any one outing because it always goes like this: you leave the town and try to get to another town or dungeon and get nearly there before you are half dead and out of MP for spells. Then you turn around to go home and are bombarded with twice the rate of encounters just when you need to get home quickly. You stumble into town with barely one HP left and collapse in the Inn. Then you go to the king's castle and save your progress. Rinse and repeat, until many trips later, you finally get to that city or dungeon. Now you need to survive the dungeon too. It all makes you feel really pathetic.I get it that the game makers are trying to slow the game down to get more play time out of it, but that slow grind gets to me after a while, and not a long while either. So I moved on.

I looked for the sequel to Tower of Druaga, The Return of Ishtar, on Wii Virtual Console but couldn't find it there. Tomorrow I'll download Namco Museum Vol. 4 on PSN to play that. So instead I downloaded The Legend of Zelda. This game is fine, but something about the movement controls made for an awkward feel, and I found myself bumping into enemies all the time. Maybe with some more time, I could get used to it but I was impatient and moved on. I was singing along to the theme the whole time though. 

Then I ran through a bunch of arcade games from '86 on various collections on Xbox Live. There was Rolling Thunder and Sky Kid Deluxe on Namco Museum Virtual Arcade; Trojan, Legendary Wings, and Side Arms on Capcom's Arcade Cabinet; and Iron Horse on Game Room. There were a few others on Game Room I still didn't have but the store has closed there, so I couldn't buy any more games.

I did a lot better on Iron Horse this time. This is a side scrolling brawler. You are a cowboy on a moving train and have to pick up bags of loot while avoiding attackers. It seemed like 2D train segments from Uncharted 2.

My favorite of all of these arcade games was Sky Kid Deluxe. It's a side scrolling shoot 'em up. You shoot at bi-planes and pick up a bomb to drop on a target. Then you land and move on to the next level. If you get shot down you can mash the attack button to right yourself. I liked that. 

Then it was back to the present and Minecraft, which Mark had been playing all the time I was playing the other stuff. I jumped into his game and started a routine of going out at night and fighting creepers, zombies, skeletons and spiders. Also a bat once and sometime wolves because they eat sheep. I was mainly looking for creepers though for their gunpowder to make TNT. During the day, I would fill up the holes created by creepers that exploded and I built a lookout tower. I died several times but got back to my equpment each time so I wouldn't lose anything. Mark was gathering gunpowder too and mining with TNT. This is definitely the way to go. Just put like two or three TNTs in a hole and blow it to kingdom come. Then pick up all the matterials you see lying around. Hunting creepers is dangerous work, but it's worth it to avoid all that endless digging. 

I got several achievements in Minecraft today. I created a potion for one and shot a skeleton dead at 50 yards with an a bow and arrow for another. It was a good day. I'm sure, after I play some Return of Ishtar tomorrow, I'll be right back in Minecraft seeing how big a hole I can make with TNT. KABOOM!!!