I played a lot of digital titles this week and stuck with almost none of them (no respawns) but enjoyed myself quite a bit. Also some disc-based ones I did stick with a little longer.
For years Microsoft hoovered up more and more of the games industry. It was shocking when they purchased Bethesda - a huge third party publisher and development house. By the time they secured the deal to buy Activision-Blizzard, it was much less so, and it was clear that Microsoft believed they could buy all the properties they needed to make GamePass a success. It didn't take long to see that their strategy wasn't working.
It's fun to go down the Metacritic [MC] list, so I'm doing it again for the stuff I played in 2010.
Idealized because I don't own all of these yet, at least, not in physical form.
It's fun to go down the list of best of all time on Metacritic and make a personal list of favorites. Here are mine for the original Xbox.
I watched the trailer for Farming Simulator 25 where hikers are taking selfies in front of modern harvesting machines and then racing them across fields. Nerds! Haha. I'm okay with my cartoony jeep in Farm Together 2. I've tried the Farm Sims before and they are mondo complexido. I love farming but not that much.
Quite a lot has happened gaming wise for me in the last two weeks. I finished up with Twin-Stick and Isometric shooters and discovered several new franchises and another racing game I love. So here goes it.
My Twin-stick shooter fascination has branched into a genre that is similar but not exactly the same. What I played this week is more along the lines of isometric multidirectional shooters. Really, the only substantial difference is that you use a trigger to shoot instead of using the right stick to both aim and shoot. Overall, it kind of feels pretty similar but maybe with less of a bullet hell feeling. Anyway, here's what I got into this week.
Here’s my latest batch of game reviews I’ve recently written over at GamerDad.com. Please click on the links and read as many as you can, and maybe post a ‘like’ or comment or two. I’d appreciate it. OK let’s begin!
With the Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door remake coming out on Switch this month, I thought it would be fun to go back and rate all the games in the Paper Mario series. We’ll do this from worst to best, and only games in the Paper series are going to be on this list. Well, with one exception. OK, let’s begin!
I started this month by making a puzzle I found at Goodwill, but then I needed to watch Philly Eagles highlights, and so I hooked up my Xbox, and now I'm trying to limit my playing to the earliest type of video games. I've started up Gamepass quests again, though, so the rules bent a bit. Here's what all:
Last year there was a game that came out that I really wanted to review called Arcade Paradise. I requested a review code three different times and was denied each time! I really wanted to review it, too, because it’s a time management sim where you must run a laundromat business, but you are secretly running an arcade in the back with dozens of fictional arcade games you can actually play! I actually had an idea for a business that was half laundromat, half arcade, and I was going to called it Quarters: Good Clean Fun. So this game really resonated with me. If I had gotten a chance to review it last year, it definitely would’ve showed up on my Game of the Year list somewhere. But this year I used some Christmas present PlayStation Store points to buy it, and sure it was only 20 bucks so I was kind of cheap, but this stuff adds up if you’re not careful. Anyway, so now that I’ve played the game, I thought I’d write a blog about the arcade cabinets you can play on it. Oh yeah, and slight spoiler alerts here and there, but I don’t think it matters much.
I got totally fed up with Minecraft the other day. Mark and I had just turned the game from Peaceful difficulty (no mobs) to Easy (mobs with moderate damage) in order to hunt Endermen. In less than a couple of minutes my outdoor camping deck with trees for walls was surprise attacked by two creepers, one after the other, in broad daylight, destroying part of my deck and a chest full of stuff. I got so fed up, it led me to erase everything on my hard drive and start anew with random selections from my owned games, Game Pass, EA Play and Games with Gold. All of these groupings have a little button that says, "surprise me". I grabbed one from each section in turn and the resulting chaos is recorded below.
While I was trying to stick to my retro game playing, my friend was still deep into Dishonored 2. As an assassin, he had lots of bodies to hide and it was funny to watch him fill up bathtubs and decorative ponds with them. Kind of gruesome but the physics of throwing a whole body around in this game is pretty funny.
Ended the day today packing up my Xbox One and taking it home from my friend's place. Not sure when I'll have time to go over there with my new job, but maybe I'll get one day a week of gaming in. We'll see. I think I might suspend Xbox Live for a while too and play more retro stuff on retro consoles. Chasing rewards points takes up too much time, and if I don't have much time, I'd like to play exactly what I want. No plans on what I'm going to play next because I don't even know my work schedule yet. I'd like to play Dragon Quest IV. Anyway, here's what I played today, my last day of Xbox One for a while.
My gaming routine is as follows: play any game needed for MS Rewards; play any game needed for Game Pass rewards; go through all the games on my hard drive from smallest file size to largest. For this last objective, I play a game for the next closest achievement, decide if I want to keep it or not, and then move on to the next game. I repeat the process weekly until, hopefully, I clear my hard drive (not likely when I keep adding new games). So here is what I did the other day.
I am going through my installed games list on Xbox One from smallest file size to largest, uninstalling ones that I finish or just get tired of. I also added a few by buying them on a sale.
On a lark, I chose a horse to win the Kentucky Derby today. I chose the one with the most humorous name to me, Soup and Sandwich. This horse was 26-1 but it challenged first place for the first half of the race. Then something happened and it quickly sank all the way to last place. That's $100 imaginary dollars down the drain. Gaming made up for it but, for real, I wasn't upset. It was really a very entertaining joke to me. "Go Soup and Sandwich. . . nope, dead last. Haha!".
Got another batch of game reviews I’ve recently written over at GamerDad.com. Please click on the links and read as many as you can, and maybe even post a ‘like’ or comment or two. I’d really appreciate it. OK let’s begin!
A rather ugly year for me as my work changed management and made me feel totally unimportant. I managed to hang in there that year, but everyone else I had worked with for 8 years left, to be replaced by people I didn't know. Very stressful and not fun. But these bits of media below were fun. Check 'em out.