I'm currently playing Skylanders: Spyro's Adventure again for any remaining achievements and to look at my figure collection. Here's an overview of the complete figures for the game.
I kinda can't wait to do this sort of overview for DS games when I get there in a few weeks.
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 won't get to NGC this month, but it's fun to peruse the Metacritic best-of list anyway. These are largely exclusives to the system I've played or have thoughts about.
I got through a lot of GBA/PS2 stuff this week and retro on Xbox Series S. I got some good purchases on sales this week too. Also progress through the Power Rangers Lightspeed Rescue show, books and podcasts.
So in revisiting this 2000-2009 this month, I thought I'd go down page one of the list of Metacritic's best of for GBA in this time range and make some comments for the games I have something to say about.
Over the years, there have been many different types of cartridge software released. Where music and video media (eventually) became standardized, each game system had its own form of storage media. In addition to carrying interchangeable game software, companies tended to make the design and appearance of the cartridges themselves distinctive as a marketing gimmick. Most of us have memories of having game cartridges in boxes, not to mention blowing on the edge connectors when our games glitched out. So here's a brief overview of various game cartridges throughout history. This is not an exhaustive list.
I have various plans for this year. They may seem overly elaborate, or even stupid (I had a friend say that to me once - I'm not sure I don't disagree), but I'm compelled to it by whatever is driving me. Anyway, here's a quick and possibly embarrassing overview of the month's and year's plans.
Here's a few miscellaneous picks. Destiny and Mass Effect have great art and info on their respective universes. Shovel Knight is just a visual feast, both fully drawn illustrations and delectable pixel art. Finally, I'm not the biggest Tomb Raider fan (though I do like the series), but I got this well-reviewed series overview and retrospective new for $5, so I really couldn't pass that up.
My other hobbies outside gaming are reading and music. I'm on a year long plan for both, each month having its own theme. I guess I'll break it down, for those who are interested.
I get excited to get a bunch of new books and see what's coming in the theaters and in gaming for the coming month. I make a list and try and do it all. Here's what I'm focusing on for May.
Ready for Xmas? This collection was sort of my gift to myself this year. There are 15 5200 games total. I played all but the 2-player ones. The following five I have something to say about.
Good morning Pixlpeeps! This time last week I was in an airplane heading towards San Francisco to start on a mini adventure with my brother. This past week was a fun road trip where I flew up to the bay, filled a moving truck, slept for maybe 6 hours and then drove down from San Francisco to Las Vegas to help my brother move into his new house. It was a little over 600 miles but it was fun, and I’ll tell you more about it in a bit but first since this is a combo blog let’s start with gaming.
So here I am, Sunday morning not out of bed and watching the last stage of the Tour de France. I was meaning to write this on Friday but I was tinkering with a project that I am still not finished with, and I had a CD Friday trip so I was busy with that. Saturday I was going to write but again I was still tinkering a bit before deciding the weekend is for sleep and being lazy, which leads us to right now. Here I am, watching folks on bicycles finish up one hell of a race. Let's catch up on the non gaming things Chris has been up to.
Back in the late Summer/early Fall, Nintendo released a new batch of 3DS StreetPass mini-games. I didn’t get them right when they came out because I didn’t have an opportunity to get out with a bunch of 3DS users to really take advantage of the StreetPass capabilities. But a couple of weeks ago I went to PAX South, so I finally had a reason to download these games and try them out. You can download the games separately, or in a bundle for less than ten bucks, so it wasn’t that bad. The games are pretty small, so I thought it would be fun to do mini-reviews of these titles over at GamerDad.com. I posted the links here along with overviews of each game if you’d like to read about them.
Last year I read X-Men: The Dark Phoenix Saga trade paperback and really enjoyed it. Last week I got the Days of Future Past TP from the library, started reading it, and discovered that it chronologically follows right after Dark Phoenix. That's a cool bonus for me but I was surprised to find out that most of the book has nothing to do with the titular story. I'm halfway through and the stories seem very insular, unlike Dark Phoenix where everything led to the moment of Jean Grey's death. They're not bad stories, just unrelated. I really liked the first issue in the book because it was basically a recap of all the X-Men comics up to that point. Cyclops was monologuing about everything the X-Men had been through and how he and Jean fit into it. That culminated in Cyclops taking a hiatus from the group to deal with his issues. Since I've read only Dark Phoenix, it was cool to get an overview of everything else that had happened.
Welcome to another fantastic episode of Nerds Without Pants! We're a little late, and a man down(sort of), but we make it up to you with a fun discussion about what we've been doing, and go in depth on the documentary Atari: Game Over.
Good morning and Happy Friday Pixlpeeps! The year is almost over, and I really should start Christmas shopping. Well there’s no sport in starting now, I will probably wait until Christmas week, when it gets interesting. So how have you people been? Anything fun I missed? Television shows? Games? Movies? I’m currently debating on going over to the new movie theater today to check out the latest Bond flick, or maybe just play more Need for Speed. We shall see. Let’s get this Quick Hits started!
Recently I played and beat the new holiday title, LEGO Dimensions. I was impressed with some of the worlds you explore and licenses used, so I decided I’d write a blog about it. In short, LEGO Dimensions is essentially Skylanders with LEGOs. You buy and build LEGO figures and vehicles, and then put them on a special pedestal so you can play as them in the game. Unlike Disney Infinity, any character and vehicle can go into any world at any time. That’s one thing that Skylanders and LEGO Dimensions does right. Half the fun was seeing all the worlds you could go into, and what surprises you’d find. In fact, brother Jeff (who I always play LEGO games with), described the game as ‘LEGO Kingdom Hearts’ and I like how he put that. So let’s dive into the portal and see what we can see!