What Game/s are You Playing? Daily / Whenever Check :) (GAMEPLAY)

[YoshiM]

I really haven't had time to game lately until today. After all the cooking (about 4 hours) the eating (I thankfully didn't gorge myself this year...I can't do that anymore) the kids went to play their games. My wife and my eldest two were (or still are right now) working on decorations for my wife's musical show next month. That means I can go off and play....and play I did!

I've been working to get my OG Xbox online with Insignia. I had some time late last night to get the setup stuff taken care of but kept running into connection errors at reboot. It didn't occur to me last night that the softmod settings were overwriting my Xbox dashboard settings. Once I set that to static (and reserved the IP address on my router)-connecting to Insignia was quick and easy! Then after discovering I needed to install patches for some games, I was able to get online and play!

The first game I tried was "Star Wars: Battlefront 2". I hopped on and just joined a session and got onto a team that lost all of its spawn points. Next game I got into my team was getting mowed down. The names didn't look right-I wonder if the host had bots running. Anyway, I stepped in and began to carve through to a base point (flag...my brain can't think of the actual name right now). I was able to wipe out the opposing droids and secure the point. Suddenly I could become Yoda...which I gleefully accepted. My little green booger with legs rans through and mowed down Separatist droids like a Ginsu through tomatoes! Spawn points were getting captured by my team! I only wished folks used voice chat! Anyway...suddenly we started losing the points. I got cut down and by the time I got back in the game, our last point was taken and it was game over.

The second game I attempted was "Phantasy Star Online Episodes I & II". The ISO I downloaded, unfortunately, was a modded version so I could not get online. I was able to find an American version, downloaded the DLC/patches for it and I was off to the races! Again, the person I was with had no voice and I have no idea how to easily chat. Someone chatted with me and we got into a fight but I died quickly. Gotta read up on this some before I jump back in.

Last game I tried was offline: "Soul Calibur 2". It's been years since I played this and I was gunning to give it a go. It came on and out of what I played today, THIS was the most gorgeous of the bunch! It's hard to believe the OG Xbox came out 20 years ago and that the games visually aged so well. I got through the Arcade mode with Cassandra (as I'm a Sophitia fan, so had to play the sister). Voldo and Raphael gave me some trouble but I got through them on the next try. I unlocked an extra Arcade mode and a couple costumes.

All in all, I really dug playing the ol' Box again. I moved my tower computer upstairs in the boys' room so they can play on it while I transferred all my personal stuff to the laptop I'm typing on now (which is a gaming machine as well). I was going to use my laptop as a desktop from time to time but the wires between my laptop with USB dock and my step daughter's laptop (she uses my circa 1960's desk for her virtual schooling-she can't stand a ton of noise like my third eldest, who uses the Airbnb during the week to do his work. Both are in a spectrum of autism and his threshold for noise while working is way lower than hers). So I plopped my Xbox on the file cabinet my laptop was on and hooked it up to the HDMI switch that goes to a nice Dell multi format monitor (HDMI, Display Port, component, etc.). That screen really made the graphics pop! Sure I could see some stair stepping but dang, I did not care.

I forgot to add last night I did play some "Burnout: Revenge". Ooooo the graphics look sooo good and the fast ramming of rivals against the scenery is just sooooo satisfying.

[Aussie2B]

I guess I spoke too soon about the difficulty of Imagine Figure Skater on DS. It's still far from what I'd call a hard game, and I cleared the State Competition at 3rd place on my first try, but I actually got a Game Over on the Regional Competition (which they also refer to as the Block Competition; the localization isn't good about keeping terms consistent). I like how it gives you different options for retrying, like going back to the start of the month if you skipped opportunities to improve stats. But as far as I know, I have the max stats possible at this point (gaining one level in each category every week), so there's no point in that for me. And this was with choosing the harder of the two prebuilt programs each time and only making one mistake in each program. I don't know if it'd even be possible to earn enough points to clear the competition with choosing the easier programs. One thing I noticed is that the prebuilt programs are random, resulting in a variety of potential scores, so I guess if you get programs worth less, it'd be harder to clear the competition unless you're perfect. Custom programs really seem to be the way to go now. I like how the prebuilt programs offer a variety of skills, making it more like a real program, but I'll probably just have to build my own with high-scoring jumps over and over, haha. That makes it more difficult, of course, but I assume I could screw up more and still earn a decent enough score.

[YoshiM]

I got in a little Switch action over the weekend, with some late night "Animal Crossing: New Horizons" play. I bumped into the wisp, which sent me on an ectoplasmic body part hunt throughout my island. You'd think I walked past all the areas but of course, one little spot I walked around had the last piece I needed. I wasn't even close enough to hear it when I went through the area.

Today I loaded up "Tron 2.0: Killer App" on the Xbox. I originally played this game back on PC but my machine just didn't have enough oomph to totally run the game. Plus I was (and still am not) great at the mouse/keyboard combo of PC Land. The folks that consolized the game did a decent enough job and it looks and sounds great. One con with the conversion is that the dialog was never redone, so the character that tell you how to do things mention PC controls (like arrow keys or something like that) or "action button" while the printed dialog shows the proper instruction. The light cycle mode is still a pain in the keester as the stick is used to not only go faster or slower but a slight wiggle makes you turn....in a 90 degree angle. This can get very disorientating when you are using the trigger to turn and you want to get past an opponent and then you turn.....I died a lot when that happened.

One thing I find I took for granted thanks to modern gaming is the auto save. "Tron 2.0" has none. So when I got past the first light cycle area and back into FPS mode, I died not soon after arrival to the new area. I forgot about the lack of autosave and had to go back to the last race, where I did remember to save. I do remember sporadically but the act of saving religously hasn't completely sunk in yet. I'm currently in the "prison pits" or "cell block" or whatever you want to call it. I'm on my way to get my disk back from the leader of the security programs called Kernel.

[celerystalker]

I had some fun with my sons this weekend. Ended up getting a free TV someone was getting rid of and finally decided to vertically mount one in my basement for Tate mode shooting.

[YoshiM]

The wife had to get some leg surgery done, so I took off of work so I could drive her to the hospital.and back. While waiting, I read an issue of "Joystik" magazine and then played "Sonic the Hedgehog" from the "Sega Genesis Classics" I bought on the Switch. I haven't really played that game that much si ce I origi ally owned it back in '91. I have it in so many compilafions and ways to play it but just haven't. Until now. I got to the Marble Zone and acquired a Chaos Emerald before I saved and shut down to go to my own appointment (contact lens check and put my old lenses back in my eyeglass frames...which the tech broke....)

[celerystalker]

I got the fever to play some Money Puzzle Exchanger for Neo Geo MVS yesterday. I love it as one of my personal top 10 puzzle games, but good lord are those last 2 battles tough. I beat it 3 times yesterday, but I would not want to admit the shameful number of continues it took.

After the kids went to bed last night, I decided to play on the vertical screen some more, as it's new enough to me to still be exciting. I played Homura on PS2 for awhile, and my opinion on it has changed a LOT since first getting it back when it came out like 15 years or more ago. I didn't like it as much back then. It was the peak of my shooter (shmup) playing and buying, and came out in the same window as the posthumous Dreamcast games and all those Cave ports like ESPGaluda, Mushihimesama, Dodonpachi Dai-ou-jou, and Ibara, and I really didn't care for its dark color palette and polygon models instead of sprites. Really giving it a fair shake, I truly enjoyed its mechanics this time around. You move slightly slower while shooting, which helps with micro-dodging, and faster when not for macro. There are no bombs, and instead you use your sword when you can (from a slowly-filling automatic gauge) in two ways, almost like in Mars Matrix with the bullet absorbing attack. First, when in striking range, you will do a lock-on, invincible attack to up to 5 enemies of the same type, destroying them all in a flashy animation. Second, you van use it to reflect away a swarm of nearby bullets and send them back at your attacker, netting a poimt multiplier for each bullet. There are no power-ups to collect, and the sword mechanic is really the only scoring gimmick aside from the usual dropped point bonuses from enemies and percentage of enemies destroyed. It's a nice change from the gimmicky scoring in Cave and Treasure games, and it even has a standard 3 credit limit, making it to where it can't be just credit-fed. I'll probably go for a 1cc for the first time in a long time on this one!

My sons have taken a shine to Marvel Super Heroes for arcade and Sega Saturn. My older boy likes Shuma Gorrath, and thr younger likes Blackheart. I had to feel bad for my younger son, though. My daughter wanted to try, and beat him while mostly looking away from the screen and mashing buttons. He got her back after a few tries, but I could see the frustration on his face.

[YoshiM]

I got some Atari action last Monday testing out the four-game cartridge that came out with Atari's new modern paddle controllers. They all played as they should and the controllers felt like I stepped back in time, playing like it was 1982 all over again.

I did also partake in Nintendo's eShop sale and picked up "Goat Simulator" (as it looked goofy fun) and "Gris" as it gave me "Journey" vibes in its presentation. "Goat" was stupid fun and "Gris" was an artful feast for the eyes. I didn't get too far in either as I just wanted to get a taste of them before I went to bed that night.