PixlBit

I took the day off work today (Saturday) in order to be at my mom's birthday dinner, so I spent the afternoon with a few games. First was Microsoft Pinball Arcade for Game Boy Color, played on my Gamecube Game Boy Player, and then Destiny on Xbox 360. 

Microsoft Pinball Arcade is five Gottlieb pinball tables rendered as close to realistic as they could. There's: Baffle Ball, Knock Out, Slick Chick, Spirit of '76 and Haunted House. They're in chronological order with Baffle Ball being 1931 and Haunted House being 1982. I think they look pretty good for what you could do on a Game Boy Color but I found the flipper action to be sluggish. Even worse, I couldn't get the left flipper to activate with the d-pad most of the time. You can change the controls, but I couldn't get my changes to stick for some reason. Baffle Ball doesn't have flippers, so that was fine, but kind of boring because you just watch the ball drop across a field of pins and catches. Not much to do there. I think it's much better to play these tables on Pinball Arcade on either XBL or PSN. Still, I enjoyed reading the text files on the history of pinball. At least that was something. 

Then I got the Taken King DLC for Destiny and played that with Mark the rest of the afternoon. For some reason we ended up doing a lot of story missions not in the DLC. I thought I'd done all those, but I guess not. Or, they were part of the DLC, I'm not sure, but I didn't access any area named Taken King yet. I leveled to 31 with a light level of 150. The game is as fun as ever. Some of the battles were just frantic and desperate even with Mark at level 38. I did find myself a little frustrated at the limited ammo and slow reloading of my weapons. You have three weapons you can access at any time. One gives you a lot of ammo and the other two don't. You have to get pickups to get more which, I think, tends to drop more when you do precision kills. My primary weapon is a hand cannon and it reloads very slowly. I upgraded it to work a little faster but it's a real pain in a crazy firefight with enemies all on top of you all the time. I had to rely on my throwing knife and melee skills a lot (I'm a Hunter class. Mark's a Titan). 

I have my real weekend starting tomorrow, and I hope to get a lot of Destiny in before I switch to PS4 and Ratchet & Clank next week. I heard today on a podcast that Ratchet & Clank is a retelling of the origin story like in the very first game. Should be interesting.

Also, I'm playing Persona 4 Golden in the little time I have at the end of every night. I'm totally loving it. It's so interesting how they work in all the RPG mechanics into a modern story that deals with psychology. I really think it breaks new ground for RPGs and what kind of stories they can tell. I even got my female roommate asking me about it. That's pretty rare. 

Until tomorrow. Bye.