PixlBit

My more regular schedule has left me with little time to blog, but I found some tonight (Sunday) and maybe I'll get into this habit every Sunday night while I do wash. I did manage to find time to game though. I'm making good progress in Dragon Quest VII on 3DS and I'm still gaming on the the weekends with my buddy Mark. And oh yeah! I went to a gaming convention, Retro Con. Here's a quick breakdown. 

During the week, after daytime business (although no real work yet), I've been putting in a few hours in with Dragon Quest VII on 3DS. I'm nearing the ten hour mark and visited two new islands and solved their problems for them. I tooled around in a sailing ship too. There are lots of random encounters, maybe too many, but you can up the speed to make them go quicker if your confident of a victory. It's been pretty easy going so far except I got surprised by a boss on the volcanic island and got myself killed, but I won the battle anyway and was revived shortly after anyway. Seemed a bit unfair though. The boss was doing about 20 hp damage and then suddenly punched me for over 50 for a kill. Darn it! At least my two other party members were able to finish it off. 

Then Mark and I went to Retro Con in the suburbs of Philadelphia on Saturday. I thought it might be a slow affair but as the day progressed the con filled up with dozens and dozens of cosplayers. We participated in a trival contest and watched the cosplayers compete for prizes. There were a lot of vendors selling toys, video games and board games, and action figures as well. I got a complete set of Overlord mini figures. That's one minion of each of the minion types: blue, green, brown and red. I took some photos and a short video.

We got there early and waited in line a while. 

The local Ghostbusters club had an Ecto 1 and there were lots of Ghostbuster cosplayers. There was also a Back to the Future DeLorean car too.

The 501st Legion had a bunch of members there in stormtrooper, X-wing pilot and Darth Vader costumes. Also a G.I. Joe costuming club and lots of Harley Quinns. I take terrible pictures at these public events because I'm shy, but Mark took some great ones, especially of a Master Chief cosplayer. They're on his Facebook page. Here's a link but I think you have to friend him to see them. 

This was the line of cosplayers waiting for the contest. 

I almost forgot. My favorite part was playing these free play arcade cabinets. They were loaded with about 5000 games from arcades to console titles. I found my old favorite shooter Flying Shark and played that for the first time in a long time. I also payed Fantasy Zone, Xevious, and even tried to play some Super Mario RPG. They even had Gameboy and Gameboy Color titles on that cabinet and it all looked a played great. I stumped them with Twinbee and Daitana Twinbee though. They didn't have those on their cabinet. They had just about everything else though. 

Then Mark and I played a bunch of games over the rest of Saturday and Sunday. I tried to get into Far Cry Blood Dragon again and try and finish it. I got frustrated with it for the same reason as last time. Mission objectives are not always clear. Like, they don't tell you where you need to go. Also, sometimes I couldn't figure out where to get a reward for certain missions. Really annoying. But the opening missions are so great and funny being wild parodies of 80s actions movies. I loved that stuff. Just give me a pointer on the map to tell me where that bridge is you want me to go to for Pete's sake!

There was some Minecraft played. I thought of an interesting thing. Start the game with a house made out of rare matterials so you don't have to mine so much. We did that and the rare matterials house we made next to the normal looking village houses looked like a spaceship had landed. I actually didn't know what to do for a few minutes because I was so stunned I didn't have to go looking for diamonds. I finally snapped out of it and threw up the Nether Gate and Mark and I had a blast fighting there. Then I found the Stronghold by accident spelunking a cave and we put up the enchantment table. All we needed then was to hunt Endermen. But then the connection got bad and I kept getting kicked out of the game. I gave up with it and played Skylanders Superchargers instead. 

I cranked up Skylanders to Nightmare difficulty. You take more damage and the card games are a little harder but it's not really so bad. Plus you get 30% more rewards so I was racing to level 70. I was at 65 when I stopped. 

Then I popped in Rare Replay to play all the shorter games in that collection. Most of them are pretty short, the early ones. I played Jetpac and really liked it. It's the oldest in the collection. Then I played all the other 80s Rare games and then Battletoads. Battletoads was pretty good. A fun brawler. I love it when your guy throws enemies right at the screen. The interface for these games in really cool. You can save anytime, rewind, and go for multiple achievements on every single game. Then special videos unlock that give you interviews with the devs and other special short features like stuff on unreleased games. I stopped at Blast Corps in the timeline because that one is a little longer than some other stuff I want to get to. 

Then the Eagles football game started and I chose a turn-based game to play while Mark had it on his TV. I have minimal interest in sports these days. I chose Hand of Fate, which was a Games with Gold freebee a while ago. It's a card game but also an action game. You use the cards to determine encounters and deliver story. When you fight, you go to a small setting and fight it out in third person like a God of War game. I got really hooked on it and played it the rest of the night. I finally died about half way through the story missions. It was perfect timing though because I had to stop. 

And that's about it. XCOM 2 comes out on Tuesday and I CANNOT miss that. I'll do some trades and make it reasonably priced for myself. 

Bye!