PixlBit

In this game you learn the power of observation. Microsoft's new, and smaller, halo ring orbits earth so you can observe your gears farms and take notes. The stats help your farmers know what to grow next and complete innovative machines for Microsoft. It's like a sports management sim except for tech. You highlight things as you speed past the farms and then pour over spreadsheets. Then you call up your middle managers to tell then what to do. I liked the visuals from space but gameplay is more like a real job than I could stand, so I played these other five games. 

Microsoft Solitaire Collection

I'm just about fed up with this game. In the daily challenges and the event challenges, there is always one hard difficulty match that I can't win. So I start with the hardest one. If I fail, I do something else. No point doing all the challenges just to fail on one and not complete the set. I'm not wasting time replaying a match over and over. I think I need a game that is relentlessly easy. Life's hard enough. I can't be bothered with games that challenge me too. 

Ring of Red

This is a 2001 PS2 game I've always wanted to play. It's a strategy game very similar to Valkyria Chronicles. It shares that hand drawn art style, teenage fighters with grudges, and a turn-based but also slightly real-time batte system. You fight in mechs and can move around on a grid, but when attacking you go to ground level and fight in a limited real-time way. You can move forward and backward to change your range. When you fire, a targeting reticule comes up that swings around a lot so it's a matter of timing to hit your target. I didn't like this very much because I found it difficult to get hits. Cool game though. 

Observation

Game Pass game I played for rewards points. I got far enough to get them but got stuck. An astronaut is marooned on a damaged space station and has to use the computer to fix everything. You play as the computer which gets put into a floating sphere so you can move around more freely. You take direction from the astronaut to fix stuff and figure out what happened. It's pretty cool but I was moving from one capsule to another when I hit a dead end and couldn't find the passage to the next one. I'm sure there was some nifty trick to it. It's basically a puzzle type game: scan stuff, use your wits to figure out what to fix. I might try it again someday. Just didn't have patience for it today. 

Gears 5

Still trying to get the monthly Game Pass challenge on this. I played another 90 minutes of the campaign and really enjoyed it even though I didn't get another achievement. I got Jack's ability to take over enemies. I used it all the time and sat in cover watching enemies turn on each other. 

Farm Together

Mark got the train. I watched him use it. It's largely cosmetic, unfortuneately, but I still want it. Need to be level 60 and I'm 47 right now. I learned that farm hands can also maintain animals for you. They can also fish. I got them to cover most of my animals and fish ponds. I hardly harvest anything now, just plant and wait. I'm looking at achievements now which got me to figure out the burst meter. This builds when you do things in other's farms, encouraging you to visit them. When you max the meter you can bring back that power to your own farm and increase your leveling and harvesting by 2x for a limited time. Fun. I had to pry myself away from the console to stop.