PixlBit

I just got two of my favorite TV shows of the 2000s from Amazon, Venture Bros. and The Mighty Boosh, that I wanted to watch but now there's no time for them. Instead, my regular goto without a tv show to watch during meals at game time, is Fail Army on youtube. Why this is endlessly entertaining, I'm not sure. The psychology of it elludes me. But it is constant source of hilarity even topping other distractions like sports highlights, hobbyist vids, and miscellaneous trivia. It's like the sauce on the sandwich of gaming. Details below. 

Retro: 

Grandia III (PS2): This has an interesting active-time-battle combat system. A circle in the upper left corner shows all the combatants spinning around it as they act on the field of battle below. In one sector of the circle is the red battle area. If the foe is in that zone, and it's your turn, you can perform an interupting attack that moves them counter clockwise in the circle, stopping their attack. Additionally various timing related attacks can cause a special attack or combo attack with another player on your team. It's neat, but I got beat quite early on in the game. Perhaps I need to study this system more carefully. Great looking game though, interesting characters and story. 

GrimGrimoire (PS2): I love Vanillaware's game art. It's hard to describe but it's colorful, hand drawn and the animation remindes me of Monty Python cartoons where the characters sort of float above the environment. In this game you summon magical creatures to gather mana and fight your battles on a 2D screen divided by platforms. It reminds me of a RTS game the way you create and then assign tasks to your minions. I need to play more of it, but its sure to stay in my collection for the art style if nothing else. 

Game Pass:

Batman Arkham Knight (XSS): Returned to this for the umteenth time hoping not to get frustrated by it. Sometimes the missions just seem to leave you hanging, wondering where to go to complete them. I ran into that again trying to save the firemen, so I switched to finding Scarecrow instead and found myself beating the mission. Wala! Progress! The traversal in this game is stunning. Its easy to execute but endlessly full of complex moves you can do. A fabulous game, again, by Rocksteady. I'm always happy to return to it. 

Cassette Beasts (XSS): Punched out another achievement getting points for rewards in Game Pass in this game. I managed to succesfully capture a beast this time. You have to wear them down first and then try and "record" them with you cassette player. I can now use and evolve this beast as I battle across the island world. 

Social:

Earth Defense Force 2025 (XSS): Mad Krammer and I made great progress online. He got his Air Raider Normal difficulty achievement and I cleared up all the levels across all four characters I needed below Hardest difficulty. We even made some more headway on Hardest completion for our characters. All that's left for me are a dozen or so levels of Hardest across four characters and the dreaded Inferno levels, a good bunch of them done already. I'm at 85% completion now. It's still fun as I search for novel ways to use weapons. I watched an online player use air strikes to good effect. I may have to experiment with that next time. 

Casual:

Suduku/Majong/Wordament (Android): Just some progress on achievements soon to be got. I'll be back to daily challenges when October begins. 

Pikmin Bloom (Android): I got into this Niantic game pretty good in the last week. I'm planting flowers, sending my Pikmin out on fetch and battle missions and growing and feeding more Pikmin. This games shares many features of the Pokemon Go game. You have to walk in the real world to plant flowers and help grow the big plants situated in real world places. The game also has a kind of mini journal that tracks your progess and lets you assign pictures and notes to a daily record. I'm enjoying it, but trying not to use it all the time. I try to check in once a day only and then activate the flower planting if I'm going to go on a walk. Fun. 

What have you been playing? Any epic fails? Successes?