PixlBit

   1984, the year after the great video game crash of '83. For me, console video games fell off the frickin' Earth. I forgot about my Atari 2600, my neighbor's Intellivision, and my friend's ColecoVision. I moved on to PC games with my first dungeon crawl, Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord. I went to the occasional arcade to play Xevious, but in my mind, arcades were dead too. Amazingly though, console games were still coming out before the NES hit and here are ads for two of them I got from Doctor Strange No. 68, released December of 1984.

    Exceptionally bored today. My gaming buddy got himself a girlfriend, my other friend was busy doing maintenance on his car, and my girlfriend was busy with chores, so I spent the day in Starbucks writing and thinking about games. After starting to freeze from the air conditioning after about three hours, I left to do some shopping. I had $20 left after buying the Season Pass to Bioshock Infinite, so I went to Best Buy and priced some of the games I mentioned in my previous blog about 2012 stuff I still needed to play. Not finiding anything for $20 or less, I went to Walmart and found Far Cry 3 at $20. (They had Assassin's Creed III for $20 too but I had to stay with my budget and leave it be for now).

     I was just going through my database of games I listed from last year and decided to apply my new rating system to them. I call it my "desire-to-play" column. I give each game a one to five star rating and then focus my attention on only the five star games until I play them all. I'm getting to the end of buying all my most desired games of 2013 so far, so I need another list for when I'm done with this year.

     This week I picked up a bunch of Doctor Fate comics on the cheap after a friend said Doctor Fate was like DC's version of Marvel's Doctor Strange - a favorite comic character of mine. I found out later that Doctor Fate preceeded Doctor Strange by about twenty years (DF started in the 40's and DS in the 60's). Anyway, I noticed DC tends to not have as many ads in their comics as Marvel, most of them being ads for other DC comics - like the way indie comics do. But they do have video game ads here and there and I got six of them out of issues 32 to 41 of Doctor Fate all released from Sept 1991 to June 1992.

     July 7th is Bungie Day in case you didn't know. It's something about Bungie's interest in the number 7 and probably due to the once in a hundred years date of 7-7-7 that happened to inspire the first Bungie Day. So I thought I'd reminisce a bit on my own history with Bungie games to celebrate.

     I put on my Kool-Aid Man suit this morning, drove to the mall, burst through its walls, gave the nice Gamestop man a delicious Kiwi Strawberry Jammer, and paid 40 bones for the boxed copy of Muramasa Rebirth on PS Vita, a device I don't even own. That's how much I wanted this improved rerelease of Muramasa: The Demon Blade for the Wii.

     Both the PS4 and Xbox One will have this feature which will allow you to record gameplay from any game you play on the system. How will you use it? Will these blogs be just full of gameplay videos? I know mine will. Except that i'm going to try and keep them short and to the point. No one wants to watch tens of minutes of footage of someone else's game. At least, I don't think so. I know I'm kinda warry of watching anything game related for more than a minute or two because there just isn't enough time and I want to go play something, not watch someone else play. Short highlights seem the best thing to me.

      Another week of comics and another batch of old video game ads scanned right from their pages. 1980's Marvel comics were always full of ads about all the things kids were into: sweets, toys, and games. Comics fans are a little older now, and there aren't any ads for cookies or candies or toys (other than action figures) in comics today, but what has always remained are the video game ads. These ads I got from The New Defenders, No. 125, released November of 1983.

     The comic Last of Us #3 came out today and I read it. Finally most of the major players of the game are present, the Infected and the Fireflies. Both the art and story are very good. The game still hasn't risen in my interest to more than a curiosity. I have the Last of Us demo that came with God of War Ascension that's still sitting shrink wrapped on my TV table. Maybe when I play that it'll move up to a must buy.

      My friend was home on Friday afternoon, so I went over with my 360 to play. I forgot my controller though and so played my 3DS instead.