Back to Robotron

So with all the TRON talk and my newest purchase of Sinistar, I have not played my Robotron cab in quite some time. So tonight I fired it up and dusted some of the cobwebs off of my people-saving, insidious-brainiac killing skills. It took some time, but after about five games I started to get my groove back. I was videotaping some of the play and wast on the way to a 1,000,000 point game (which is my standard for a "good" round) when the machiine reset. For those of you not familiar with the lore of Robotron, there is a well know bug in the game. Sometime, when shooting into the corners or at the quarks (UFO looking things that shoot X's at you), the game will get stuck in a mathematical loop from which it cannot remove itself. When this happens, the system hard boots itself and restarts the game, much to the frustration of the person playing if they are having a particularly good round. As luck would have it, this ALWAYS seems to happen in the midst of a great game. I have never had the game reset when I was playing like s**t. Anyway, I caught the reset while taping, so check it out.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqyDX0UBOL8[/youtube]

And to prove that I have not completely lost my Robotron playing skills, here is a recording of a 1.7 Million point game that I played earlier tonight.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sNXoqQjqPvI[/youtube]

In addition to putting in some time on my arcade games, I have been trying to catch up on the massive backlog of unplayed console games that I have. I finished TRON Evolution and must say that I was wholly disappointed in the game. The grahics were beautiful and I liked the story for the most part (though there were some significant issues with the flow of the narative). However, the controls were broken beyond belief. Much has been written in various reviews, so I won't rehash what has already been said many times, but TRON Evolution actually made me despise somethng with the TRON name attached to it. Great job there Disney.

Speaking of Disney, I have started playing through Epic Mickey and am enjoying it for what it is, a fairly simplistic platformer aimed at kids. The one thing that I really like about this game is all the extra historical content that you can dig up. As a life-long fan of Disney, these little vingettes are what make the game for me. However, once again the controls, and particularly the camera, are horrible. For a company that has produced quality movies for over 60 years, you'd think that they could figure out how to design a decent in-game camera. Think again.

Finally, I started back on playing Bioshock 2 and am really enjoying this game. I simply love the world of Rapture. Not sure how I feel about Bioshock Infinite and it's relocation to an aerial world. For now, I will enjoy exploring under the see and fighting Big Sister.

I have a ton of other 360 games still in shrink wrap that I really need to get to soon, including Dead Space (1, not 2), Batman, Arkham Asylum, Mirror's Edge and Mass Effect (1 AND 2). With working two jobs, planning our Gamers Gone Wild Event, planning my own wedding for 2012 and the arcade downstairs, I find it very difficult to make time to play games. On top of all of this, BulletStorm is coming out in a few weeks and I can't wait. I really enjoyed the demo, though I have only played through it twice so far. Not to mention that the game will come with the Gears of War 3 Beta packed in. Too much goodness.