1141 You Turn The Screws.

Someone, I forget who, commented about how you sign into another account on the second player controller to play Borderlands splitscreen. That was what was wrong. I’d never even heard of such a thing. Since I’ve never had a multiplayer account I’ve never needed to know anything about how that works on an Xbox. Anyway, thanks whoever it was. We were able to play a bunch of missions and it saved to the proper accounts and everything.

You know those Skylanders figures you can order from bags of chips? I never got the first run of them because we never used to buy chips, but the Teen is always having friends around, so I was able to score the order codes for a set of the second wave. That was a while ago. They started showing up the other day. Not in the order I ordered them in, mind you, but eventually they all arrived. They’re “free” for buying the chips, but in reality it’s $5 for the chips and $3 for shipping, which makes them as expensive as a regular figure. (Depending on where you buy regular figures…) They also have virtually no purpose in game. They just follow you around, looking adorable, on console versions, and only appear at the stage select on the 3DS. Strangely though, they are treated as regular characters in Skylanders Lost Islands. I guess since you never really save anything to the figure on that they decided to just cut people a break and make them useful. At least as useful as anything is in that game. It’s pretty pastoral. In any case they’re cute and a fun addition to the collection.

I was tempted to pick up the Halloween version of Eye Brawl, but it turns out the variation of that figure is even more cosmetic that usual. He has an orange “pumpkin” head on the toy itself, but in game he’s just a regular Eye Brawl, which I have. It’s gotten to the point where having multiple versions of the same character is getting out of control. I don’t think I’m going to bother with variants in Swap Force. I didn’t get every version of every character in Giants either. I’m still at a bit of a loss as to why they’d make a light core version of a character and one that isn’t in the first place. There’s about a million new and returning characters in Swap Force and enough is enough. I haven’t actually checked, but I think I got all of the new characters in one form or another finally. It’s possible I missed some though. (I never saw a Jade Flashwing and I would have preferred the green color scheme.) By the time the final wave was appearing the local stores had apparently had quite enough of not selling the 3.5 billion glow in the dark Sonic Boom variants they over ordered. The Wal-Mart that’s an hour away even tried clearencing out their stock of Skylanders to make room for the thousands of Violet Pars they decided it would be a good idea to have. Apparently having learned nothing at all from their Skylanders debacle.

Swap Force is in direct competition with Pokémon X/Y on their release date. I’ll have to wait to get Pokémon, and I intend to download it, so I can get it whenever I feel like it. I never actually completed BlacK 2. It got lost in the shuffle at some point and I never went back for it. I think Fire Emblem kind of sealed the deal on that and then State Of Decay heaped a mound of dirt on it. I’ll probably just pick a team and take them to the end without a bunch of swaping out like I would normally do. I don’t have time to level up new guys every gym. I’ll just decide on a balanced team and get it done.

I also never finished Pokémon conquest, because apparently I’m not sure when, or if, it actually ends. Every time you beat it it seems to start you over as one of the other characters. Maybe at some point you get back to being you, but I have no idea, at this point, how long that will take. The game actually gets challenging after a few times around too. You can’t just wander in and kick things into submission. You have to plan shit out. My time is at a real premium anymore. It’s hard to give up any for a game that gets super slow at some points. The Teen’s insatiable movielust really burns up my minutes. I really wonder how parents ever get anything done.