February 29, 2016: Family Video Game Day

After yesterday’s frustrating attempt at going to see Knossos, today we took the time to relax a bit as a family and spent much of it in the game room playing video games together.  It was a really nice day, we all enjoyed it a lot.

Dominica and I started in on Highrise Heroes as soon as we got up.  We are determined to beat this game.  We love it, but it is really, really hard towards the end.  The game “tricks” you with thinking that there are 100 levels, then you get reminded that it is not an American game and they start number with zero, so there should be 101.  Then you go into the basement and there turns out to be something like 121 levels.  The story was interesting and we mostly liked the ending and are definitely hoping for a sequel.  Fallen Tree Games (who also make the Quell series) are known for making sequels to puzzle games so we are hopeful that this one will be getting a sequel (or two), too.

One of the things that we really enjoyed on Highrise Heroes was that at the end of every level you received your global ranking so that you could see how you were doing, not just in comparison to yourself but against everyone, everywhere.  That made for a lot of fun and we knew that if we were in the top one hundred players in the world that we were doing well and on nearly all levels we were in the top eight and on some we were in the teens!!

Liesl wanted to play a game so Dominica and she played Scribblenauts Unlimited which was a perfect game for them (it is only a one player game, Dominica was helping Liesl play) as it is a fun, word puzzle cartoon game definitely meant for kids.  They played that for quite a while and had a lot of fun (and a lot of arguing because that’s how they are.)

Liesl played Castaway Paradise for quite a while today.  She did really well and is nearly ready to become a “VIP”.  One more good day of playing and she will make it to the VIP levels for sure.

This evening we talked the girls, cajoled is probably more accurate, into watching the pilot of Star Trek: The Next Generation with us.  That’s the double feature “Mission to Farpoint” episode that is nearly two hours long, it is essentially a made for TV movie.  On Netflix the two episodes are merged into one.  You can’t even tell where the separation was supposed to happen.

The girls kind of liked it.  I thought that for sure that Liesl would love it but she mostly just put up with it.  Luciana said that she really liked it, though.  But, I suppose, I was around Luciana’s age when I first started watching the original Star Trek with my dad.

For family game night tonight, after our show, we settled in and played Telltale Games’ Jurassic Park.  We have not played that game since we tested it out while we were in Nicaragua.  It’s a really cool game that takes place during the first movie, using different characters in the park while the movie is going on.  It is a really neat idea and tells more of the story of the movie.  Very well done and totally makes you feel like you are taking part in the movie.  But it is also very high stress and hard to play for any length of time.  It is quite taxing and I am the only one that can handle having the controls.  The game is scary enough that both of the girls like to hide under blankets for much of it as dinosaurs tend to jump out at you rather suddenly.  It’s not a horror game, but it is an intense one.

It was a really nice day together as a family.  And that wraps up February, 2016 and it wraps up our second month in Greece.