Finn made out very well for Christmas. She got a Fuji Instamatic camera (I am insanely jealous), a pike of Pokemon cards, and a programmable LEGO robot. One of the things that didn’t make it to her pile under the tree were any XBOX games, as we limit her devices to weekends, and generally there’s not a lot of time to play with her on weekends anyway. Over the break she tired of the games on her Kindle, and she didn’t get the Nintendo 2DS she asked for, so we leaned on the XBOX.

We have three multiplayer games for our console, Super Lucky’s Tale, LEGO City Detective, and Plants vs. Zombies 2. Super Lucky’s Tale is OK but the mechanics are terrible and the camera doesn’t track with the game well. It’s like jumping on a trampoline with a cardboard box over your head. LEGO City Detective is decent and has a giant open world to explore but the game does a terrible job of teaching the player game mechanics, so often we’re wandering around the same location trying to figure out what we have to do to advance the story. And the story itself is filled with a terrible attempt at humor, so it gets annoying quickly. Plants vs. Zombies 2 is a complete piece of shit that I haven’t been able to get working; it requires an EA login (besides the XBOX login) and continually fails to connect to the EA server, so we’ve never actually seen it running.

Finn and I sat down and made a list of multiplayer games she’d like, and I stuck them in an Amazon list. On the way home from running errands the other day I had a bright idea and stopped at the library, where I checked out three games for us to try: LEGO Star Wars TFA, Portal Knights, and Star Wars Battlefront 2. The first two were on Finn’s list; I was hoping LEGO Star Wars was better than City Detective, and so far it is. We like it much better because even though we’ve been stuck in a few places it’s much easier to track what we’re supposed to do, and YES SHE CAN PLAY AS REY. Portal Knights didn’t load for us because the disc is damaged, so we’ll need to swap that for a better copy.

The third disc was for me: Battlefront 2 is beautiful and addictive and different from what I expected it to be; the original Battlefront on my old XBOX was a simple jump-in-and-shoot title that was actually pretty limited in terms of gameplay (as a single player). This one includes a single-player storyline as well as an AI controlled set of battlefields, as well as online multiplayer, but I’m happy to play it on my own. I think LEGO TFA and Battlefront 2 will be the next games I purchase now that I’ve played Fallout 4 mostly to its end: I got a year out of that game, and it was worth every penny. 

Update: I got an XBOX360 copy of Dead Space 2 at the Five Below for $5. It installs and plays on my XBOX One even though it’s 8 years old, and it doesn’t look half bad!