60k down, 9200 left

After a masterfully-salvaged Friends Like These attempt and a quick dose of The Darkness boosting, I now sit on exactly 60,000 gamerscore, a number I'll probably be sitting at for a few days. What's more is that I have only 9,200 left on my card, 5,000 of which is obtainable in the course of a week or two.

My plan to reach 100% completion (playing Gears 2 and rubberbanding Texas Hold 'Em throughout):

1. Finish The Darkness
2. Grab 3,000 gs from my backlog.
3. Play and complete The Godfather.
4. Grab 2,000 gs from my backlog.
5. Just Cause.
6. 1,500 gs.
7. Dead Rising.
8. 1,000 gs.
9. Bully.
10. 750 gs.
11. Hulk.
12. 500 gs.
13. Whatever game.
14. Finish the backlog.

I want to get at least the first 9 steps done before school starts in September. Besides Gears and Texas Hold 'Em, which I don't think will be completed this year, I don't have too many large obstacles in my way. GTA IV is fairly time-consuming, Mirror's Edge is hard, Orange Box will take a while, and Crystal Quest will be a bitch if I can't figure out a way to play it without the patch.

So, that didn't work

3 out of the 5 people I was scheduled to do The Darkness didn't show up, so I killed some time by playing Aegis. I finally got lucky enough and got Ace in complete solo, so that's another game down. Now, I'm happy about that, but now I'll be hard-pressed to hit 60,000 evenly. The last achievement in The Darkness is The Don, worth 45 points, so I'll have to find another 25 points somewhere. If I do, I'll hit 60k in the middle of Darkness boosting.

With Friends Like There looks like it'll go well, a quick MTAF got 5 replies in an hour.

Approaching 60k

I honestly have to admit that raw gamerscore barely matters to me. It's been over a year since I last played a game for points alone, not counting my 20-hour-long sub session in GSL VI. But what I did notice is that I'm fast approaching the 60k mark. Once I finish up the Darkness in my boost sessions starting tomorrow, I'll be only 60 points away. And in the time it took me to write this paragraph, I finished the campaign to Jumper, earning me 50 points. That means 10 more seperate me and a milestone I'm determined to hit evenly. "With Friends Like These..." should do the trick. Hopefully I can get all of that done before the weekend, because Halo 3's Double XP weekend is Zombies, giving me a chance at those two achievements that I don't want to miss.

So, The Darkness. Absolutely phenomenal storytelling, characterization, atmosphere, level design, and gameplay. Only problem is that the shooting mechanics are so godawful that it becomes a chore to play it sometimes. This is one of those games that you can tell was pushed out the door too early, and isn't really polished enough to earn a place on every gamer's shelf. The game on Hard is a right bitch sometimes, especially when you die because you can barely aim at or see the enemies. The game also never thinks to tell you that having your Darkness manifested will shield you, and worse yet, seems to take away the Darkness for no reason, right when you need it most, leaving you entirely vulnerable to everything.

The achievement list would be a pinnacle of excellence, if not for a few things. One, give me a damn checkpoint right before you get to the workers in the beginning of the game so I don't have to watch the 5-minute opening sequence every time your horrible shooting mechanics screw me out of an achievement. Two, difficulty resetting when you play multiplayer? How did you possibly manage to do that? Three, the multiplayer blows. The phenomenal storytelling, characterization, atmosphere, level design, and gameplay of the singleplayer doesn't help anything, all you have are awkwardly-played levels and horrible mechanics. I would love to get 250 legitimate wins in a good multiplayer, but I can't. Four, loss of games played tracking? wat.

I also returned to Gears for the first time in a while the other day, and I should really take breaks more often. With the exception of two games of obvious lagswitching, I got 1500+ EXP in 7 straight Guardian matches.

Gears 2 burnout

Well, the shittiness that is Gears 2 multiplayer is really starting to wear. It sucks, because all Epic needs to do is fix a handful of things. First off, the chainsaw needs to be for camping and coming up from behind only. One shot should down its revving and you should be able to deflect it with any weapon. Being able to run into battle revving a chainsaw and surviving is just a joke. Second, smoke grenades should stun briefly. Not knock you down to the ground. Grenades that are pinned to the wall needs to be majorly ungimped. Have there be a way to take them off walls or make them be duds 50% of the time, anything. And there's the final issue with lag, which is probably only caused because of the ridiculous graphics in the game. I've always advocated gameplay over graphics. If I wanted to see in perfect clarity, I'll go outside.

So, what I'm doing is playing until I'm sick of the game, playing a little bit more, and then taking a break. I'm getting to 680k, 10% of the way there, then breaking out The Darkness and finishing up a few other games in my backlog. Ultimately, I want to spend 3.5 weeks on, 1 off. That'll put me at level 100 in... 10 months. fuck.

Fuck Epic.

So, good news first. First on x360a to get to rank 25 in Gears 2, meaning I'm first in all the x360a clubs for that game so far. The bad news is, I'm not even close to being done with the DLC. Rank 100 is either .75 or 4 times the length of the original Seriously... in Gears 1. I mean, what the hell.

I know I'll enjoy playing Gears 2 for the most part, and I'm actually glad there's a chance for me to play with friends and get achievements at the same time, but this is ridiculous. The original 1000 was relatively pain-free, and it only took about 40 hours not including the leave-your-box-on Party Like It's 1999 achievement. The first wave of DLC was only annoying in that it cost $10 for three maps that were out a month after the game.

But now this DLC... fuck. I should be able to choose what I put on my card. Granted, I would have played Gears 2 at launch if it came with this achievement, but this is setting a horrible precendent. I was planning on playing Unreal Tournament III, another Epic game, but now I'm not going to. Who's to say they won't come out with a ridiculous DLC pack later and force me to replay it?

And the bullshit goes on. Mirror's Edge's 250 requires you to be nearly perfect in all the time trials, including the original ones, and is far harder than the original 1000, which you could pretty much skate through. Halo 3 has forced you to have impossible achievements on your card for what will be almost a year.

Rock Band is doing it right, with an extremely elegant solution. Mark the DLC as a seperate game entirely. This way, I can choose whether or not DLC will go on my card. You'll sell less DLC, obviously, but you'd be selling more games because people like me won't be afraid to put them on my card in the first place.

EA, Epic, and Bungie are ruining a great thing. So is Microsoft, for letting them get away with it. At least a few months ago, you could say "Oh, that game's at 1250 now, so it'll never get DLC again." Not anymore.