ROYAL RAINBOW!

So, Beautiful Katamari is pretty much more addicting than cocaine. I assume. Phenomenally original concept with amazing execution, with only a couple of shitty levels and a slightly flawed control system keeping it from perfection. I pretty much blew through campaign, unlocked Eternal mode in almost every level, then swept up everything I possibly could in Eternal. Once I was done with all that, I had something like 98% of the collection, so it was a day's of work to sweep up the 50-odd items I was missing.

After that, I did all the DLC, got the 1.5 million km Katamari achievement, and I've just been grinding requests. Should be done with that by tonight, and it'll just be a matter of leaving the game on overnight for the additonal achievements.

More good news, I am now past the 90% completion barrier. Even though TA says I'm at 88%, they do it by achievements, not gamerscore, and they count 0-pointers, like the COD:W@W and Kane + Lynch ones I don't have to and will never get. As for what I'll do next, I think I finally have the motivation I need to clean up a sports title or 5. I'll also be adding The Godfather to my card in the near future.

Screw you, server shutdowns.

Unless my powers of observation have failed me, I just completed the last of my online achievements in sports games, meaning I probably never have to fear a server shutdown. I even had a close call with MLB 2k7, the one I just finished up. The achievement for playing a full 9-inning game can be glitched on you if your first game doesn't meet the criteria, and the only resolve is to wait for the leaderboards to be reset. Team 2k stopped resetting the servers apparently a few days after I had last played, which was awesome. Also, the lobby system has been down for months, meaning that the online was probably soon the be axed. It's done now, and I'm happy.

I'm currently mopping up the TLAD achievements in GTA, should be done by tomorrow, leaving the two big onlines left. After that, I think I'm going to complete Beautiful Katamari, which should leave my completion percentage at about 89. Hooray.

Cabela's Alaskan Adventures = DONE

This game is absolute, certified shit. The worst game I've ever played by far. I can't even begin to describe all the ways this glitchy piece of shit sucks, but I'll try, it bulleted form:

• Squirrels take something like 8 shots from a shotgun to kill. Bears, one.
• You can shoot an animal, listen to the guide say "Now finish him off", shoot him again, and get penalized.
• There's a stamina meter, which I guess is accurate, but is unfair because: a) It drains at walking speed and b) you need to walk across huge maps sometimes.
• Fishing employs ridiculously inaccurate mechanics and requires you to move a joystick with an accuracy of literally 2-3 degrees.
• When the game says "Shoot 3 bears" it sometimes means "Shoot 3 male adult bears" and there's no way of finding this out until after you kill a bear and get penalized.
• There's no way of being able to determine the gender of most of the animals until after you kill it and get penalized for killing the wrong gender.
• You need to adjust for wind and bullet arcs for shots as short as 3 yards. No, really, 3.
  
• An animal can pounce at you from 10 feet and damage you without coming close to you at all.
• Sometimes, the game you need to hunt will run to a cabin and you can't kill it because you can't shoot a gun within 50 yards of an occupied building, regardless of the fact that the building isn't fucking occupied.

And blogspot has a scheduled outage in about half an hour, so I'm going to stop for now. If the glitch to use radar on Simulation mode didn't exist, I probably would have hung myself by now.

I'm still keeping Gears 2 on hold, and my new goal is to get GTA IV done before I start Gears. So far, I've done 11 races in about 5 total hours. Wanted seems like it'll be more time-consuming, but infinitely more straight-forward. For now, I've just been doing AWP with Sajaa and doing the campaign again for Chain Reaction during downtime.

I still stand by "SR2 > SR1 > GTA IV". Hell, I'd rather play Superman Returns than GTA for 100 hours.

The Darkness = DONE

Thanks to DJBruce92, who was awesome enough to let me boost wins off him for about an hour and a half, I now have a 1000 in The Darkness, albeit way after I was planning to. I also theorized a way to boost Gears 2 with a few people, and we'll be trying that in a month. Until then, I'm taking a break to focus on everything else on my plate. I'm currently going on Cabela's Alaskan Adventures, which is horrible, but made much more tolerable with the radar glitch. It should be done by the end of the week.

"Ooh Shiny!"

Despite the fact that I've played less than 20 new games in the last year, I can't help it when I enter a game store and see a quality game on sale for less than $20. As a result, I currently have more than 20 games sitting on my shelf that have yet to play. That's not counting the handful of impossible games that I don't intend on putting anywhere near my 360 anytime soon. It's taken great willpower to not play them, but I'm starting to break. Two of the games - Dead Rising and Overlord - have sequels coming out this fall and I want to play them before preorder season begins.

I don't think I'll be altering the play schedule I posted below, but I'm not sure at this point. I have definite benchmarks as to when I'll be putting new games in, but beyond that I don't know. I've hit a pretty good balance of Gears / regular gaming, and at this rate I'll be done with Gears 2 by the 1-year anniversary of TU3. It sucks, but there's nothing I can really do. Once you factor in that school will be starting, if I can hit 100% completion by my 20th birthday, I'll be happy. I want to hit 100k long before that though, so maybe my triumphant 100k/100% completion moment needs to be altered to 150k or even 200.

As I previously mentioned, preorder season is coming up. I make a habit of preordering my games in full so I don't have to worry about having money that day. What I've done the last few seasons is gone into my local Gamestop with hundreds of dollars in cash, preordered 5-7 games at once, and left with a slip of paper. It's fun. My view so far is this:

• Assassin's Creed 2 - This is a definite. All the bad parts of AC1 seem to have been adressed, and the sequel looks like free-roaming swordfighting awesomeness.
• Dead Rising 2 - I have yet to play the first one, but if it's as good as I've heard, this is a definite.
• Overlord 2 - See above.
• Bioshock 2 - How could I not?
• Wet - Looks very intriguing, but I think I'll wait it out a little while. The devs were responisble for the travesty that was Mercs 2.
• I am Alive - The teaser at last year's E3 sold me, but I think I'll wait to see some more trailers first.
• Halo ODST - Hell no.
• Half-Life 2, Ep. 3 - Is it coming out? Who knows. If it is, definitely.
• Duke Nukem Forever - This looks like it may be the year we are graced with this. No, really.

I know there's one or two I'm forgetting, but this is good enough for now.