Halo 3 = DONE

I finally broke down and bought ODST, meaning I was finally able to get the last of those achievements in Halo 3, and bringing me back above 95% completion. I only needed to load up, then pause Gay Tony to find out that the menus are hot pink, and, therefore, it sucks. Not much else is going on right now, just sweeping up as many achievements as possible from whatever game I feel like. Currently, it's Fallout 3, which I should have the original 1000 in soon enough.

Demoliton Expert

All the multiplayer achievements for Fracture are done, but I'm still not finished playing, as I need to host games for my boosting partner for a few hours more. I'll be finishing off the game this week, and then putting on Borderlands so everyone I know will stop telling me to get it.

Been going back to 'Splosion Man, and made a hell of a lot of progress. I am now only 10 or so levels away from beating the game on Hardcore, and none of these have the stupid random laser sentry bastards, which were the only things that were really making things hard for me.

At the quarter-mark in GTA right now, and apparently The Ballad of Gay Tony's multiplayer comes with a cash bonus for kills streaks. I've yet to find out how much these bonuses are, but if they're sizable, I might end up boosting Wanted off in Deathmatches. I can't see that working though, because at a paltry $100 a kill, the bonus will have to be thousands apiece before it will be worth my time.

One million bucks down...

And 880 rounds of Hangman's NOOSE to go. -.-

I'm not going to go too hardcore, as some random guy who was either drunk, stoned, clinically retarded, or all 3 told me that the Ballad of Gay Tony was going to come with a way to play the co-op in Party mode. Then he smashed the chopper into a building. It does actually make sense to do that, and even though logic isn't Rockstar's strong point, there is a good possibility that they may realize that parties in co-op = good thing.

In other news, HOLY SHIT BACKYARD FOOTBALL! I used to love the Backyard games when I was a kid, and I'm actually going to get this. Easy achievements are just icing on the cake. Unfortunately, I can't find it anywhere but eBay, and the auctions are going for more than list price sometimes, which is just plain weird.

Lode Runner and Interpol

Both completed to push me up to 27 XBLA completions, 22 away from my goal. I've already given my opinions on Lode Runner, it's a genuinely fun game that would be one of the Arcade's best if not for the fact that it just drags on forever. 80 SP and 48 co-op levels. It gets boring after a while.

Interpol is HORRIBLE. The plot makes no sense, and they don't even need one. It's a fucking arcade game, just throw me some pictures, tell me what to find, and we're good. Graphics suck, which I normally don't care about, but the ENTIRE GAME is graphics.

Then there's the fact that it can be insanely confusing as to what things are. One level has you looking for a lamp, and there's about a billion lamp-looking things. Somehow, none of them are lamps and the thing you're supposed to find looks like a goddamn apple. There's another part where you need to find the word "Italia", and damn it if it's not the two huge "ITALIA" banners in the center of the screen, but a little pamphlet hidden in the corner. Or the "Find 8 Fives" section where three of them are completely blocked from view and can only be found by randomly clicking around. Or the part where the "Bear" is just a brown lump on something that looks vaguely like the California state flag. I could go on, but this game doesn't deserve this much time out of me.

Achievements are buggy, which always pisses me off, but they're easy enough to work out and it takes no more than 3 or so hours for the full 200.

I'm pretty much fed up with GTA for the time being, going to stick with Fallout and Fracture until I get both of them finished up.

Everyone is fucking dumb.

Hangman's NOOSE is easy. One guy gets a chopper, the other two stay back and protect Petrovic. By the time chopper guy has returned, the other two have killed enough people for Petrovic to come out of his jet, and all 4 people take to chopper to the extraction point. $4500 in 2 minutes. Bang that out 1000 times in 35 hours, and you're Wanted. Easy enough, right?

Apparently not, because I'm the only person with more than 5 brain cells that's ever put GTA IV in his disc drive. I could go on and on about how most of these people seem to understand less about the basics of this game than they understand about tying their own shoes, but I'm busy (trying) to get some money.

Auf Whatever Petrovic - FINALLY

78 races into my second attempt, AWP has unlocked. Fuck. Yeah. No more finagling two controllers, no more squinting at a 12" monitor that's 10 feet away, no more yelling at boosting partners, no more altering my sleep schedule to play at offpeak hours, no more glitched lobbies, no more random floods of 8 people, no more Fight Island, no more voting to kick, no more infinite loading screens, no more cannonball runs, no more checklists, no more phallic tracks, I'm fucking done. And all the happiness I got from the achievement is quickly fading now that I realize I still have close to 100 hours left to spend on this godawful crap.

I don't know what I'll be doing now, probably working on Wanted a little bit before AC2/L4D2 release.

Closing in (again)

Getting close to the 2/3rd mark in AWP again, and I've decided that if it doesn't unlock this time around, I'm probably just done. Done with GTA, done with completion, probably done with 360 for a long time. It's ridiculous that one of the so-called greatest games of all time can be this flawed and Rockstar won't lift a finger to help. As I understand, all they have to do is look in their profile data and tell me what race didn't count. It'd probably take less time than deleting the 3 dozen emails I sent them.

All told, I polished off 10 races in 3 hours, which is pretty good.

Left 4 Dead = DONE (again)

I had zero problems with the apparently buggy achievements, so I get to securely stay in my little bubble of Valve fanboyism until Left 4 Dead 2 comes out in less than a month. I'm letting Texas Hold 'em run for a while while I get caught up with schoolwork and other boring stuff. I'm suddenly in the mood to polish off Mirror's Edge, but it'll have to wait.

And now for something completely different.

Looking at 92% on my Trueachievements page was getting me aggravated, so I'm ditching my pre-existing plans (again!) and just trying to get raw score going. I'm almost finished with the Left 4 Dead DLC, and I'm going to try to get cracking on a sports game before the night is done. I should also be polishing off Fracture soon, as well as still completing Fallout 3 by the time Assassin's Creed 2 comes out.

Fallout 3 - again.

I changed my mind. This game is awesome. For some reason, I just up and started loving it in the middle of a mission. The first set of "find your Dad" missions were just boring and derivative, but after that they started to pick up. I still don't know when I'll be done with it, as I still want to work on AWP. My completion is starting to slip, with Fallout's 1550 really messing it up, in addition to 250 from both Left 4 Dead and GTA IV. Consider that I bought and can't wait to play Brutal Legend, and I'll be starting Resident Evil 5, I may be under 90%, which scares me a little.

I'm still looking at a 99 by the end of the year.

Fallout 3

It's alright. Not fantastic, not spellbinding, definitely not the GOTY. It doesn't do anything wrong, and is pretty innovative, it's just not too fun to play. I'll readily admit that RPGs aren't my genre of choice, but Fallout remains unimpressive. It's definitely addicting and enjoyable, but I'd much rather be playing Brutal Legend or Lode Runner.

I'm not regretting putting it on my card though, but I won't have it done for a while. I'm getting into GTA IV more than ever now.

The Fall is coming...

Starting tomorrow, my laundry list of must-haves for this year start releasing, and I'm definitely not where I wanted to be. Fallout 3 GOTY comes out tomorrow, as does Brutal Legend. Next month is Assassin's Creed 2 and Left 4 Dead 2 and it just keeps going from there. I'm only 9000 EXP away from Elite in Rainbow 6 Vegas 2, so I should hopefully have that done tonight. I'll be taking my time with Fallout 3, as I definitely want to get AWP done before The Ballad of Gay Tony makes GTA get overpopulated again. If I can get Fallout 3 1550d and GTA 1500d before Left 4 Dead 2 and Assassin's Creed 2 drop on the same day, I'll be very happy.

Lode Runner

It's pretty badass. I bought it back when it was on DotW, but haven't played it until recently. It's a well-done puzzle platformer, that I'm sure was pretty innovative when it was first released on the NES, but with souped-up graphics, it feels like a modern-day easy cash-in game. Not to say that it's not fun, which it is, it just doesn't do anything I haven't seen before. Basically, you run around, shoot out parts of the ground to trap enemies or to get to new places, and collect gold. Kind of like Pac-Man and Dig Dug but nothing like either. The game actually does get fairly hard, and it looks a little bit time-consuming. I don't really know when I'll get it done.

2 down, 15 to go

So, I finally got back on the Prototype horse, managing to finally get through the pain in the ass that was the Elizabeth Greene boss battle. It wasn't hard, just that it takes literally an hour of darting around her inflicting really minimal damage every time. You take out her 3 limbs by hitting each one 10 times. This makes her fall to the ground, then you attack her for about 15 seconds. You're lucky if you take an eighth of her health. After the first two rounds, the military goes ape on her, and by that I mean they send everything they have on her in a completely futile attempt to do anything at all. Then you jump into a tank, hit her maybe 3 times before your tank gets destroyed, jump into another one, and rinse and repeat like Howie Mandel. (getithehasOCDlol)

The entire time, you have to hope that you don't get caught in a string of attacks that will kill you quicker than an insert witty analogy here. So yeah, not fun. What's even less fun is the Supreme Hunter final boss, in which you have to fight a steady stream of bullshit. First off, who would you choose to engage, the gigantic freak of nature that's wreaking havoc on an aircraft carrier, or the guy fighting him? That's right, the one with the camera behind his head. So you're trying to get your health up so you can devastate the Hunter, but you keep getting shot by soldiers. Great. Oh, and a single attack from the Hunter will kill you.

But it's done now, as is MLB 2k7, which I hit on a whim and finished in a day. I'm thinking that I'll get some of my sports games whittled down, so I'll probably finish off RB6v2 today and then get cracking on NBA 2k7.

'SPLODE!

So, I broke down and got 'Splosion Man, or more accurately, I bought it right after release and was yet to play it until recently. Holy fuck. It's like N+ on PCP, in the most awesome way possible. It is probably the only game on XBLA that can make you legitimately retarded, as there's only so many times you can 'SPLODE! until you start saying 'SPLODE! every time you 'SPLODE! and just go 'SPLODE! until your brain rots. 'SPLODE!

Anyway, Hardcore mode is probably going to be a bitch, but I'm told that if I found N+ easy (I did), that 'Splosion Man would be a good challenge. I don't think I'll be going at it in one stretch, so it won't be done any time in the near future, but eventually.

One thing I like about the game is how designed it is, that you're supposed to be escaping from an underground laboratory but there's all these things you need to jump on that have no practical purpose. Also, the Pause Menu is some guy looking at you through a CC TV and grinning. So, obviously, you're playing a guy intentionally set free to fun amok in the facility, probably constituting a conspiracy. So there you go.