17 games in 15 days

Is what I have left, and I honestly don't think I can do it. Finals week has made me busy as all hell, and it's continuing until Saturday. Even though at that point I'll be free and clear, I'll still have a job (retail during the Christmas season, no less) and most of the money I'll be earning will be going into Christmas gifts, so I doubt I'll be able to buy enough arcade games.

If one or two more really easy games come out between now and January 1st, I may be able to do this, but here's how it currently stands:

I need to complete 17 more arcade games.

• I can finish Sonic 1 in about 3 more hours.
• I can finish 'Splosion Man in about 5-8 more hours.
• If the gods grace me with a royal soon, I can finish Texas Hold 'Em in about 5 hours.
• I can finish Braid in about 4 hours.
• I can finish Feeding Frenzy in about 5 hours.

That's about 25 hours, and I'd still need 12 more past that. I'd need to start Wallace + Gromit 1-4, Sealife Safari, Sam+Max 1-2, Shinobi, Sonic 2-3, Comic Zone, and Feeding Frenzy 2.

The main problem is that I don't own any of those besides Sonic 2, and I have no points to my name. As I'm typing this now, it actually seems like a reasonable timeframe, but I'd need to come up with about 10,000 Microsoft points, which again might be possible.

All I know for sure is that after this rush, I'll still want 52 more arcade completions to one day join the 100/100 club, but that's far off, and I'll be playing harder arcades. At year's end, regardless of how this challenge works out, I'll be working on climbing the 360v sandbox leaderboards. I'm currently #66, and I haven't even played 7 out of the 17 games on the list.

Gunstar Heroes and Cloning Clyde

Gunstar Heroes is actually one hell of a game, and at only 400 points, it's definitely a must-have for the Arcade. It's really well-done, boasting graphics far better than the original yet still retaining the old-school feel. It's not that hard with save states, bar a few sections, and all in all only takes a few hours for the 200.

I had heard bad things about Cloning Clyde. Very bad things. Things that would make a metaphorical combination of Hitler and Double Hitler blush and run to the nearest confessional. But it's actually a pretty fun game. It doesn't boast anything really innovative, just a bunch of ideas that are rarely used in games, and the whole is definitely greater than the sum of its parts. I'm only 8 stages in, but that's a third of the levels down in like an hour, so this should be done for arcade #30 sometime tomorrow night.

Arcade bender

It's starting. Besides Spec Ops with my cousin, L4D2 with my group, and GTA with my other group, I'm playing nothing but arcade games until the end of the year. I will beat Birky or die trying. I'm downloading Gunstar Heroes as I speak, and I should have that 200d by the end of the day, along with possibly Wallace + Gromit #1, depending on how long they both take. I currently need 20 completions in 25 days to win. It'll happen.

Oscar Mike!

You know what's really aggravating? Knowing that Infinity Ward spent a good amount of time and effort making the ingame dialogue accurate and appropriate, but then decided to fill it with that stupid NATO alphabet thing. I really have no idea what a Whiskey Hotel is, or why I'm always Oscar Mike, and I've stopped caring a long time ago.

The campaign is really the basic CoD formula, slightly better mechanics, engines, and weapons, same exact fucking missions over and over. Spec Ops is pretty fun, although difficult at parts. I only have 6 missions left to 3-star, but they're just stupidly hard and I don't really feel like bothering.

1 vs 100 = DONE

And that's arcade #28, 21 more to go before January 1. I was able to get both Watchmen games for $15 combined yesterday, so there's 2 more that I'll be getting in that time. I should also be finishing up 'Splosion Man soon, as well as Tetris Splash and starting up Castlevania. I also opened up MW2, and already finished the Alpha and half of the Bravo Spec Ops.

The Orange Box = DONE

I intended to do Portal without cheats, I really did. Then I spent about 2 hours on the first time challenge and decided that I really didn't want to. It's not that I was unwilling to put in the time and effort, but that I didn't want to associate Portal with anything negative. When I hear "The cake is a lie", I associate that with GLaDoS and Valve and everything I love about video games. I wasn't willing to add "flashbacks of two weeks of pain and frustration" to that.

So, I broke down and used the whole cheats exploit thing, and it only took 2 days to sweep up all the golds. Orange Box is done now, 99 achievements and all. I put MW2 on my card as well, and I should have that done relatively soon.

1 vs 100

I love general trivia games, but I was unable to play 1 vs 100 for quite some time, as the Live games may as well as been scheduled by someone with a copy of my class schedule and a deep hatred for me. Thankfully, Thanksgiving (hurrpunnotintended) gave me a few days off of school, and I was able to max out my avatar action 10 times in a Live game last night.

I didn't really find the achievements too hard, seeing as how I'm just insanely awesome and got my first 16 questions right. The 6 instant answers took me a while though, seeing as how it's a fucking stupid achievement when a quarter of the questions are along the lines of "Which of these are longer/bigger/smaller/harder/better/faster/stronger?" and you therefore need to see all 3 answers before you can respond. I got something like 10 4-5 question streaks, which took me like 2 hours. I finally got a 5-question streak and then I got the question "In what movie does Paris Hilton play a drug-addled spoiled heiress?" The answer to that is Repo! The Genetic Opera, a cult movie that almost no one's heard of but I would have the bastard children of.* So yeah, that was pretty awesome.

All I have left now is to answer 500 questions, which amounts to around 2.5 hours of aimless button mashing as I do something on the computer, and that'll be arcade #28. Unfortunately, my ever-present foe Birky also got the game, so it's a complete wash for my arcade completions challenge that I'm probably not going to win anyway.

*This is the second time in three articles that I've mentioned having babies, I promise I'm completely male and have absolutely no gender confusion issues.

Assassin's Creed 2 = DONE

The collectibles this time are far easier, and actually tie into ingame rewards. So yeah, I can conclusively say that AC2 has improved upon the original in every conceivable way. Anyway, I'm done with it for completion number 91.

#92, in the form of Borderlands, may be coming later this week, depending on how efficient powerleveling is. At any rate, I'll be done with the DLC tonight and be putting MW2 on my card for my last new retail of the year.

No spoilers here

Without delving into any specifics at all, I will simply say that the ending to Assassin's Creed 2 is the single best 5 minutes of media I have ever seen. In one cutscene, every single question the first two games introduced was answered, even the ones you never asked, and the plot took a massive increase in scale. It was exposition, rising action, climax, and conclusion all in one and was it ever fucking awesome. In less time than it takes to cook an egg, I went from hating AC1 to respecting it, from loving AC2 to wanting its babies.

I might be done with the game tonight, and definitely tomorrow, and I'm eagerly awaiting the probable DLC. After that's done, it's Expert L4D and Borderlands DLC. Also, I got my first straight flush in 20,000 hands in Texas Hold 'Em. 26,617 hands and no royal.

Assassin's Creed 2 - first impressions

It started off pretty damn slowly, but now that I'm a few hours in, it's definitely a far better game than the first. A story worth paying attention to, varied missions, and vastly improved weapons blow AC1 out of the water. Then there's the fact that Leonardo Da-Fucking-Vinci is in the game and AC2 is a solid five-star release.

I'm working on AC2 and L4D2, as well as Tetris Splash, as well as doing shitloads of school work, so I really couldn't say when I'll have anything done. I just know that it will be.

Left 4 Dead 2 - First Impressions

All of the complaints about this just being a shitty rehash of the first one have been proven wrong, as #2 adds so much more in the way of weapons, gameplay, and infected. It actually goes so far past L4D1 in a year that it makes the first game look like the phone-in version that was released way before it was ready.

Just playing through one campaign, it's obvious that these are two completely different games. It's no longer just an A-to-B thing over and over, the cresendo points and finales require you to actually complete a simple task, like finding and shutting off an alarm, retrieving an item, or collecting gas cans to fuel your escape vehicle. The melee cooldown in 1's multiplayer is everywhere in 2, but there are also new melee weapons that can be used nonstop.

The introduction of melee weapons is just part of the incredibly immersive co-op play. In 1, the extent of co-op was special attacks that required help, and possibly having different players carry different kinds of the three weapons or two thrown ones. In 2, there are more special attacks, with at least 6 different weapons, 3 thrown ones, and even the health packs and pain pills have options.

Once you add in the fact that there's actually a continuous story, it's obvious that Left 4 Dead 2 is not a shitty rehash, but rather a completely new experience that Valve somehow managed to pull off in a year.

Fracture = DONE

Fracture honestly disappoints me. It brings a lot to the table in terrain deformation and plenty of strange weapons, which are both completely awesome and original. Unfortunately, the game is so poorly designed that it doesn't tie together well and ends up just a complete mess. The aiming is horrible, movement is finicky, level design is incredibly generic, and it's just all boring after a while. The story is worth playing through, even on the usually-unfair hardest difficulty, but it definitely doesn't make up for the online achievements. About 75 hours for the 1500 games played.

The ending sets up a sequel, and I would honestly get Fracture 2 because if LucasArts can learn from their mistakes, it would be an incredibly good game.

In other news, I'm shelving Borderlands for the time being. I could play through the story again to get to level 50, but I'd rather wait for the announced DLC and see how much EXP I can get from that. Started Left 4 Dead 2, which looks like it'll be a fun but extremely hard 1000. I've got a solid team ready though, so I'm confident I can get it done. I'll get whatever I can get done by myself, then crack open Modern Warfare 2 and play that when my team's unavailable. Looks like Assassin's Creed 2 is going to stay on the shelves for a little while.

I can be petty.

Did you know that BASE jumping stands for "Building Antenna Span Earth", and is by definition parachuting from a stationary object? I knew that, and I thought everyone did, until I played Gay Tony. Apparently, "base jumping" (which is in real life inherently awesome because you're jumping from relatively short heights) is synonymous with "parachuting" to Rockstar, because half of the jumps are done from helicopters or motorcycles (wtf?) and they're mainly about the parachuting section.

The drug wars are also stupid as hell, because you're doing 25 of them that cycle through 4 different dialouges, none of which are well-written or well-acted.

The dancing part is just plain dumb.

The golfing mechanic is finicky as hell and zooming in doesnt help because your sensitivity remains the same.

The fight club bit is unfair because your enemies can use weapons and you can't unless you disarm them, but then it just goes away at round's end.

And don't even get me started on the 100% nonsense.

The two extremes.

Played Borderlands and GTA today, and the differences between the two are almost saddening.

You have Borderlands, which sacrifices richly detailed landscapes and any hint of realism to just be balls-out fun. You have unlimited respawns, fully dynamic saving, a magical hawk that divebombs enemies, a gun with unlimited ammo that fires plasma, enemies with "Badass" right in the title, midgets that get knocked over by their own shotgun kickback, and missions that make absolutely no sense. All in all, it's a phenomenally fun experience with tons of replayability. The only thing wrong with it is the lack of compatibility with completing the story missions in co-op. Everyone in the game has to be at the exact same point in the same playthrough, otherwise stupid things happen and the host will get random missions from far later in the game assigned to him or no one gets to save progress or something. I defy anyone to seriously fault the single-player experience for anything.

Then there's GTA, which, I'll say time and time again, is the most realistic and detailed experience to date, and honestly would be right up there with the ENIAC and MS-DOS on a timeline of humanity's accomplishments with computing devices. Just walk around the city, and note the level of detail in the NPCs walking everywhere. They actually do things, not just walk around aimlessly. The city-wide traffic grid functions perfectly, the in-game internet is more advanced than China's real one. Unfortunately, that's about all you ever do, just drive around the city, and at 30mph to boot because any faster and you'll flip on every goddamned turn you make. Every mission is punctuated with random phone calls from your friends, asking you to go on dates that you have to accept, or you get no awesome things like free quicktravel or guns. Half the missions are just stupid A-to-B things. GTA IV's just not a video game, it's a simulator. It depresses me to think about exactly how fun it would be had that much attention and money gone into something like Saint's Row 2. As far as I'm concerned, GTA IV is one of the worst video games ever, just on the sole fact that it's not fun to play. Microsoft Word would make a horrible video game too, but Microsoft was smart enough to promote that as a word processor.

Unfortunately, Borderlands is almost over, while I still have quite a bit to do with GTA. All that's left for Borderlands is for me to play half of the story again to rank up to level 50, and then await DLC, which AC2, MW2, and L4D2 will keep me from playing for a while. As far as GTA goes, I'm slowly but surely getting to the $5 million for Wanted, and now going into mop-up mode for Gay Tony. Unfortunately, mop-up's going to take me about 3-4 times as long as the story, which is even more reason for me to hate Rockstar.

Borderlands - first impressions.

Holy. Fuck.

GOTY so far. I normally don't care about graphics, but it looks absolutely incredible. I could keep going on about what's so awesome about it, so I will. It's definitely got a hint of RPG in it, kind of like a My First RPG presented through a shooter. You also gotta love a game that refuses to take itself seriously, like this. The guns are crazy, the people are insane, and nothing makes much sense if you sit back and look at it. At the end of the day, it's all just fun.

I'm currently mopping up (I think) my first playthrough, and two are required. Should be done by L4D2/AC2 release, at least if I don't get swept up in finishing GTA. I'm just shy of 2 million and Gay Tony still sucks. 100% all missions isn't going to be fun. I'm probably not even going to try it until someone writes a guide.

All Hail!

So, I'm finally done with Hardcore 'Splosion Man, and I can honestly say it's one of the harder things I've ever done. Some of the levels towards the end were just ridiculous. 3-4 minutes of precisely timed 'splodes. Not fun. All I have left is to do the multiplayer campaign and I'm looking at a solid 200. I'm probably also going to put on Castlevania and definitely CoD Classic over the next week, so that's 3 easyish arcade completions right there. Birky, I'm coming.

Fallout 3 = DONE

For the first time in a long time, I've been really motivated to clean up my card. I've had Borderlands and Brutal Legend sitting unopened for weeks now because I can't put Fallout, GTA, or Splosion Man away long enough to work on them. I finished Fallout though, had to go on a murder spree to finish up the rank 30, SO hopefully there'll be no more DLC because I don't feel like starting it with everyone in every town dead and my Karma tanked.

Also got past a bit in Splosion Man that had been kicking my ass for weeks, and I'm now only a few chapters away from completion, so yay for that.

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.

Brief Update!

So, on a complete whim, I decided to retackle GTA. I found out that, despite the fact the Trueskills are in different hemispheres, my spare box and account can match up with my regular one 95% of the time. In the space of 5 hours, I've done 12 races, which isn't bad considering:

1) I accidentally did one race twice, so I really did 13.
2) 11 of them were Cannonball Runs, so that's like 2.5 hours ingame.
3) I started at 10pm EST, which is still peak hours.

I've been incredibly careful for the glitch that felled me the first time, and so far nothing of note has happened. Hopefully, I should be at AWP by the time Fallout 3 GOTY comes out.

Conspiracy week III

The only conspiracy theory I really subscribe to is the JFK assassination. If you've seen the movie JFK, you'd probably agree that, despite its minor factual errors, it does open up a line of questioning as to the legitimacy of the lone gunman theory. I have read (and by read, I mean skimmed through the first few chapters of) the Warren Report, and it is rife with what seems to be straight up bullshit.

First off, the Report states that Oswald's military-tested marksmanship was nowhere near sufficient to make the shot that allegedly killed Kennedy. Then they say that the faulty sight on the rifle compensated for this. That's like expecting a hurricane to sweep by a city that was already hit by one, and move all the debris back to how it was before the first hurricane.

They also give a picture of Oswald holding a rifle that's obviously doctored, none of the shadows match up. Jack Ruby killing Oswald works about as conveniently as a meteorite killing your would-be mugger, and is just about as likely.

But the real nail in the bullshit coffin is the Magic Bullet. I mean, COME ON. How the hell are we supposed to believe that a bullet, fired from a gun, travels hundreds of feet, hits a target, makes something like 7 90-degree turns, including one in midair, and exits completely pristine?

So what do I think really happened? This video sums it up pretty well:

Conspiracy week II

Wrong. Halo 3 gets updated with 750 points, some of which remain unattainable for a year. Then Mirror's Edge gets updated with 250 points that are harder than the original 1000 AND require you to go back to the original game. Fifa 09 gets DLC. Wait, that's a yearly franchise. That can't be good. Then comes the mother of all bullshit, Gears of War 2 forces you to buy maps that were ready before the game's release, and then gets tacked with a multiplayer achievement that takes about 1000 hours. Then, they do absolutely nothing to stop the huge uprising of cheaters. Today, I'm one of probably a dozen legit Rank 100's, and I can't play a multiplayer game without getting bad feedback because I look like one of the thousands of cheaters.

Then Transformers 2, a movie cash-in, gets DLC. Now, it's pretty damn obvious that developers are just making the DLC along with the game and releasing it later for more sales. Think about this thing from the point of view of someone who completes all of their games, like me or thousands of other people. I buy a game with the intent of completing it, understanding that it takes a set amount of time and effort to complete, and assuming that that single purchase will be all I need to do so. Months later, DLC comes out, forcing me to spend more time and money to get what I originally bought, that is, a completion.

From my point of view, this is like if I bought a phone, then 6 months later, the manufacturer takes away my 8 button and forces me to spend another $20 to get it back. I have a friend who's a lawyer, and I assume a very good one because he's pretty boring, that tells me that this does constitute unfair business practice, but it would be impossible to hold Microsoft or a developer liable because no jury would see things from our narrow point of view. Then again, it took only a failed lawsuit for McDonald's to pull its SuperSize option.

What I'm getting at is that this does technically constitute a conspiracy. Microsoft had a set of rules that clearly outlined what developers can and can't do in terms of gamerscore. All achievements must be attainable without extra purchase, only 250 DLC points per game, etc. But developers openly flaunt these rules, releasing glitched achievements with no effort to patch them, forcing people to buy or play another game to tie-in an achievement, shutting down private servers when they could just patch in a line that makes the servers run off of Microsoft's. But Microsoft looks the other way because this all equates to more money for them. Assholes.

Conspiracy week

So, for this week in my English class, we have to direct our blogs in a conspiracy-themed way. Anyone who's ever been in party chat knows that my incessant jabber is one step away from wearing a tinfoil hat and calling into radio talk shows at 2AM with my Project MKULTRA stories. So, it's not really that much of a stretch for me.

Before I dedicate the week to full appeasement of my English professor, I thought I'd rant about Microsoft's near-conspiracy in their shaky DLC practices.

DISCLAIMER: THESE EVENTS PROBABLY AREN'T IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER. I'M TIRED AND THIS IS A RANT, LIVE WITH IT

So, way back when, gamerscore was cut and defined, right? You got a retail game and it offered about 1000 points for you to earn. Some were impossible and some were child's play, but whatever. Arcades gave you 200. Shortly after, Microsoft came out with set rules that stated all retail games must have an available 1000 points, arcade, 200. Ubisoft went back and put G.R.A.W. up to a round but still stupidly impossible 1000, but other companies like EA decided to flaunt noncompliance by never patching their games up, and coming out with shit like Tiger Woods 06, which had something like 250 glitched points out of the box. But whatever, they're EA, they can have and shut down their own servers, and do whatever they want because they make Madden, the best-selling yearly franchise on the 360.

That worked pretty well for a while, as EA and 2k continued to make an ass out of themselves by releasing full-budget games with glitched achievements they never bothered to patch, as well as the odd shovelware like Rayman or Smash TV. Then, Bethesda thought it would be a great idea to add extra achievements onto DLC for its game Oblivion. Great idea, as the DLC pack, Shivering Isles, was good, lengthy, and well worth the $30 it cost to download. But wait, doesn't that kind of mess with people who care about completing every game they play? In theory, yes, but these are fair deals and a fun experience.

So games like Gears joined in with 6 new solid maps and a decent set of achievements mirroring its new online gametype. Cool. The Godfather brought its original 835 up to 1250 with a mission mode. Nice. Crackdown brought its 900 up to 1250 with more vehicles, more sidemissions, and more weapons. Awesome. Stranglehold came out with a bunch of half-asses maps ripped right off of single-player for its tacked-on and horrible multiplayer, and charged 20 bucks for it. Wait, what? Okay, a good system had its first little hiccup, but that's okay because, hey, the 250 extra points for that are REALLY easy.

So, we continue for a while and some weirder stuff starts to happen. Ninja Gaiden II comes out with DLC not only a few weeks after release, but with a mode that's way harder than the original 1000. But anyone who's going to 1000 NGII is a masochistic and extremely talented freak, so they'll enjoy the extra 250. Beautiful Katamari is released with the DLC that's encoded on the disc and the 20-dollar download just unlocks it. Okay, I guess, because the game was only $40 when it was released. Phantasy Star Universe comes out with 250 extra points, but it's almost 2 years and you still can't earn one of the achievements. Naturo comes out with glitched ones that the developers never fix. Hellboy is released with unattainable achievements and the promise of DLC, but it's been over a year now and nothing. Okay, shit's starting to go down, but you could always wait for a game to get its 250 points and then it'd be safe to play, right?

TO BE CONTINUED...

WET so far

So, the first of 4 playthroughs for WET is done, and I'm not as impressed as I thought I'd be. They start to really abuse Quicktime Events near the end, and they commit the other QTE crime by not introducing them until far into the scene. Story was a little hard to follow too, as they kept jumping back and forth in time and introducing too many characters to keep track of. All in all, I'm satisfied and I don't seem myself getting aggravated at the game, which whores itself for playthroughs. One playthrough to unlock the hardest difficulty, another to play it, another for a mode where I lose health as time goes on but everyone dies in one bullet, and another in a score trial mode.

I'll give any game two playthroughs before I get pissed at it, and more free passes if they offer alternative means of playing. I haven't played Golden Bullets or Points Count modes yet, but it looks like it's in the clear.

Sandboxing

So, the 360voice sandbox leaderboard has been updated, and with it my goals for 2010. Fallout 3, Assassin's Creed 2, and Left 4 Dead 2 will be the only new retail games going on my gamercard. I want to be at 99% completion by year's end. Once I get to the point where I can count my incomplete games on one hand, I'll be going nuts with new games and gamerscore in a dash to 100k. I also want to get every sandbox game besides Spiderman 3 and maybe Mercenaries 2 done before then, so here goes:

BULLY
Seems like a solid game, but with slightly buggy achievements. I own it though, and it's a quick 1000.

DEAD RISING
With my new school/work schedule, (which will be defunct by the time the year ends, so I might be doing this early) I can pull a 14-hour shift on Sundays without messing up my schedule too badly.

GTA IV
If Rockstar weren't bitches, this would have been done already. But alas, I need to redo AWP and grind out Wanted. Ugh.

MERCENARIES 2
The glitchy achievements scare me. A lot. I can probably do most or all of it offline completely, so if there's any issues I can delete my account completely, recover it, and pretend I never played the game at all. Mwahahaha.

RED FACTION: GUERILLA
I actually intended on getting this at launch, but it never happened for some reason. Online will take a while, but it doesn't look too bad.

SPIDER-MAN 3
Ugh. I definitely think I can do the races, I just don't know if I'm willing to put in all that time and effort on stupidly buggy controls and camera angles.

THE GODFATHER II
Loved the first one, and apparently this one's easier but not as good.

THE INCREDIBLE HULK
Stupid linked Ironman achievement. I'll have to figure out a way to do that without putting Ironman on my card, because I defnitely don't want to play that.

PROTOTYPE
I don't really have that much to go, but what's left is just stupidly grinding.

WET - first impressions

Holy. Shit.


It's fucking awesome so far, like playing one of those kick-ass low-budget 80's action movies, only on steroids. The game is pretty much Stranglehold and Kill Bill's illegitimate child. On crack. I love the fact that they not only put grain in the cutscenes, but use it to indicate damage in the same way Gears uses a reddening screen.

They also do Quicktime events extremely well. It's usually:

A) Put into a scene 30 seconds in, where nothing indicates it previously. The controller probably isn't even in your hands, and now you have to hit X-A-B-Y-LB-Down-Select to escape a rouge wheat thresher.

B) Completely unnecessary. Why did I have to hit X, twirl the right thumbstick, hit Y-B-RB, and X again to set up an explosive? Just X would have sufficed. I don't care if it's more realistic, I have people to shoot in the face.

Wet does commit crime B with the A-mash X thing to open locked doors, but it's more than made up for by the truly awesome parts. The highway level in the demo, which is the only one I've done so far, is completely badass. You're given a full 2-3 seconds to hit one button, which means you'll never have to end up restarting, and can instead enjoy the flow of the cutscene while feeling like you're involved.

There are a handful of things I don't like so far though. I don't know why I need to watch a 10-second scene every time I get more health, and I would really like a checkpoint right after the cutscenes where I watch a sweeping camera show all the baddies in the area. Instead of how they do it now, by giving you a checkpoint right before it and orchestrating it so you die almost immediately if you don't know exactly what you're doing, condemning you to watching the unskippable scene 5 more times.

Unskippable cutscenes in general annoy me, it's just the developers stuck up their own asses, without any regard to the fact that it may not be my first playthrough (WET requires at least 3, probably more) and I just want to focus on actually playing the game. Sure, WET's cutscenes are badass, but not after the first 15 times.

I also don't get how I pretty much need to be diving or sliding or something to shoot accurately. Sure, that's the point of the game, but there are points where I'd rather stand still and pick people off, just for the sake of not getting killed.

All in all, I'm pretty impressed with what I've seen so far. Looks like a solid 1000, requiring a good dose of time, effort, and skill, but not a stupid amount of any. Also, 360voice updated it's sandbox leaderboards, so it seems as good a time as any to break down my future gaming plans. Later.

Brothers in Arms - done for now.

So, the story's done, leaving just the online 0-pointers (optional), and the stupid load-up-the-game-for-5-seconds ones. I kind of enjoyed it, in all, I just found it almost like a slap in the face that I was forced to watch the cutscenes for an unbearably derivative war story. We get it, war sucks and sometimes people have motives for fighting other than the draft. Not being original.

Anyway, I started up Golden Axe, which should be done in a few hours. I want to finish up Rainbow 6 Vegas 2 up tonight as well, and maybe start up WET. I should be able to get that done in a few days, leaving me plenty of time to mess around with Prototype, Mirror's Edge, and some sports games before Fallout 3.

Peggle

No, it's not on my gamercard. Yet. I've been playing it on the PC, and holy shit is it addictive. To the point where I've barely played anything but and it's taking me days to do Brothers In Arms. It seems like a massive undertaking on the Arcade though, so I doubt I'll be doing it any time soon. Peggle, while awesome, is so luck-based that it makes some of the achievements beyond unfair. Clear every peg in every level? What the hell? I probably will do it one day, but not for a while. For now, I'm still on the BiA grind.

Saint's Row 2 = DONE

Woo-hoo! My refusal to overexert myself for an 11th rank badge is now moot, and I have a 1250 in my favorite 360 game thus far. I also passed 75,000 on the said Kingpin achievement, which is pretty cool. 15 games and 2,775 points stand between me and my goal, and there's an outside chance I could be at perfection by the end of the year.

The only hard things I'd have to do between now and then are GTA IV, The Orange Box, Texas Hold 'Em, and Mirror's Edge. Brothers in Arms will be tedious, but just elongated. It'll take literally 30 seconds a day, just over 100 days though. WET, Assassin's Creed 2, Left 4 Dead 2, and Fallout 3 GOTY edition are my only must-plays between now and then, and I kind of want to play Dead Rising and Mass Effect before their sequels come out. 7-Day Survivor won't be a problem really, as I now have almost all of every Sunday off.

It really depends on how much my school workload will weigh me down. Currently, it's not too effective, but you never know.

Brothers in Arms

So, in addition to having a set of utterly retarded achievements, Brothers in Arms made Metal Gear-sized mistake in thinking that by "play a video game", I really want to watch something and move around every once in a while. Granted, I'm only two chapters in, so maybe it tones down, but like half of my playtime so far has been cutscenes. The game's not bad though, it has its moments, including the extremely awesome slo-mo/zoom in every time you kill a guy with one headshot. It comes across as a lovechild of Call of Duty and Rainbow 6 Vegas, but instead this time it's reminding me that war sucks and all people are human. Except Germans.

Points are easy enough to come by, sort of. It's about 10-15 hours of singleplayer, plus another 5-10 for the 0-pointers that I'm probably going to get. I'm going to do the Committed, Focused, and whatever the hell else legit though, I'm not really big on getting achievements without doing what the description says.

Wet deprivation symptoms

So, I picked up Wet today and it's sitting on my shelf. Looking at me. Taunting me. Why am I not playing it? I can't trust Artificial Mind + Movement. The only other 360 game they've worked on was Mercenaries 2. So, for fear that Wet's achievements are unattainably glitched, I have to just wait it out. So far, it looks like every achievement but the two that no one has (Beating the game on Very Hard and getting Gold on all challenges) unlock just fine for everyone. Hopefully in a week's time I'll be playing it, along with Brothers In Arms. Saint's Row 2 and Halo 3 will both finally be finished at about the same time, so I'll be in good standing with my soon-to-be-broken plans.

What I want to do now is, starting now, complete one game for every new one I put on my card, in addition to staying above 95%. I'm currently at xxxxx/77800 points, so that's a maximum of 14000 I'll be adding before I hit 100% completion. Leaves a comfortable margin for DLC and arcades.

I also figured out why I haven't been getting upgrades as often as logical in Fracture. My commander hates me, which is understandable because my character's an egotistical twat that channels Duke Nukem in the worst way possible.* Every time I get an upgrade, I get to be overpowered for two minutes before the game throws in a new enemy that's about 5 times more powerful than anyone else. It's not even fair.

*By this, I mean nothing against Duke. Duke backs up his trash talking with severe amounts of ass-kicking and Vaporwared awesomeness. Jet's trash talking is followed by him being a little bitch all the time.

Fracture so far

So, with about 800 multiplayer games down, I got cracking on the single to Fracture. I thought it would be some crazy awesome game that let you open up sinkholes beneath people's feet and be totally fucking awesome. But instead, the whole ground-manipulation thing is just coming across as tacked on. It's not really powerful enough to do anything besides slowly change the terrain to get past incredibly obvious puzzles after everyone's dead.

I would think you could at least make hills in front of you for cover, but that barely works. It's so finicky and random that half the time you'll end up on top of the hill and half the time you'll do the same thing to the guy shooting at you. It's so much easier to just duck behind something, well, it would be if there were things to go behind. There are a bunch of crates everywhere that can maybe shield you if you crouch just right and the enemies are slightly lower than you.

Drastically altering the basics of a genre to let the player take full advantage of a new feature is fine, but then you make the entire game hinge on said feature. Imagine if Portal's gun made portals that didn't operate to any consistent physics, and it was never clear at all what surfaces accepted portals until after you tried it. That's about how Fracture works.

It's at least a tolerable game though, and now it looks like I'm getting powered up, which can apparently be done at will with no consequence by my commander. Why the hell is he not giving me all of them at once?

I knew this would come in handy

So, for one of my college courses, we have to make and maintain a daily blog. What that means is that I have to do virtually nothing different in life except maybe update more than biweekly. That won't be a problem though, as I finally got my laptop back or, more accurately, got a new one for free because Best Buy is awesome. Anyway, expect far more updates than I've ever done.

So I finally beat World At War on Veteran, which I didn't really find that hard after Burn 'Em Out. Even Heart of the Reich wasn't so bad. Clear out the first Flak with like 3 frags, blow it up, and there's a Panzerschrek like 10 yards away. Grab that, blow up the second Flak for a checkpoint. Make your way to the one on the far right, there's only a handful of people guarding it. Once you blow up that Flak, your comrades have taken out all but like 3 Nazis on the left side. Not hard at all, really. Whatever, I'm done with stupid grenading Treyarch bullshit until next year. Still have to do the zombies, but that's genuine fun that I won't mind doing.

Currently working on Fracture, which I'm probably not going to get done for a while. Halo 3, Saint's Row 2, Brothers in Arms, and WET are going to take up all my time from Wednesday until Fallout 3 GOTY probably.

Pac-Man Fever

4 more arcade games added to the completion list, 3 of them Pac-Man games. Pac-Man: CE was probably the most fun I had in a while and ranks up there in my list of favorite arcade games. Altered Beast's also done, but who cares? :P I also bought Portal: SA, which I'll be playing soon, and Arkanoid which, although difficult, is definitely possible for me and looks like a fun game.

Unfortunately, in less than a week, college will be starting up again, so I'll be cutting down on my online time. I definitely want to get Rainbow 6 at least to the point where I just have to idle for Elite before the end of the month, leaving me just new games and my backlogged dozen to work on. Also, starting today, I'm going to be more diligent with Texas Hold 'Em, definitely going to leave it on every night. There's no point in leaving my 360 off when it could be working on achievements for me.

The Godfather, Monkey Island, 70k, and more!

By just playing random games, I ended up at 69,800 gamerscore evenly, so I thought then was as good a time as any to play Monkey Island, one of the first games I ever played. Bought it on release day and never got around to it until then. After I finished that, I swept up the DLC for The Godfather to put me at 95% completion and 12 incomplete games away from 100%. My new goal is to never fall under 95 again, which means no starting games unless I have a high enough completion to withstand it. I should be finishing off MLB 2k7 soon enough, as well as NBA. Even though I got the onlines in before the server shutdowns, (and only days before for some) I can't shake the stupid feeling that I missed SOMETHING and I'll hate myself until I dust off all the 2k games on my card.

Also, the rivalry between Birky and I has hit new heights. The only thing he has on me anymore is arcade completions, and I made the foolish mistake of announcing my plan to pass him before I was ready to put it in action. He's now 30+ ahead of me, a number that grows daily. Pretty soon, I'll be pulling out every easy arcade game there is, as well as Hexic 2, Contra, Splosion Man, Minesweeper Flags, TMNT 1989, and anything else I know I can complete. I have almost $200 in Microsoft points ready to burn, and I want to get at least 10,000 of the points I have left until 100k from arcades, which works out to 50 new completions.

I'm sterile!

My balls turned into brass, which I assume decimates one's sperm count. Bioshock is really fucking annoying when you can't respawn scot-free every 12 seconds, but overall I had fun with what is now completed retail #54. Unfortunately, my laptop is broken, yet again, which kind of limits what I can do games-wise, as I don't have the luxury of road maps or strat videos or anything. I'm going to finish up the original 835 in the Godfather hopefully tonight, and then start working on World at War's zombies afterwards.

And here's a video.