Yay, I managed to hit my gamerscore goal! I hit 150k about an hour and a half before the goal was due to time out. I also managed to nail it perfectly:
The final burst in achievements was partly down to Monopoly Streets being pretty rewarding, but mainly down to Band Hero. Ahhh, I love games that you can get away with not actually playing, or playing very little of. I played an hour of guitar, and then sat a mic with a fan and let it play through the entire career on beginner vocals for me. This lead to:
I’m totally OK with that.
I really don’t have much that I actually want to play right now. There’s nothing major out that interests me until Borderlands in September, so I think I’ll just be taking it fairly easy for a while, take a break from the GS cramming
Off topic, for my birthday last week I got an unbelieveble collection of presents:
Massive thank you to Darran and Maisie for these corkers!
I’m aware that this looks hideous, but WordPress’ formatting is being shitty, so this post will have to stay a cluttered one.
Annoyingly, I didn’t get a summary email for the week ending the 13th, which is a shame since that was my week off work. I would have liked to have known how many hours I put in! To briefly summarise that week off the top of my head…
I put the majority of my time into Sonic Generations. It’s strange, since Sonic was the big one for me when I was little, but I never really had a major urge to play Generations. I gave it a very quick play at the Eurogamer Expo last year, but it still stayed in the fairly ‘meh’ part of my mind. I can’t even begin to imagine how many times I played Sonic the Hedgehog/2/3 before I was even 10. I was absolutely obsessed with the series, but as the years went by that obsession was unsurprisingly turned into bitterness as that franchise was murdered over, and over, and over again.
I stopped even bothering after Sonic Heroes. The franchise stopped existing in my mind from that point, and aside from trying Episode 4 with some hope (which was QUICKLY demolished), I never touched a Sonic game for years.
It was only when my brother offered to lend me his copy to help my gamerscore challenge when I was even reminded it existed. I took it home and while I know it’s early days yet, but it’s probably been one of the best games I’ve played this year. The levels (especially the nostalgic 2D Green Hill Zone/Chemical Plant Zone) are mind blowing. So perfectly done in line with the originals. It kept a smile firmly on my face as the familiar themes and stages rolled by and lightning speeds.
I would even go as far as to say that the levels from the diarrhea pockets of the franchise are brilliantly done, although the lack of a Sonic 3 Stage is CRIMINAL.
I rented the NCIS game to boost my gamerscore up a full 1000. Four hours and some diabolical voice acting later I was done. Can’t complain at that.
As for this week:
I 100%’d Mass Effect 3 last week. It’s the first time I’ve ever done that with a Mass Effect game. In fact, it’s the first time I’ve even gone back to a Mass Effect game! I absolutely loved it first time round and went straight back into it. I’m absolutely not one to brag – I will gladly say when I struggle with a game but I was surprised at how easy I found the Insanity play through. I never struggled at any particular point, but one. Without major spoilers, the very last enemy in the game (bearing in mind that the game does not actually ’end’ anywhere near this point) is not some kind of gigantic enemy or boss of any kind, it’s in fact an average, common Reaper enemy. It’s incredibly difficult to explain without spoiling some minor details, but in short – this twat had me stuck for half an hour. Upon googling, I wasn’t alone. It also lead me to this video which made me giggle (spoilers, obviously):
On Insanity, it’s very much an insta-death situation if you suck, which I clearly did at this point.
Either way, some frustrated cries at my TV later, I was finished.
I actually went straight into the first Mass Effect when I was finished. I’ve decided I am going to play the first two again. For a couple of reasons, firstly (and mostly) my games have been with Ashley bong-eyed Williams, and not Kaiden pretty-face Alenko. The only reason for this is that I was aiming for the Soldier Ally achievement way back when I played the first game and so made the decision to keep her, which I didn’t even pop in the end anyway. At this point I didn’t even think much of it, but another two games later I really wish I’d kept Kaiden.
Secondly, I want to play as a different class. The multiplayer in ME3 has settled that my favourite class to play is the Sentinel, so this is what I’ve gone with.
It’s… Interesting going back after playing 3, but I’ll stick with it.
Fez. Oh my.. Fez. I have only played an hour purely because I was wanting to score, but what I have played is unbelievable.
I’m not sure I’ve ever seen anyone so passionate about a game as much as my other half is about Fez. I came in from work last week (this story is absolutely no exaggeration, by the way) to find my other half sat in the living room, surrounded by scribbled notes and drawings littering the floor. ‘I’ve deciphered the language!’ he cried as I walked in. ‘..What?’ ‘The language! I’ve worked it out!’ he says as he scrambles through around 40 pages of notes to show me his work. ‘I spent about 5 hours doing this! But I did it!’.
He says that Fez is now easily the best game he’s ever played. Once this challenge is done, I’m pretty sure the first thing I’ll be doing is going back to that.
Hmmm, these blog posts are coming later and later each week…
So last week, I earned more achievements than I ever had before, according to 360 Voice. I finally got round to playing Vanquish, and honestly, I wasn’t crazy about it to begin with. I found it absolutely brutal. It wasn’t until I bumped the difficulty down to easy that I started to enjoy it. What an absolutely mental game!
As for Your Shape… My beanbag did a good job of burning a chunky 7000+ calories across 3 nights. I’d played it with some regularity a few months back, but I find it so painfully boring. I just started playing Dance Central for both the calorie burning and the fun. I was never going to play it again, so I thought I’d abuse it for the gamerscore. My beanbag sat through many, many sessions of Cardio Boxing while I mopped up various games on my phone, which sadly don’t show in detail on Raptr.
The gamerscore goal is going OK considering. I’ve managed to hit (or over-shoot) the daily requirement almost every day, or make up the difference when I haven’t. I’ve pretty much dried up all the gamerscore from my fairly poor collection so I’m now running pretty much only on lovefilm rentals, or games borrowed off friends of mine. Less than two weeks left. I think I can do it…
One this has been firmly cemented this week. BioShock is the best game ever. I finished the German version this week, and playing it straight after reading the book is mind blowing. So, so good!
Other than that, there really isn’t much to say about last weeks gaming. Call of Duty 2 and Rock Band 3 are a result of some splitscreen at a get together at a friends place. Most of the time was actually spent playing Wario Ware: Mega Party Games on the GameCube, which has to be one of the most legendary split screen games there is. So, so many laughs out of slighty (!) tipsy people as someone tries to shake a dogs hand while every other person in the rooms screams ‘left!’.
Not to jinx it, but my effort to keep up with my GamerScore challenge is actually going OK. Next weeks summary will be interesting, there’s been some serious whore-age this week! My time off starts Friday, too, so I imagine that’ll increase even more shortly!
More Mass Effect 3. Yay! I’m still playing it through on insane. I’m chipping away at it fairly slowly since last week I bought the online pass and finally got round to trying the co op. I definitely approve of that. It’s great fun, but playing it has made me realise how shit I’ve had it by choosing the Soldier as my class for every Mass Effect game. On paper it’s 100% my kind of class but now that I’ve tried all these others I realise how guff and boring the Soldier really is. Now I feel like I’ve basically been playing a glorified third person shoot for the past five years when it could have been much, much more interesting. I never realised how much more interesting every other class is! If I ever go back to the previous games (big if) I think the Soldier would be at the bottom of my list when it comes to picking a class. I think I can do without the kajillion ammo types I have.
Earth Defense Force: IA has been the co op game of choice for a while. Me, my other half and my best mate have been chipping away at that for some months, working on some very, very grindy achievements. Currently, we’re all playing through the campaign on hard with our second characters/classes (all of us have one already maxed). It’s nice to play such a simple game sometimes, something that takes so little concentration, but at the same time there’s only so much mindless city-levelling (with a touch of bug killing) that I can take.
Zombie Apocalypse 2 is another co op effort, four of us picked it up whilst it was on sale. Definitely seems much more interesting than the first, though it has probably the most annoying characters and voices ever.
I have a gamerscore goal to hit 150,000 before my birthday at the end of next month. It’s been running for a while and was a reasonable goal to start with, but now as the date closes I need 277 GS a DAY in order to hit it. I’d really, really like to but I don’t have any money for new games so I’ll have rentals alone to hit it with. Any (bearable) scorewhorey or even just decent rewarding game recommendations would be appreciated! I have a stretch of time off starting next Friday (10 days, woo!) so I’m thinking quite a lot of catching up will be done then!
Like pretty much any gamer, I absolutely adore any amount of stat tracking. Raptr send these fantastic little summaries each week and from now on, I’m going to post a summary of my summary (!) each week.
40+ hours play time, not a bad effort!
So, Mass Effect 3. The Mass Effect games are a weird one for me. I always forget how much I enjoy them. I’ve only played each of the previous games once. As much as I enjoy them, replaying and mopping up doesn’t really appeal to me. They’re just too much of a time sink for me. And this was a strange one. I actually wasn’t particularly excited for it. I think that’s mainly down to the lull I was having, but despite that I gave it a rent anyway, mainly just for something new to play, But, this one… Like I said, I know I enjoyed the others but I could not put this one down. I was well and truly hooked. I say ‘was’, I still am. I finished it on Thursday but have since restarted in on Insanity. I just can’t get enough of it!
As for the ending (spoiler free)…. Honestly, I don’t know what to think At the time, the ending genuinely didn’t bother me. But having since read some articles on it (particularly this GameFront one) I can understand the complaints. Having reading more about the choices and being puzzled about the outcome a little (which is difficult to explain, but to summarise, I’m confused when in comes to the crew after the end game) it seems some fans are right to be annoyed. I don’t know an awful lot in regards to the finer details about the universe surrounding Mass Effect. I’ve played the games pretty quickly, only once over a period of five years, so the plot holes mostly passed me by at the time, but now I’m unsure what to think. I can’t deny that I loved it all (end included) at the time, it’s only reading into after that’s left me puzzled.
Either way, I think I’ll be playing it for some time more yet. Annoyingly, my copy is only a rental and so I don’t have an online pass (or the points to buy one yet) so I haven’t tried the co-op (not even slightly interested in the multiplayer) but I can’t wait for that, when I get round to it.
BioShock. Yay! I mentioned a couple of posts ago how I was dying to play it again after reading the book, but I was waiting till I could afford the German version of the games, for its separate achievement list. Well, a couple of weeks ago I mentioned this again on TrueAchievements, on a similar blog post made by phatal1ty. Another member chirped up and said that they would actually be able to pick up a copy, as they were in Germany. Long story short; they hunted it down and sent it over for me for just £12, when buying it myself would have cost over £36. What an absolute legend. The community is just unbelievable sometimes! It made my week, and now I’m finally replaying it again. Happy times!
Just as I was saying that I’d hit a major gaming lull, something unexpectedly tore me out of it.
I spent the weekend playing The Darkness II. Honestly, after not really ‘feeling’ games for a short while, it’s main selling point to me was that it was apparently crazily short. I wanted something short and sweet, having not feeling too enthused and coming off the back of sinking over 110 hours into Skyrim. I started The Darkness II last Friday night, and by Sunday afternoon I’d put over 20 hours into it and popped the full 1k. That is something that I haven’t done for a very, very long time. It’s an absolutely fantastic game. I’ve had the score-whorey likes of Adrenaline Misfits and Nickelodeon Dance on rental for weeks, just because I couldn’t even be arsed to finish them, even though they’ve been taking up a couple of slots on lovefilm the whole time. It completely reignited my excitement for games again.
So, that’s it. No more pissing around hanging onto rentals for weeks on end, no more ‘Oh I’d like to play that’. I’m getting stuck straight in now. Mass Effect 3 will be the focus for a little while ahead, I imagine. But my rental list is now rammed with games I can’t wait to play and have been meaning to. The likes of Borderlands 2 and BioShock Infinite getting release dates has also been quite a big boost. Some time off has already been booked for the two of those.
I’m particularly looking forward to Borderlands, though. Not many games have been co-op seshed like the first one was. Four of us put over 150 hours into that in just a matter of weeks, playing for hours and hours at a time. You know you can be proud when an American Xbox Live friend (eight hours behind) jumps in the party to tell you you’ve managed to ‘outstay the majority of the people in his time zone who’ve gone to sleep’. And I absolutely can’t WAIT to do it all again.
