The title of this post says it all: Beyond Good and Evil HD and Torchlight got removed from my Xbox 360’s hard-drive space to help make room for future games and content I’ve already paid for, such as the remainder of Telltale’s second season of The Walking Dead, if they ever get around to releasing another episode. I think I ended up freeing around 2 GB of space, but I plan to tackle some more arcade titles I have sitting untouched for awhile to see if I can polish them off enough for me to consider to removable. Previously, I polished off Shadow Complex and then immediately uninstalled it. We can all blame this on my neurotic nature to use every oodle of storage space I have to its full potential.
For Torchlight, though I had long beaten the game back in 2011, I was sitting pretty at 11 out of 12 Achievements. The last one to unlock was called “Superstar” and requires you to “achieve maximum fame.” You mostly earn fame by defeating unique enemies in dungeons, and you can always tell these apart from regular grunts because they have names like Moggath the Dragonkicker and Sh’gorl the Darkstink. In short, you probably need to kill around 200+ unique monsters to hit this target, and my saved game showed that I had only killed, at that point, around 125. And so I grinded, which was not the most exciting task, but it was mindless enough, and I had plenty of potions and healing spells to keep me going. Only took a few hours of going at it and ignoring picking up new weapons, enchanting gear, and worrying about what skills to enhance and so on.
This also served to remind me that Torchlight II is much better than Torchlight, especially because I built a range character there with the ability to create random chaos whenever making a critical hit. It was much more taxing to grind as a melee character for the “Superstar” Achievement because it meant getting in close and taking more HP hits. Though I do like the idea of these “clicky” action RPGs on consoles; maybe I should look into Diablo III one of these days.
Next, I moved on to Beyond Good & Evil HD. Now, I played and completed the original Beyond Good & Evil on the PlayStation 2 a long time ago; in fact, it’s one of the first games I wrote about back when I got into writing about entertainment media on the side, over at my stupidly named Blogger site Game Beliefs. In 2011, a Cyber Monday sale for XBLA had the HD version of the game priced at $3.00, and I happily paid for it a second time, fondly remembering how many photos of strange wildlife I snapped during Jade’s journey to stop the DomZ from stealing away the inhabitants of Hillys. I played a little bit of the game then, and then nearly finished the whole thing a second time in June 2012 when I was permanently stuck on the couch for an entire weekend with really bad back pain. I got all the way to the end section and…well, just stopped. Not really sure why, but I guess my back got better and I was so excited to leave the couch that I just dropped everything off my plate and went elsewhere.
Anyways, the last section of Beyond Good & Evil HD basically involves some “reflect this light properly to open the door” puzzles, a spat or two of direct combat, some flying-but-on-rails ship battle, and a surprisingly difficult final boss. I don’t remember the final fight being so difficult last time, but I suspect the fact that I went into the fight with only a small number of health-healing items played a major part in its difficulty. Without spoiling what happens, the controls for Jade during combat get reversed, and you basically have a split second to hit the boss and/or dodge out of the way, and the reversed controls take some time to get used to. Took me several attempts, but I did it; I saved Hillys all over again. I missed unlocking four Achievements, but they didn’t seem like any fun–more grinding, and not in a do-able, mindless way–so I just watched the credits, appreciated the soundtrack once more, and removed the game entirely. Oh well. Bring on Beyond Good & Evil 2; that was a joke, by the way. That game is never becoming a real thing.
So that’s three games now played and polished off enough for me to feel okay with uninstalling and never looking back. I’ve got more to go after, but for now I at least have enough room for the next episode of The Walking Dead, which I think drops sometime in March. Whew.
Grinding Down 