Nice to meet you, 20,000 Gamerscore

So, I used to have this little widget thing over in my sidebar that kept track of my Achievements and recently played games. It was a nice thing to have, a quick reminder of where I sat Gamerscore-wise. However, I guess Microsoft recently updated its system, changing the way players’ gamercards looked, and all the code in my widget got thrown for a wild ride. In short, it ended up looking like this hot mess:

Don’t y’all just love my new hair color? Matches my eyes, I’m told.

Anyways, this wasn’t very upsetting, and I figured it would either fix itself in due time or I’d go looking for a new widget. No rush, no rush at all. Except, suddenly, without warning, there was a great need to make sure the world could see my Gamerscore! Great need indeed.

Last night, while playing some Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood, I noticed that I was sitting comfy at 19,990 Gamerscore, ten points off from a perfectly pretty whole number. Well, looks like I had a new mission to accomplish then, one not involving finding treasure or assassinating bad dudes or even burning Borgia towers.

Scanning the list of still-locked Achievements in Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood, I found only two worth 10 Gamerscore points exactly. One involved using a parachute, which I did not have yet, and the other required me to win some hand-to-hand fights. I knew exactly where that took place, headed over via the lovely fast-traveling tunnel entrances, fought my way through five easy rounds, and unlocked the following with little challenge:

The Gloves Come Off (10G): Win the highest bet at the Fights.

Mmm. So, math time! 19,990 plus 10 equals…uh…hmm. Hold on. Let me get some scratch paper. Let’s see. Carry the…one, and times everything by the denominator. Factor in the ratio of pi versus the radius. Wait, wait. No, I got it! It’s 20,000 Gamerscore! Look, look, thanks to the widget brainiacs over at mygamercard.net:

Sure, pretty meaningless in the grand scheme of things, but I have fun paying attention to it all. In fact, if any of my dear readers will recall, I was also able to perfectly achieve 10,000 Gamerscore when the time came near. Can’t wait for 30,000 Gamerscore to show up next!

All Achievements Achieved – Dead Rising 2: Case Zero

For some reason, I expected the Achievements to be much harder for Dead Rising 2: Case Zero. Especially the one for killing 1,000 zombies, but I quickly realized that it only sounded more difficult than it truly was. I just spent a good 15 minutes running them over and over and over again with the pushcart thingy when I had to carry back the first bike part. Yup, even a zombie game has its percent of grinding to do…

The toughest of the bunch focused on fetch quests:

Still Creek Survivor (20G): Saved all the survivors in Still Creek. So much work in such a short stay!

This one required dedication and attention. Given the strict time limit in Dead Rising 2: Case Zero, you basically have to forgo finding all the bike parts in favor of saving everyone else stranded in Still Creek. That’s fine. I never really liked Chuck’s daughter, and seeing her taken away by the military for a second time bothered me not a bit. Now, actually saving the survivors is not a walk in the park. In fact, it’s more like a walk in a zombie-infested park. And they’re all drunk off moonshine. Okay, okay–maybe only one is actually drunk, but the rest sure do act like a bunch of inebriated clowns. Basically, you go find where these survivors are and then get them to follow you back. Sounds simple. It’s not. They like to run directly into groups of zombies instead of following the path you’ve cleared for them with your spiked bat and electric rake. The worst survivor is a sick woman you have to carry all the way back to your hideout; I flashbacked hard to Musashi: Samurai Legend and felt everything inside of me twist upside-down from repressed torture and anguish.

Seven Achievements are guaranteed to unlock during your first playthrough. The rest require another playthrough or two, but don’t take long at all to get. Small Town, Deep Pockets was the last to unlock for me after buying way too many stuffed moose heads from Dick’s pawnshop. A surprisingly easy 200 Gamerscore overall.

A roundup of lately achieved Achievements

I’ve been adding to my Gamerscore as of late via multiple games, and I think now’s a good time to share with you some of my grand accomplishments. I’m talking about Achievements, naturally. Y’know, those little blooping bloops that pop up now and then when gaming on the Xbox 360 and doing something, um, specific. I love ’em. And hate ’em, too. Facebook lists my relationship with them as “complicated.”

Moving along…

From Borderlands, I pinged–or rather dinged–this one last night after clearing out three to four “trivial” difficulty quests:

Ding! Overleveled (15G): Reached Level 51

The game’s a bit dull now that I’m a pretty high level, playing solo, and on my second run through the same ol’ quests. I do sincerely doubt I’ll climb much higher with Roland, but maybe I should try playing as Lilith to mix things up for a bit.

From Fallout: New Vegas, I completed a number of quests recently, but only one was actually tied to an Achievement:

Return to Sender (20G): Completed Return to Sender

This quest was…a bit of a downer. In many ways. First, you have to find a bunch of ranger stations and tell them about fixing their radios. Then you have to go back to each ranger station again to ask about odd reports coming over their radios. This means a lot of fast traveling, which doubly means a lot of loading screen. I swear I’ve stared at that spinning roulette wheel so much that I’ve seen its very soul. And then it ends sadly with a cloud of confusion over Jareth’s head.

From Street Fighter IV, I got a couple Achievements recently as I continue the long climb to the top, but this one is a goodie:

Super Combo Master (10G): Perform 100 Super Combos.

Why is this a goodie? Weeeeeeeell…super combos are hard to perform! There. I said it. Now you know just how much of a fighting game n00b I am.

From Mini Ninjas, a not-so mini (ninja) amount of Gamerscore for a grindy Achievement:

Now You See Me… (40G): Defeat 100 enemies with stealth attack

And lastly, from Sonic’s Ultimate Genesis Collection, we have this one from Super Thunder Blade, a game I never played and never will play again:

Get to the Chopper (15G): Super Thunder Blade: Score over 1,500,000 points in the first level

This ol’ shoot and flying as frantic as possible game is horrible. You have a limited number of lives and must dodge an array of bullets–the biggest problem is the controls as moving the chopper out of death’s way is tougher than expected. But the Achievement’s name gets points, both from me and the Governator.

Okay, that’s all for now. Quite a roundup, eh?

Inching closer to Ramona’s final evil ex

Twins are cool. That’s just a fact.

And over the weekend, Tara and I took down two of ’em, at the same time, thus earning ourselves the following Achievement from Scott Pilgrim VS. The World: The Game:

Twin Dragons (10G): Defeated the Twins simultaneously.

To be honest, it happened too fast and too easily. I mean, we had so much trouble staying alive against Todd and Roxie; I figured the Twins were gonna be a handful of ass-whoopin’, but no. I got both of them cornered up in the top left part of the screen and slashed away with a stolen ninja sword while Tara took care of any nearby goons. Within seconds, one of the Twins was flashing yellow, an indication of his low health, and then boom–KO!!! Both dead. Both within milliseconds of each other. I really thought killing two bosses at the exact same time would’ve been tougher than that, but it was almost mindless how it went down.

Here’s hoping NegaScott or Gideon toss up a better challenge. Granted, there’s no Achievements tied to them so all Tara and I need to worry about is staying alive. I’ve hit the level cap with Scott, but she’s still climbing the experience ladder with Kim. I have to wonder if maybe I was a bit overpowered for the Twins? I doubt that though because just the level’s regular enemies put up one stink of a fight. Hmm. Can’t wait for the DLC and patch to help balance out the difficulty issues. Still need to get online access though…

[Full Gamerscore] UNO

So…full Gamerscore earned for UNO; all 12 Achievements pinged and proudly captured; blah blah blah yadda ya I’m the man blah blah. It happened last night, and I slept quite soundly thanks to it. I polished off a few more rounds of online multiplayer, thus securing the final Achievement and telling the world that, yes, I am a UNO shark. Feels good to finally have another game fully completed that isn’t LEGO-based.

Anyways, reviewing the list of Achievements, it’s clear this isn’t exactly a tough 200 to get. Most just come naturally with time, and the ones that took the longest for me involved playing online games…because I was a Silver member of Xbox Live for a great while.

Favorite Achievement

Skip to My Lou (15G): Play 40 Skip cards.

Skipping an opponent is a lot of fun. I enjoy it more than Reversing or even making them Draw 4 and lose a turn. Skipping just has this quick satisfaction to it, and I love the Achievement’s artwork. Makes me want to throw some rocks across a lake now.

Easiest Achievement

UNO! (10G): Successfully call UNO! and win the game.

This is basically how you win a game…though I guess you could win without calling UNO! but that might get you in trouble with other opponents, forcing you to draw two more cards. Best to just call it and then seal the deal.

Hardest Achievement

UNO Shark (30G): Win ten 4-player games of UNO®, in any mode, on Xbox Live.

It’s the last one I got. Some nights, I’d play two to three games and not win a single one. This is because some people like to play up to 250 points, which is not easy to win in one fell swoop. Other times, I’d be in a game where the first person to go out wins, and that made things easier. Either way, this one required patience and a lot of diligence.

Yay…full Gamerscore! UNO! It excites me to now see a new entry on my Xbox Live dashboard under the fully completed titles section. Maybe I should try to finish up Shadow Complex next, since that’s the closest. Or Winterbottom. One of those. We’ll see. So much more games to play, so little time and sanity left.

10,000 Gamerscore exactly – mission accomplished!

Well, the subject line kinda says it all, but here’s the glorious visual proof:

It’s such a nice, round number. I wouldn’t go so far as to call it feckless, but, yes, it’s a silly thing to care about and get excited over, but see this is where I and Achievement whores differ. For them, it’s all about getting as many as you can, as fast as you can. Me, well…I like to set these mini-goals and have fun going after particularly challenging ones or Achievements that really change how I play a game (for example, I’ve not yet sacrificed 10 people in the Temple of Shadows in Fable 2 because I find it hard to be really evil in that game), and so in that sense, I really like keeping track of what I unlock.

Not sure how long my new shiny Gamerscore will last though as I am working my way through an evil run in Fallout 3 and will eventually–when I’m not so terrified of every single creak and snicker–return to Rapture in BioShock. But for now, let’s all enjoy ten thousand Gs.

Going for 10,000 Gamerscore tonight

Call me crazy, call me full of OCD, but ever since I saw my Gamerscore hit 9,975 I’ve been wanting nothing more than to hit a straight 10,000 and to do it with my next Achievement. So I quickly perused my list for the first locked 25G Achievement, and there’s two sitting idle in my copy of Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts: Speedy of the Colossus and Whoa Nelly! One involves going over a set speed and the other…involves going over a set speed. Hmm. Not sure how that worked that way.

But yeah, that’s my goal for tonight. Got a bunch of other stuff to do though (like watch House, read short stories, clean up some LOST fanart for tomorrow, and pay bills), but I think I can make time to unlock one of them.

Wish me luck!

9,000 Gamerscore, a billion more to go

I was going to wait until I crossed 10,000 Gamerscore to post about it (because it seemed like a nice enough number, lovingly round and a threshold of sorts in terms of e-peen and gaming prowess), but somehow…somehow I managed to unlock four achievements last night from both BioShock and LEGO Indiana Jones 2 that fortuitously brought me to 9,000 exactly. See?

I’m kind of amused by this. Most likely you aren’t.

Also, since I’m now revealing my Gamertag, feel free to add me on Xbox Live. Just know that at the moment I’m only a lowly Silver account and therefore cannot help you boost or be your co-op partner in SpongeBob’s Truth or Square.

Achieving Them All

There’s a really interesting article over at Kotaku about a 24-year-old stay-at-home mother named Kristen who is the No. 4 ranking player, worldwide, in Gamerscore. Currently, she’s at 166,365 GS. Man, and I thought my 8,000+ GS was impressive /sarcasm. She’s achieved this mountain of a score from “boosting” and playing a slew of terribly reviewed games.

And it’s all for the boasting.

Because in the article, she is quoted as saying that, “Like, maybe 65 percent of the games I play I don’t enjoy.”

This part bothers me, mostly because I can’t really wrap my head around it. Let’s break it down. More than half of the games she plays…she doesn’t enjoy. Yet she journeys onwards. Pushes through the tedium thanks to party chat and other boosting gamers. Me? The minute I hit a wall or the game becomes a chore (hello, Eternal Sonata), I shut it off and move on. Because I paid a lot of money for my gaming system, as well as its games. And for that amount of money, I deserve to be entertained–to a point. A lot of entertainment is actually determined on us, the consumer, to bring something to the table. I guess, in a way, this Kristen, this CRU x360a, is entertaining herself with every ding that sounds when an achievement unlocks (even at the cost of playing Night at the Museum 2 and games in Japanese), but I don’t know. It seems like a lost cause, and I worry for the day that revelation reveals itself.

Now, I like achievements. I do. They can be great enablers, and I’ll often skim a list of them for a game I’ve bought to see if there’s any gameplay tactics or tricks I should be keeping an eye on. Sometimes you are rewarded for just natural progression, other times for trying something different. They are nice pats on the shoulder, and while I’d love to unlock every single one in every game I have, I won’t. The games I truly enjoy, sure, most likely, because I just have to have more and more of said game, but finding all the flags in Assassin’s Creed will never happen, nor will I be completing Mass Effect three more times or whatever.

After all, there’s a reason achievement whore and achievement chore rhyme.