Achievements of the Week – The Legend of the Boar Edition

Posting this very early on this bright and sunny Friday as I’ll be spending it mostly moving, sweating, and moving and sweating at the same time. And who knows when we’ll have Internet again. Pray for Tara and I’s well-being as we leave the attic known as the Leaky Cauldron and head to the house in the woods, which she calls Godric’s Hollow and I call Grimmauld Place. Should be a crazy time…

Anyways, this week, I unlocked two Achievements with legend in their title and then sat idly on a boar for five minutes while checking my email. This is the very definition of excitement, I know.

From Fallout: New Vegas…

The Legend of the Star (20G): Completed The Legend of the Star.

Not going to say too much about this here as I am working on a big boy blog post, as this quest was a bit demanding, and I obviously didn’t ping this baby until my third character, wherein I really had to concentrate and pay attention to the fact that these Sunset Sarsaparilla star bottle caps were not gonna find themselves. Also, the quest’s reward is nothing great. Oi. Regardless, glad this one’s done as it was the last Achievements left for sidequests.

Caravan Master (30G): Won 30 games of Caravan.

Way back in June 2011, I wrote a rather informative blog post about how to play Caravan; you’d think, with that knowledge, that I’d have knocked this Achievement out a lot sooner than this. The problem is that the game got patched shortly after that, and the patch did things to Caravan. Cruel, nasty things. They made it so that opposing players could play cards such as kings, queens, and jacks against your own stacks, thus ruining your hard work to 26. The guy near Gun Runners was impossible, doing this every other turn. Fed up, I went back to my old staple of NCR ambassador Dennis Crocker, and while he occasionally messed up a stack of mine, it was less frequent. Six won games later, and there ya go.

Tara said,”Wham, bam, Caravan!” when I unlocked this. Love that dork.

From Nier…

The Book of Legend (20G): Grimoire Weiss joined your party.

All Aboared! (10G): You rode a boar for at least five minutes.

One of the early sidequests in Nier, given to you by some no-name villager, involves taking down a wild boar terrorizing…uh, sheep. Or people. It doesn’t matter. You just need to go kill a boar. After you do that, it seems other boars have heard of Nier’s horrible deed and are now tame around him, ready for riding. The Achievement’s descriptions says to ride the boar for five minutes, but I merely climbed on its back, put the controller down, checked what was up with Gmail and Twitter, peed, and came back to that oh-so-sweet pinging sound. All aboared indeed.

—

And that’s it. Depending on our Internet status at the new house, there may or may not be an Achievements of the Week for next week. We’ll see.

Unlock any good ones lately, Grinding Down readers? Tell me in the comments below.

George Stobbart is dirty, makes me laugh

The other week, Tara and I spent most of the afternoon moving stuff into our new place. Since I got out of work earlier than she did, I arrived at Grimmauld Place first, did what I had to do, and had a good hour or so to kill until she arrived. Thank goodness I never go anywhere without my Nintendo DS 3DS!

It’s been some time since I played Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars (first half-hour review here), and I had a hankering for something other than my usual go-to titles (Dragon Quest IX, Pokemon White, Let’s Golf! 3D, or Scrabble). I couldn’t quite remember where I had stopped plot-wise, but I do remember that I had just finally broken free from the restraints of only exploring Paris, arriving in Ireland outside a pub and schmoozing with the locals about a ruined castle–that’s also haunted. Oooooh. I did not actually enter the pub back when I saved the game for the last time, which was around the six-hour mark, so it was a great re-starting point, entering a bar with lots of people to talk with and lots of new items to pick up. Eventually, George learns a heap of new information and leads, and we’re back to Paris to see what Nico’s up to. Mostly spoilers.

Back to George, and the game decides to suddenly get really funny. I mean, it’s been decently funny from the get-go, but when George infiltrates the hospital and has to pretend to be a competent doctor amongst an array of incompetents….it goes to a whole new level. Exhausting dialogue options has never been so humorous.

Plus, this little bit of inner dialogue happens later on in a church:

Sorry for the shoddy camera work. I had to resort to using Photobooth on my Mac, holding my 3DS up at an angle I can only describe as awkwardly decent. If you can’t make out the text, George is talking about the firm buttocks of young ladies. In a church. Ya dirty boy.

I’m kind of stuck on a tripod puzzle at the moment, and it’s basically “steal a tripod,” which is not as easy as it sounds. While online looking for better screenshots of the above moment of glory, I discovered that Ireland is like only the second place out of six or seven locations that George and Nico will be visiting during their search for shadowy Templars secrets and killer mimes. And I’ve played for six-plus hours so far. This is a long game. I hope to finish it soon, but if I continue to only nip away at it in bite-size increments…it might take a good while. Hmm. So long as George continues to voice his dirty thoughts, I’ll make a more of an effort then.

Achievements of the Week – The Burning Love Edition

Here we are for the second stab at rounding up all of those juicy Achievements unlocked during the last week. Don’t expect the naming convention of these posts to be conventional; they are born on a whim, on a phrase, on a wild brain-bite, with most often the first Achievement listed acting as the muse. Okay, let’s do this!

From Team Fortress 2…

Flamethrower (5G): Set five enemies on fire in 30 seconds.

I was trying so hard for this Achievement, managing to set three enemies on fire before a turret took me out. Was bummed. But then, after respawning, I quickly shuffled back to the warzone, lit two more dudes on fire, and ping. Glad to see that it didn’t have to be all five on one life. I have to imagine though, that since it took me about 10 seconds to respawn and five or so more to get over to the fighting, that it was down to the wire.

Nemesis (5G): Get five revenge kills.

Revenge is a dish best served BOILING HOT, YA BUNCH OF SNIPING SNOTHEADS. This one also tied in with the above Achievement, in case you couldn’t figure that out on your own.

I actually unlocked several more Achievements for Team Fortress 2, but I did them in a whoring kind of way and am not terribly proud of my actions. We’ll leave them unmentioned this week.

From Half-Life 2…

Hot PotatOwned (10G): Kill a Combine soldier with his own grenade.

Ha, funny.

From L.A. Noire…

Johnny On The Spot (30G): Respond to 20 street crime cases.

Petty crooks and ruffians are no match for the mighty Cole Phelps. I also unlocked the Miles On The Clock Achievement, which gets some coverage here. Closing in on a few more, such as The Long Arm Of The Law and The Brass. Maybe they’ll ping this weekend. Maybe they won’t. I’m no fortune-teller.

—

And that’s it. Been a slow week for Achievements, mainly because I was focusing more on other projects, like journal comics and Supertown comics. Writing up a crazy review of Minecraft. Watching some old Shark Week stuff on Netflix to make up for the fact that I don’t have the Discovery Channel currently. Oh, and moving. Always with the moving. Wish I could get Achievements for packing boxes and carrying them to my car, over and over and over again. Something like this, perhaps:

Professional Boxer (100G): Packed five consecutive W.B. Mason boxes, carried them down two flights of stairs, loaded them into your car, and broke a sweat.

Hells yeah.

Moving, the game of heavy boxes and staircases

No, this post is not about the PlayStation Move, but it is about moving. Cause that’s the reason I didn’t play any videogames yesterday. That’s right. Not a single one. Didn’t even end up busting out the Nintendo DS before the Sandman came to take me away. Oh wait…I did play the game of not having a heart attack after repeatedly climbing two sets of stairs with heavy boxes as Tara and I moved into our first apartment. I totally beat that game. Cause…I’m typing this post, see?

Anyways, we only brought over miscellaneous stuff at the moment. It’s going to be a piece-by-piece sort of move, as I still have my own studio and she’s still living at home with her folks until we get married. Which, amazingly, is happening one month from today. One…month. ONE MONTH. Trying not to freak out here. Deep breaths.

Want to see some more shots of our new, mostly empty pad? Check out Tara’s Flickr account then.

I’ll get back to videogame-related blathering soon, I promise. Visiting my folks for the weekend, which means packing up the Xbox 360. Tara hasn’t gotten to play Scott Pilgrim vs The World: The Game yet, and I now need help beating The Clash at Demonhead level. I’m even gonna be nice and let her play as Kim, as Scott’s move list has actually grown on me. I had to grind with him for a bit just to get past Lucas Lee on “Average Joe” difficulty. Tis a hard game. But if I can beat the no heart attack game, I can conquer this one for sure.