Mission Accomplished

Today is a grand day. Why? I was able to meet my 200,000 TA Score goal before the start of 2010, a goal that I have been behind in for months. I try to go skateboarding every other day but that hasn't been possible due to the snow and weather conditions which has ultimately meant I've spent much more time on Xbox than I usually would. The consequence of this is good, more gamerscore whoring. For the first time I am in debt to the Xbox Live Arcade service that Microsoft provides because together me and my brother have bought/got a total of 7 arcade games in order to get me quick easy points. My girlfriend helped contribute to my success with the contribution of The Beatles Rock Band to my collection as a Christmas gift and tractakid also deserves some recognition for responding to my plee to boost PES 2008 for a quick and easy 500+ TA Score in 2 hours worth of work.

So what does the future hold for me and my gaming? Well I still have the goal of 75% completion for around June time which I'm working on. I'm pretty far behind on that but not definitely out as I will try to claw up from the current 64% I am on. I set myself a new goal of 160,000 gamerscore before 2011. That was set as I reached 125,000 gamerscore a week ago which meant I needed 35,000 gamerscore in just over a year. By a lot of people's standards that is a low goal and shouldn't have been set however I've seen many people raise the bar too high and fail. It was a close call for me to reach my goals this year and I don't want the "stress" of trying to reach my new goals. 35,000 gamerscore in a year shouldn't cause me too many problems yet is still a worthy goal (in my eyes) to accomplish. My main objective however is the 75%, 160,000 gamerscore is just a bonus one for me to work on.

Not sure if I should add another goal or not (I can have up to 3). There's nothing else I really want to achieve so I'll probably stick to just the current two. If however anybody has any suggestions or challenges for me to do then leave a comment and I'll consider it. Off to get some more gamerscore now as I continue on with my rampage!

What's The Point in Certain Achievements

Now the title of this posting isn't very direct, there's many of achievements I don't see the point in (for my own personal reasons) yet I am still able to understand their reasoning (such as the developer wanting the gamer to visit all areas of the world when collecting flags in Assassin's Creed).

This "rant" is about one specific achievement that I am currently aiming towards getting, it's the 5 Hall of Famers achievement in Smackdown vs RAW 2009. I was just making myself a cup of tea 5 to 10 minutes ago and was thinking to myself what should I do now as it's getting late but still early for bed. Smackdown has been the game I've been focusing my energy in to recently and therefore it popped in to my head, knowing I have just one achievement left to go gives me a drive to continue plowing my way through it. So yeah I'm motivated to get it (and I will) yet it doesn't mean I enjoy my time, instead I just found myself thinking "why did they decide to put this achievement in the game?".

In order to get the achievement to unlock you need to go and enter in to the Hall of Fame, done by entering career mode and winning 6 belts by defeating 5+ opponents in your way. It needs to be noted that career mode is a shamble, a cheap and lame inclusion in to the game that I bet was rushed in last minute and not a single bit of polish thought to be included. It is so repetitive and because extremely tedious after a while. Think of it like this, doing Exhibition matches but limited to your 1 wrestler with poor stats and no sense of direction. Your aim is to beat people well by being a crowd pleaser and your star rating (rated out of 5) then combines with the other star rating results from other people contending for the belt your going for. Now when you have enough stars you can challenge to be number 1 contender and then once you've won you take on the champ for the championship. That's it. No cutscenes, no story telling, just plain old boring similar matches.

Now it's time to finish off explaining what's needed to get the achievement. I've stated you need to enter the Hall of Fame but what I didn't mention is that this needs to be done 5 times! Now managing to bore your way in to the Hall of Fame once is an accomplishment in itself, having to do this 5 times though settles the men from the boys. I love Jeff Hardy, I find his dare devil style a turn on (whoops....) and therefore for my third and current playthrough I have selected to pick him. Problem is I'm only about half way through my third playthrough and I'm bored already, there's a limit to how many times a Swantom Bomb looks cool. Unfortunately I am forced to gruel it out and get it done, opting for the table matches as they do seem the quickest way to get a game over and done with. I have to say I am SICK of hearing the commentators blab useless crap, a complete reverse from what they had to say in the Road to Wrestlemania game type which I happened to enjoy. The problem is it's so repetitive and only makes the repetition of the tedious same matches even worse, thankfully Windows Media Player and my large collection of music help to drown out my sorrows.

So where am I going with all of this? I just want to rant about how I don't see any need for this achievement to be in the game. To come to this conclusion I feel like I did to put my shoes in other people's perspectives, the first one that springs to mind being the game developer. Developers can spend numerous of year producing their game and therefore I can quite understand them putting achievements in that encourage the gamer to see everything that is on display (we're all sick of the tutorial achievements on Guitar Hero now right?). So I think about this in relation to THQ and their game but am unable to put 2 and 2 together. They may want us the gamer to check out career mode (all be how terrible it is), I get that, however it doesn't explain to us why we need to do it 5 times, isn't one playthrough enough? A developer could argue when confronted with this point that every playthrough is different and that's a valid point to make on games such as Fable and Dragon Age where your actions have consequences. But a wrestling game? Yeah it can work in a wrestling game (Road to Wrestlemania mode is fantastic) however not in the dull and boring career mode. Everything is the same and therefore repeated playthroughs offer nothing new to the gamer.

The other perspective I try to view is those of the dedicated obsessed and loving WWE fan. They are obviously going to be much more tolerant to playing through the mode and may well potentially enjoy it every time. How I feel is though that even nobody is going to prefer career mode over Road to Wrestlemania, even the die hard fans. Road to Wrestlemania has everything career mode wishes it had and is a hell of a lot of fun. If THQ were forced to put in an achievement for completing a game type 5 times why couldn't they have picked Road to Wrestlemania 5 times, me and other achievement whores still wouldn't have been pleased but the die hard WWE fans would probably be much more keen on the idea too.



This is getting pretty long and I've got a boosting session on NHL 08 starting in 10 minutes. I've said all that was on my mind and hopefully you would have read what I have had to say and taken it in. I'd like to think you'd all agree with me about how much a pain in the arse the achievement is however if you have any points in pro of the achievement which I failed to see then please feel free to let me know. Your comments and discussion are always valued. Thanks for reading.

£3.92 for 4 Retail Games

I said I wouldn't do it but for 98p a game I couldn't say no, I've included a couple more crappy sports games to my collection. This week Gamestation are trying to remove old stock by shifting old games (majority being sport ones) for the low price of just 98p leaving me (a savvy gamerscore whore) on a journey to pick up as many new games for a low price. Here's what I got.

1. NBA Live 08
2. NHL 08
3. Pro Evolution Soccer 2008
4. World Championship Snooker 2007

I was also close to getting a PDC Darts game but when I got to the counter the guy was unable to find the disc in their storage which was a shame. Nevertheless I was happy with my purchases as although I was aware I would be ruining my completion percentage quite a bit with these purchases I felt like it's worth it for a quick gamerscore boost in time for New Year. Also I may even be able to get a high enough gamerscore in a few of the games to make my percentage the same as it was before, one reason is because I played Pro Evo 2 years ago and got one achievement on it and then stopped so it's taunted my tag every since. Now I have the game to rectify the problem and get rid of the 10/1000 that's terribly low on my card.

First impressions of all the games is good and I'm quite happy with my buy. I have NBA Live 07 and can see that 08 improved quite nicely with newly added features and a graphics overhaul. NHL 08 seems good to as there's the ability to create your own players and teams which I'm sure an ice hockey lover would quite like. I also haven't played a snooker game since 2003 or so and therefore I am happy to now have one in my collection. Sure the gamerscore has a True Achievement score of over 4000 and therefore must be bloody hard but I'm just super happy with the fact that I can press the A button to hurry the game up and move to the next event. I remember in the 2003 game I played I used to get bored to death of having to wait 5 minutes because the AI never messed up and I'd have to watch his every move. Not any more! I keep tapping A and the ordeal is over in minutes.

What also made me happy is that there's a CEX store just minutes away from the GAME which do good prices on trade in. They will give me £4 in cash for NBA Live 08 (would have made £3 profit) or £6 trade in value, same principle happens for the other games to with them all giving me at least a pound more back in cash than the price I payed for it. I do feel like keeping the games for my collection however if I manage to get round to completing NBA or NHL soon then I may get rid of it and get my cash back. Reason being that the discs are in disusting condition and I don't really want that in my collection. How people can mistreat them that bad is beyond me, I could dangle it infront of my kitten and tease it so it scratched and the CD all day long and there still wouldn't be as many scratches as I see before me on my new purchases.


Finally before I rush off to get my bus that I might miss if I don't hurry up, I'd just like to say a thanks to Poke13 who emailed me saying how he enjoyed my blog and doesn't wish me to stop. At least one person enjoys what I has to say, that's enough to make me strive to continue. So thank you to him and to the rest of you that read what I have to say. :)

Callofdutyitis

That's the bug that was going around everywhere a few weeks back. Friends of mine at college were dropping like flies, I couldn't believe Modern Warfare 2 really did excel so much. Well I could believe it as I predicted it would, however the impact it had on real life (the No Russian mission getting in to the news) did take me by surprise.

I got my copy thanks to spending £10 on Overlord II and trading in my Call of Duty 4, then spending a fiver to get myself Modern Warfare 2. I did really like online but my time on it is going to be much lower now as I sink back to my old ways of gamerscore whoring. It's not just the whoring that makes me want to stop though, it's people being too damn good. At first I was staying above the 1.0 kill/death ratio (which is always my target as then I feel like I am playing more better than I am bad) but now I'm sinking down to 0.8 - 0.9 *sobs*.

Gamerscore wise on Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 I have gotten everything apart from two achievements which are (as you guessed) the spec ops ones for getting at least 1 star in every mission and 3 stars in every mission. I have numerous friends on my list that are also in the same position as me, it seems there are a few missions near the end of spec ops that stump us all. I only have 4 left to go on Veteran so I'm sure I will get there eventually, just depends on when I can get a good friend to come on and help me out.

Other news I destroyed my brain with My Horse and Me 2 for the 1000 Gamerscore last friday. Coming in at 4 hours for the first playthrough and 3 for the second it was longer than the 2 hours my friend Rover08 stated when he mailed me the game all the way from Norway. That was a nice little boost in my goal to getting 125,000 gamerscore before 2010 but that reminds me, talking about boost, I finished all the boosting on Burnout Revenge now which has been ongoing for months and I'm glad is finally over.


This is the first blog post I have written in over a month and really I didn't care that much. I've been doing this for nearly a year now (started as a New Year's Resolution) and unfortunately I haven't managed to get enough people following for me to warrant actually bothering to continue writing in it. I did think this morning though that I should write at least 1 more post before 2010 just so I can say I managed to maintain a year of doing it and not failing my Resolution. Will have to see in the future if I do or don't decide to keep writing. For now (and maybe forever but probably not), goodbye my readers.

And the COD4 Story Begins

I never got in to Call of Duty 4 Modern Warfare like millions of others on this planet. Didn't get the game at release and although at times I felt like I wanted it I prevailed and never gave in. It's different when I get given the game though as that's what eventually happened when my dad bought an Xbox 360 for himself second hand off of someone who also happened to open COD4 (surprise surprise).

I started off the story when I got it and did a few levels on veteran and enjoyed it, then stopped. I've played it online with friends and it's pretty fun but really the game hasn't gotten much playtime, until now.

As it happens the sequel is released next week and I hopefully will be getting the game really cheap thanks to a flaw in Gamestation's trade in policy for COD6. Without going in to too much detail, Gamestation are saying "trade in any 2 games from this list and buy COD6 for £5". The games on that list are all brand new and worth £30 on they're own at least apart from Overlord II which can be bough brand new online from Play.com. Unfortunately tons of people have caught on to this offer (so much so that Overlord II become the hottest selling item on both the PS3 and 360 on the website!) which leads me to think that my idea of trading in a copy of Overlord II and the free copy of COD4 I got won't work. But fingers crossed I will be getting a copy of the game for just a cost of £15 (once again thanks dad for buying a console and games which you don't play lol).

As I am planning on trading in my COD4 (or shall I say my dad's :D) I know I should finally bother to do the single player in COD4, getting as much achievements as possible. I finally started tonight after contemplating it for a few days and I completed 1 level on veteran unlocking me 40G. Now I would have gotten another achievement but I messed up on destroying all the TV's as the level ends too quickly before you've managed to destroy all the TV's in the last room. At one point I didn't even think I'd get to the end of this level as when I got in to the massive News Room in the TV Station I died like 100 times in a 30-45 minute period just trying to kill everyone in the room. After getting fed up I resorted to a GameFAQs and the 2 guides I read both directed me to travel left and through the little rooms. This of course helped tremendously and made the whole ordeal much easier than what I was originally trying (killing constantly respawning enemies).

Anyway that's it for this blog post. With just 6 more nights to go until COD6 I have a lot of work to do on COD4. I think I can do it but I also want to play Overlord II before I get rid of it and I'm currently engrossed in Luxor 2 with a friend (that's a blog post for another time). Too many games and not enough time to play them lol. Must go to bed now, got to be up in 6 hours for college, stupid veteran mode taking longer than I'd planned!

I Pause To Itch In Racing Games Too Much...

It's a little habit I've noticed that's developed recently when playing racing games, the need to keep pausing the game to itch myself. These itches aren't in a certain area you may expect a male to be itching, they are in fact anywhere on my body. We all get itches and even now as I'm typing and thinking about itching I keep needing to take my hands off the keyboard for a second to get to a new area of my body which is feeling the strain of not being itched.

So why am I blabbing about itching? Well I finally decided whilst playing DiRT 2 for like 8 hours on Saturday that the itching habit only really presents itself strongly when I'm playing a racing game. I'm not exactly sure why but it even gets to the point where I'm pausing the game every 5 seconds just so I can itch myself. I've thought about why this is happening for a while now but I think I finally came to the conclusion and that was yesterday evening whilst I was boosting Burnout Revenge. You see when I was racing as the blue team to win (for the 30 wins as blue team in road rage achievement) I didn't feel the need to pause the game once in the 60-70 seconds it took me to complete the lap. I've now managed to conclude that this is because I know I couldn't because I was racing online and also because my concentration was higher as I was trying to get the boosting done as quickly as possible (took 2+ hours, eurgh).

This leaves me questioning whether I really do enjoy racing games. I've played quite a lot of driving games on the 360 which surprises me (not keen on cars in the real world so I'd have thought it would reflect my gaming) however I've never really thought about if I got bored when playing. I don't think I do but I must do at times, it just doesn't make sense why I always feel the need to itch, isn't that a sign of boredom?

If you have any opinions or ideas as to what's going on then feel free to leave a comment and I'll be sure to reply.

3 Hours of Boosting Failure

I somehow managed to sign up to two boosting sessions that both started tonight at 8:00PM, the same time. I haven't been foolish enough to do this yet because I used to check the times but now I've learnt that because so many people join session's and then leave when they realise they have other plans that I should too. However I didn't decide to leave, I decided to persuade the session leader of Guitar Hero World Tour to push it forward by 30 minutes.

This shouldn't have been a problem, the Platinum Rockstars achievement which we were going for involves needing to complete a song on Hard/Expert 100%. I was hoping to get it done in minutes but unfortunately at 8:20 (40 minutes after we started) we had still not prevailed and the achievement hadn't been unlocked. I was on Bass and didn't mess up where as my friend rover08 messed up quite a bit and huge adrenaline also messed up. I shouldn't moan because Drums and Guitar are a lot harder to do that the Bass that I was on. However, when I leave at 8:20 to join the PGR4 boosting session I had joined I wasn't expecting for them 2 to find a replacement and get the achievement just 3 tries after I'd left. rover08 is a good friend that I know will play the game again for me to get the achievement however I don't know huge adrenaline so asking him to do it again for me is a bit cheeky however it's worth a try.

With this failure behind me I moved on to PGR4, hoping to get the Team Domination achievement which had already defeated me once when I finished a boosting session months ago with no achievement unlocked. Very quickly half of us 8 managed to get the achievement as their opponents quit the game and they continued to gain all top 4 positions, the rest of us waited. The guys with their new found achievements were kind enough to stick around and help me and the rest of us out however with the diabolical matchmaking that Bizarre have created for the game it meant that this was impossible to do. The closest I came was once when me and another guy boosting got put in to a game with 6 other randomers, 2 of them being good and on our team. It started great as after the first race the 4 top spots were taken by my team but then however the great start we had unfortunately couldn't be kept up and we didn't finish in the top 4 spots.

Anyway it's 3 hours later and I've gotten no achievement from my efforts. This blog was a way for me to release all the stress that I'd gathered up from this evening. Today hasn't been a complete waste as I unlocked Battery (1 million points in 4 player band) and other achievements on Guitar Hero Metallica, it's just the fact that the day has ended on a bummer which leaves me feeling bummed out.

Might play a bit more Xbox before I go to bed and try get a few more achievements to make up for the ones I didn't get, for now I'm just going to watch Match of the Day that's on TV and try to calm down.

Conquest of the Completion of DiRT

Last week I had a friend lend me his copy of DiRT, a game I've been wanting to play for a long time due to it being good fun and easy gamerscore. I started playing it and after the first day I got in to a conversation with another friend of mine (that's you Rob if you ever read this) about the possibility of me being able to complete it, 1000 gamerscore.

I had played enough of the game (a few hours) to be able to understand how lengthy the game was going to be and therefore I was confident I'd be able to get it all done in little time. My friend on the other hand had given up after completing career just the once and he thought I'd do the same, little does he know my determination. When a £5 bet with the loser buying the winner a game was arranged for me to get the 1000G before November I knew I'd ve victorious.

And here I stand, 6 days later with all 49 out of 49 achievements unlocked on DiRT. I hope he enjoys purchasing my brand new copy of Alone in the Dark, I shall continue to mock him for the rest of the year.

My Goal Progress Update

I been waiting for the time my goal's duration got to the 50% mark, I'd planned to write this blog when it did so I can reflect on my progress and see if I am on task to get the desired 125,000 Gamerscore and 175,000 True Achievement score before 2010.

I'm a couple of days late writing this (I forgot it had gone over 50%, it's now at 51%) but I think my ratio has stayed the same roughly. I had decided back in March or something this year that I wanted to try and go for 75% game completion, with the GSL on at X360a I was expecting to sink well low down however I managed to stay between the 50-52% mark, maybe even going up instead of down. On the 25th of June TA made it possible to create a goal for getting your percentage up to a desired number, I then set myself the challenge of giving myself 1 year from that day to get it up to 75%. Below is the image found on TA of my progress.

http://img21.imageshack.us/i/tapercent.jpg/

As you can see I am right on track here (well maybe 0.05% under) with my goal which I am pleased about. Do I think I can keep to this goal and accomplish it? Not really too sure. I'm doing well but I need to keep it up and with the summer been and gone my days of tons of free time for gaming have gone.


Then the other two goals were set up and decided by me as soon as TA implemented the goal feature. With my gamerscore sat at just over 101,000 I knew I needed a new goal to do (getting to 100K was my previous) and I thought it wouldn't be without of reach to go for 125,000 before New Year. This goal is quite big for me as I was aiming for around 24,000 in just over half a year, which a quite estimation means that if I kept up that rate for a year I'd be getting 46,000. I've had my Xbox 360 for 3 and a quarter years at the time of starting this goal which means I had averaged about 33,000 gamerscore a year, quite a bit lower than the equivalent of 46,000 which would have been my goal. Check below to see the image of my progress.

http://img18.imageshack.us/img18/5784/gsta.jpg

This is going well and I hope as long as I can get a few easy gamerscore games off of friends won't be too hard to accomplish.


The goal of True Achievement score to 175,000 is similar to my gamerscore one except even more demanding I believe. I didn't do the maths so I'm not sure but my gamerscore goal increase was around 24,000, my TA score increase was 44,500. Now roughly that is an average of 1:1.8 or so, as my current average of points ratio is around 1.55 it means I would need to be playing high TA scoring games if I wanted to try and get to 175,000 TA score before 125,000 gamerscore. View the final image below.

http://img12.imageshack.us/img12/1381/tatah.jpg

The goal is on track for completion but as expected is slightly behind my gamerscore one. I don't mind though because I've been improving my point ratio average from each achievement over the past few months so I'm doing quite well.



That's it for this long mind boggling statistical post. You can view my goals here if you wish to track my progress. I probably won't post about this goals again until near Christmas time where I make my decision about whether the gamerscore and TA score goals will be achieved.

Loving TrueAchievement's Gaming Calender

There's a reason behind why I've been boosting lots of online achievements recently with some of the games I've been meaning to do for months but never gotten around to. It was because I was never motivated, couldn't be bothered. I mean why do you want to play a game online and then not actually play it properly, it's boring, tedious and usually takes a long time (at least on FPS games).

But when TrueAchievements released their Gaming Sessions feature I got the motivation back to try and get more online achievements that I've already left. The first version of the calender had many of flaws and although it worked it was unfinished. A week later 1.5 was released and now the feature has became arguably the best for me on the website. I am now able to view the calender by weeks and see what games people are planning on boosting. Seeing a set time that people are arranging to meet up makes creating large 6+ player boosting session's much easier to organize. A great example of this feature at it's best is that in 30 minutes time I will be playing Rainbow 6 Vegas 1 for the first time in 2 years (would be if I waited 3 times). Why? Because someone has arranged to get the 16 player host achievement at that time, an achievement I never thought about bothering to get but now since the opportunity has arrived I'll simply join the session and let somebody else deal with the hassle of finding enough games.

I love this feature and I really do love the TrueAchievements website. I find myself on there just as much as Gmail and Xbox.com these days which is saying a lot. With the website getting great new features on roughly a monthly basis I am excited to see what else can be created in the future. I'd love to see them implement a badge type system which they have at 360Voice.com, you'd be able to see your total amount of gamerscore in the FPS genre and see what percentage of the games you've played, the percentage of gamerscore you've gotten from the FPS games you've played and many more neat little statistics.


Since I've started writing a blog I will continue the momentum and start writing on my mini achievement review of You're In the Movies. After I've done that my back catelouge of games I need to still review will be at 4, under 5 for the first time since I started doing this lol.

Is Sega Rally Really That Hard?

When I got Sega Rally for £10 it wasn't an easy choice. I wasn't too keen on getting it but I really wanted to go home that day with an Xbox 360 game, after all it was one of the main purposes of me going shopping in Milton Keynes (got a £20 gift card from HMV for Christmas).

So for a tenner I thought I'd give it a go. I'd heard the game is meant to be really hard and not easy for gamerscore but I remember I played the demo once and it seemed alright so I decided to take a plunge and get it. I played it for an hour or two when I got it for the GSL and got 135 points, first impressions was that it's fun, not too easy but not stressfully hard.

Since then it had not been played, until around a week ago. I was really bored and decided I'd start work on a game I've neglected because my Lovefilm account has finally run out and I've cancelled. I was aware I needed to spend a few hours boosting the 100 host achievement online so I started work on that and once I was bored decided to go back to Championship mode. I've now gone through the Premier, Modified and Major modes unlocking all the achievements for unlocking the events. Some of these achievements had a TA score of nearly 3.0 which I find quite crazy. I can see why people think the game is hard because a few of the achievements require to to win pretty much every race in every event however to unlock the next stages you just need to average 25 points out of 30 in every rally. This isn't too difficult thanks to the tracks having an invisible barrier at the side of the path meaning you can use it to your advantage to help get round tricky corners.

Now I'm at 530 gamerscore on the game and am looking at a potential of between 600 to 660 if I can be bothered. I haven't really gotten to sick of the game as I've only been playing it for around 8 hours which isn't too bad. With Forza 2 still not even touched and Juiced 2 being given to me tomorrow I'll need to finish it off quick so I can move on. My backlog of racing games to play is getting too high (Flatout Ultimate Carnage, PGR3, PGR4, NFS Pro Street, Burnout Revenge, Burnout Paradise).

How Long It Takes for 1 Million Gamerscore

I was just thinking to myself "how long would it take to get the 1,000,000 Gamerscore than Stallion83 is going for". I decided I would say it took 10 hours to get 1,000 gamerscore as that's a good estimated average I believe. Then I did the math to see how many hours it would take to get 1 million and then converted the hours in to days, here are my results.

1,000GS = 10 hours
10,000GS = 100 Hours
100,000GS = 1,000 Hours
1,000,000GS = 10,000 Hours

24 Hours = 1 Day
240 Hours = 10 Days
2,400 Hours = 100 Days
9,600 Hours = 400 Days
9,960 Hours = 415 Days
10,008 Hours = 417 Days

Now when you think about that your mouth should fall to the ground. That's over a year playing your beloved Xbox 360 console non stop, a feat impossible for any man. Now in reality it's possible for someone to not have to work due to being rich, they would need 8 hours sleep, couple hours of doing something else and a few hours to eat throughout the day. That means they could potentially game 12 hours a day, which means we need to double the length of time it takes to get 1 Million gamerscore to 834 Days.

I'm not going to bother going in to anymore detail than that as I think you get the idea about how crazy Stallion83's goal really is.. What I will mention is that (from my mathematics) I have played the equivalent of 46 days of non stop gamerscore whoring. Now if I was to turn rich tomorrow and decided to become dedicated to rising my gamerscore I could fit in to the 12 hours a day scenario and managed to double my gamerscore to 220,000 in 92 days, just in time for 2010 New Year (I believe).



Have a think sometime about how much of your life you've poured into getting those achievements, it's quite scary to realise.

Game Completed: History Channel Battle for the Pacific

When the prospect of yet another world war shooting game is placed upon your hands I'm sure I speak for everyone when you raise your eyebrows and sigh. With very low review scores and it's existence not properly known to me it's safe to say that this game slipped under the radar for pretty much everyone in the world.

The achievements on this game are straight forward, split up in to two categories which is Single Player and Multiplayer. With 21 of the 44 achievements being for the Single Player aspect of the game it shows how little imagination was used from the developers heads when they decided to write the achievement list for this game. 10 levels on the game with an achievement awarded for the completion of each one and another 1 being awarded if you complete the level on Hard with the final achievement being awarded for completing the whole campaign on Hard. These can all be obtained in just a few hours as the levels are incredibly quick. The only time a level may exceed 30 minutes of playtime is if you get stuck due to how unforgiving the game can be at times. I remember on one level your forced to follow your team mates as they run into an enemy base. Your enemies don't touch your team mates (they never die which means using them as bait in the game is the best tactic ever) which means they unloaded all their ammunition on to me, causing immediate death. Thankfully the majority of the levels are a piece of cake where by you won't die once.

The other 23 achievements are all boostable on the Multiplayer aspect of the game. All achievements apart from 1 can be boosted with 1 other player but will however take a long time. The majority of the achievements are getting 100 kills with blabla weapon however there are a few object related ones such as needing to kill the flag carrier 5 times in CTF and being the only person to capture a flag on your team. Your main objective though should always be to keep in mind that there is an achievement for getting 500 kills with American weapons and 500 kills with Japanese weapons. That's a total of 1000 kills your going to need to get online, 2000 if your boosting with a buddy. This takes time but the process can be done quicker if multiple people join your boosting session which I highly recommend otherwise you'll be boosting online for over 15 hours.

Final Verdict: - This game was listed as a game that can give you 1000 gamerscore in 10 hours on x360a's list therefore I rented it for a quick gamerscore boost. Although the game was quick it wasn't 10 hours quick, the multiplayer boosting alone took that amount of time. The boosting is not fun to do and becomes boring and tedious fast while the single player can be frustrating and difficult at times on Hard difficulty. I say stay as there's plenty of other better games to choose from however if it gets placed upon your hands as it did to me then it's worth giving it a go.

Game Completed: Top Spin 2

This is the game that made my younger 15 year old self consider gamesaving to get an achievement I felt like I got screwed out of. The reason it's taken me 3 years to complete this is because I fell short of 1000 Career Points the first time round and I've only just bothered to re-rent it and repeat the whole process over again.

With only 11 achievements in the game it was easy for me to work out my route of how to get the achievements (Road Maps weren't around back then) and I started off with Exhibition mode. It was simple, just defeat all the male and female players in the game and net yourself 175 gamerscore in the process. The gamerscore gets even generous when you see that all you need to do to get 225 gamerscore is to play 50 ranked matches on Xbox Live, winning or losing.

With 6 of the achievements now completed you have just 5 to worry about when you head to Career mode (with 2 achievements that require you to win your first match and tournament being unlocked pretty quickly). The next 3 are slightly time consuming and is where you'll spend the majority of your time on this game trying to get. On my second playthrough I was about to get to Rank 1 on my second season (due to me already being good at the game) however the first time round it was a bit more trickier for me to get to Rank 1 as I couldn't defeat people with low stats and therefore stuck to playing lots of Minors.

Every achievement minus 2 are now out of the way so I knew all I needed to do was to get 1000 Career points and unlock the last 2 achievements. The problem is that back when I first played the game people were unaware of what the career points actually were, me included. There is another point system found in the game when you look at your world wide ranking, this is the point system I thought had to be over 1000 so considering mine was I simmed to the end of the career to find no achievement unlocking. This got me very angry so I just got rid of the game and only recently like I originally said I was able to re-do the whole career again to get my final achievement (15 hours I'd rather have not bothered to do).

Final Verdict: - Gameplay aside this game has gamerscore that should interest everyone, even Tennis atheists. The game can be hard and frustrating at times so gamers should be aware of what they're getting themselves in for. Learn how each individual top player plays and discover their weaknesses, once this is done you'll find yourself getting a simple and fun 1000 gamerscore.


Oh I should have mentioned I go on holiday for 2 weeks tomorrow. Will be back writing more reviews on games I've completed (another 5 to go I think) when I get back.

Game Completed: Tony Hawk's Proving Ground

I'm going to start this mini review off by saying this is the best 1000 gamerscore I have accomplished in the 3+ years I've owned an Xbox 360. American Wasteland achievements were average and Project 8's were bloody hard, Proving Ground did one up on Project 8 and as a result I didn't think I had it in me to ever get the 1000. After what must be around 100 hours I've done it and now I'm here to speak out about the horrors.

First things first not all gamerscore on this game is hard, I just counted 15 achievements which are gotten by simply completing the game pretty much which will give you a couple hundred of gamerscore, shouldn't be a problem. Next you have a few random miscellaneous achievements such as knocking a thug 150+ feet and making a skate video worth 20,000+ points, again causing you little to no trouble.

There's now 18 achievements dedicated to the street goals in the game. This is split up in to 6 section with each section having the Am, Pro and Sick all of the goals achievements. As you can probably imagine going for Sick in all of the goals is where I spent the majority of my time on this game. The majority of Sick goals took me about an hour to complete because after constant failure I'll get lucky and reach that 4,000,000 point combo or do all Classic goal tasks in 2 minutes. Minus a few goals it's pretty easy to Am all the goals and Pro can be done with a bit of effort, Sick is just stupid hard though. Also there is an achievement for getting Am and Pro on all the goals within the game, including the story driven ones. This was pretty straightforward and I am sure I could have gotten Sick on them too if it was needed, thankfully the developers had a heart and left Sick all goals achievement out.

After wasting time going around all the worlds modding every spot and finding all cash spots and gaps all that was left for me to do was to boost online. Now 1000 online games required me to boost for around 8 hours all on my own while my partner went out, quite a boring process if I may say. The wager achievement can be boosted easily enough but then there's the Online Domination achievement which requires you to win all 5 rounds in a match with 4 other people competing. No one was replying to my messages about boosting this so eventually I tried to get it on my own and after spamming messages at random people I found online (begging them to join my game lol) I finally had enough people required. Now I just had to go and beat them all 5 times which was a piece of cake but it didn't stop my heart pounding like crazy out of dear of messing up.

Final Verdict: - Completionists stay away, this game won't look pretty on your card. Up for playing a bit of Tony Hawk's? Stay away, the game is riddled with bugs and was never polished up for release, stay with American Wasteland/Project 8 or better yet try out Skate which is better. The only reason I can think of why you'd want to give this game a go is if you fancy a relatively enjoyable few hundred gamerscore boost to your total, not caring about ever completing the game. Good luck to anyone else who attempts to 1000 this game, it's got a TA score of about 6,000!

Closing in on 60% Completion

As you may or may not know my aim is to get up to 75% completion as that's the number it takes to be in my opinion a game completionist, which I like to think I am. I started this personal goal of mine after the end of x360a's GSL where I was around the 50% completion mark. After I complete getting the most gamerscore possible out of Rock Revolution I believe I will be over 60% and the climb to 70% will continue. The thing is it's not been working on old games that have been helping this percentage. Sure I've done some boosting on old games I own such as PES6, Shadowrun and Flatout but it's the new games I've been adding to my profile which is boosting me the most. Here's a few new games I've played in the months since the end of the GSL and start of my completion percentage pursuit:

You're In The Movies (1000/1000)
Soul Calibur 4 (700/1000)
Star Wars: The Force Unleashed (700/1000)
History Channel: Battle for the Pacific (1000/1000)
Trivial Pursuit (710/1000)
Afro Samurai (965/1000)
LOTR Conquest (1000/1000)
Pure (1000/1000)
Phantasy Star Universe (1000/1000)

And the other games new to my profile which are below my target of 750+ gamerscore on

Burnout Paradise (5/1000)
Overlord (375/1000) {Am currently working on, I do aim to get 750 or so)
Rock Revolution EU (365/1000) {Started today, should get 750+ too)

So when you look at it like that you can see the new games I add to my card all manage to get to the 750 mark (or roundabouts) with the others currently being worked on. Burnout Paradise was added when I decided to play it with my girlfriend for fun and I haven't bothered to go back to it since. I will at some point (as I'm sure it's a great game I'm excited to play) but right now I'm happy with my Lovefilm games.


I suppose all in all everything is going good, apart from one thing that's bugging me. My girlfriend bought me GTA IV for my birthday (May 2nd) and I borrowed Forza 2 off a mate a couple of months ago and both of these games haven't even been touched. I'm sure they are great but after seeing Burnout Paradise on my profile and untouched I have decided to leave these games until I can find time to give them the attention I'm sure they deserve. Crackdown also goes in to this category with it's anniversary of being on my shelf untouched coming up in September, naughty me.

3 Achievements on GH 2

Ever since I came back from NASS (a skateboard festival I went to last weekend) I haven't been in the mood for playing my Xbox, instead I've been all in to my skateboarding. I like it when I'm like this as I sometimes feel my Xbox takes over me a bit too much. So instead of playing Overlord and Soul Calibur 4 in a rush so that I could swap them for a new game with Lovefilm I've been enjoying playing Guitar Hero 2, netting 3 achievements in the process which I'm very proud about.

Yngwie Malmsteen Award: - Got a 1000 note streak
Champagne Room V.I.P.: - Got 500,000 points in a song

The two above achievements unlocked during the playthrough of one song, X-Stream on Expert. The song is one of the easiest songs on Expert as it has no hard bit, just constant fast pace which would usually cause me to mess up a few times and therefore eliminate the chance of me getting the 500,000 points I needed in order to get the 500k achievement. I checked a star power path for the song and the maximum amount of points I could have gotten was around 510,000 which meant there was very little margin for error. Eventually after 25+ times of trying I got a perfect run, 100% and FC getting me 506,000 (as I dropped a few thousand points by activating star power too early at one point). As the song has 1337 notes it meant I also picked up the 1000 note streak achievement whilst I was halfway through the song. Both of these achievements I am pretty proud about as neither of them can be gotten by using the terrible glitch, therefore this helped my TA achievement ration quite a bit.

Expert Tour Champ: - Beat the Expert tour

Unfortunately the glitch is possible for this achievement which is why the TA gamerscore for this achievement is below what I was expecting. I'm proud to say I didn't cheat and that I spent 10 minutes playing Free Bird yesterday and conquering it. All you need to do is make sure you have full star power for part C of the solo and then get full star power again for part I and J, the rest is not too challenging and I was able to get through without the need for star power.


So there it is, 3 achievements for 90 Gamerscore gotten on Guitar Hero 2 in just 2 days. Not much else I can get on the game until I have a friend come round and do some of the co-op ones (there's no online on GH2 :(). I still need to complete Expert on GH3 as One and Raining Blood are currently standing in my way. I think I'll be able to do them, just have to give it a go and hope for the best.

Game Completed: Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer

When I originally played this game I got all the achievements apart from one, completing the game on the hardest difficulty. This was due to the fact that unfortunately the achievements are not stackable and at that time I could not be bothered to re-play the game again. After finding it for just £3 in HMV though I decided to give the game another go and managed to complete it in 5 or so hours. Therefore this review will be focused on hard mode playthrough but I am going to try and remember what it was like to get all the other achievements which I did a couple of years ago.

With just 19 achievements Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer is one of the games on the console with a low amount of achievements. You've got three types of achievements as you work through this game which are game completion, collectibles and powering up plus a random achievement for successfully executing a 2-play attack (which I think was just added at the end to make the total gamerscore 1000 as it doesn't make sense to have just 1 type of achievement like that in a game).

You'll pick up 10 of the games achievements when you simply complete the game for the first time (with the 11th coming from playing through again on hard mode). As you can expect this is quite an easy game and therefore getting these achievements should be relaxing as you simply play the game. In hard mode you will probably die a few times but due to the experience of already completing the game once you'll be aware of how to defeat certain bosses and enemies which would have made you a better player. My advice is to make the most out of the ability to let 3 of your team mates die and then simply hide until they respawn, therefore ensuring you don't ever properly die. By repeating a certain level with the Thing you will be able to earn points to upgrade your superhero's powers really easily which therefore makes those 4 achievements gotten with less than an hours work put into them. This leaves the collectibles to make up the remaining 3 achievements which as always in these games is a hassle to do but easy if you take the time to follow a guide.

Final Verdict: - It's just another simple superhero game which will give you an easy 1000 gamerscore. I do recommend it however it can become slightly tedious at times and frustrating finding the collectibles (took me forever on the last level as the buildings all look the same). Due to the nature of the achievements though I would recommend any gamerscore whore to give this game a go, at the end of the day it is pretty fun to make use of 4 people's powers (the game has a good combat system).

Glitchy Achievements are so Frustrating

You're in the Movies is a very good game, nothing amazing but is fun to play with friends and family. On your own however is a different story. It's not fun getting all hot and sweaty on a few mini games as you attempt to meet the criteria for an achievement (getting full points). Then, when you do meet the criteria the achievement doesn't pop.....

In total I had about 6 achievements glitch for me but inevitably my persevearance as a gamerscore whore meant I kept playing until they finally did unlock.


I won't say any more on the matter as I'll save it for a Game Completed review which will probably never get written as I'm lazy and have a backlog of a few games already. I'm going to force myself to write the Fantastic Four review tonight or tomorrow and then aim to get myself back on track. Just felt like I should write about these glitchy achievements today as it's frustrated me throughout the day and I thought it would be a good topic to discuss (even though I'm being lazy again and want to get back to playing Overlord which I have just started).

Considering Doing Force Unleashed on Hardest Difficulty

Remember a few weeks back I said I will get round to playing Star Wars, I just hadn't done because Top Spin 2 was my priority? Well the weekend just passed I stuck to my word and have now gone and got all achievements apart from 3 for 700 gamerscore on the game (excluding DLC). Those last 3 achievements can all be gotten if I can be bothered to complete the game again, this time on the hardest difficulty.

I don't want to rant on much about the game because I'll save that for one of my mini game completed reviews but what I do want to say is that my brother (gamertag is kizwiz) is inferior to me when it comes to achievements and gamerscore (well I just like to think that) and as he got 1000 on Force Unleashed I feel obliged to do so too.

I think I'm going to try soon as it's going to be hot today so I won't go skateboarding and with me sending off Battle for the Pacific and Transporter 3 I won't be renting anything if I was to also send Force Unleashed back. There's cheats I will probably use this time round, hopefully will make the game not quite so hard.....



Also I'm trying to get up to date with my mini Game Completed reviews but it seems like I just complete more games than I have time to talk about! I've got Fantastic Four, Tony Hawk's Proving Ground, Top Spin 2 and maybe Star Wars Force Unleashed to still write. I will hopefully start cracking on Fantastic Four later, I been lazy and not wrote one since Afro Samurai for like a week.

Game Completed: Afro Samurai

So firstly this is a slight lie, I haven't properly completed Afro Samurai. It's unfortunately sitting on my gamercard at 965/1000 with 2 more achievements needed to be gotten. I wanted to trade in the game the next day though so I didn't have time to get the other 2 and as I was fed up with the game after completing it twice I didn't fancy going through it yet again for the last 2. But yeah, thought I would review it now otherwise I may never get to (and be fair I've pretty much completed it as the last 2 achievements are meaningless ones).

When my friend offered to sell this to me for £15 and I checked on CEX and saw I could get £15 back in cash for it I thought it was a win situation for me. I could play a game I was interested in (it did look cool with the blood and slicing body parts off), get some easy gamerscore and not have to pay a penny. First I do need to compliment the slicing precision on the game, it's not perfect (can be bloody hard to chop a hand off) but ultimately it works really well and was a new fresh idea I hadn't seen before which makes this game unique. There's a fair few achievements which involve you needing to chop off 100 heads or slice off toes and fingers at the same time, these can be slightly challenging at first but after a few hours of playing you learn to understand the best ways of slicing off the body part you want by adjusting to your enemies position and their fighting style.

The 5 achievements that are not fun which relate to body slicing are the ones where you need to do it in a game of poker. The character that's voiced by Samuel L Jackson will tempt you to play a game of poker, here you need to slice off a head, leg and hand on a certain type of enemy in order to get a flush and for the achievement to unlock. Doing this on the robots and peasant type enemies is quite easy as they are weak however the male and female ninjas and samurai are harder due to the lack of opportunities to play poker with them. I was unable to get 2 of these achievements on my first playthrough as I was not strong enough and not used enough to the game, on my second playthrough I was on the hard difficulty which therefore meant the enemies were much harder to fight against making the task very hard. This meant a 3rd playthrough was needed for me (on Easy difficulty again) and I could not be bothered to do that.

Final Verdict: - Afro Samurai also has the standard "Completed blabla level" and "Collect all 5 collectibles on blabla level" achievements but there's a few more fun random ones to obtain too. There's 2 involving slicing a bullet and a couple on accumulative totals (like 2000 gallons of blood shed and 2000 kills) which help to make this game an enjoyable achievement whoring experience. Hard mode can be tricky but patience will get you through it.

I Showed You Ai Sugiyama!

Who's Ai Sugiyama you ask? Well I'm not entirely sure myself as she may or may not be a real person (my sheer laziness will mean I won't ever find out the answer to that). What I do know is she is on Top Spin 2 and as I got to the Grand Slam final she was my opponent. Ranked 8th I wasn't too worried but was weary due to the fact I somehow hadn't come across her before whilst playing. You see I know who the top players are and each of them have their own strengths and weaknesses, it's my job to exploit those weaknesses so I can win every game which has been the case so far.

Today I witnessed my first "defeat", I put quotation marks around the word defeat because after I lost I turned off my console in frustration knowing I would have to face her again next time I played. So why did I lose? I'm not entirely sure because I won the first set fine and then unfortunately lost the second set in tie break. I wasn't too bothered because this has happened a few times against the harder players and I always manage to win the third set. What happened here was a reverse of what usually happens, I lost the games I would usually win and won the games I would usually lose (so I'd lose when I served, I usually win).

I thought I understood the rules of tennis but I was unaware of what happened when it was a draw at the end of the third set. I was expecting to have a tie break again yet that wasn't the case as we kept on playing normally. After the 4 games were finished another 4 games began and yet again we both won 2 so it went to another 4 games (scores being 6:6 in this set). She won the first game and then won the second and to my disbelief had won the match. I was confused as to why because I was expecting to be able to win the 2 games afterwards to make it go 8:8, I was annoyed that I didn't get the chance to do this as the 2 games we played in this set of 4 were the ones I did bad at. So can anyone that knows Tennis well explain to me what happens? Hope you understand what I was getting at, might be confusing to understand so my apologies if so.

After 10 minute break I was bored and thought I'd try again. I'm the type of person that gets pretty pissed off when something doesn't go my way (I won't be childish, just put into a foul mood) so I was aware that if I lost again it would proper frustrate me. The game played out the same as the previous with me dominating the first set and the second coming down to a tie break. This time however I made full use of my advanced shots and defeated her! So I'm now ecstatic and once again in a good bright happy mood which is probably a good thing because my girlfriend wouldn't have enjoyed my company this evening otherwise.

That's the end of this blog post, I just wanted to document on my crazy losing match and ultimately I've managed to produce a blog post out of it. If Ai Suigyama for some unbelieveable reason manages to read this then my message to you is "muhahaha I beat you in Top Spin 2 :D".

Renting From Lovefilm Again + Getting Sick of Top Spin 2

I was just about to start discussing how bored and sick I'm getting of Top Spin 2 but then I realised that I have forgotten to even mention the fact that I am now renting games again. Lovefilm is amazing, unfortunately for their business their system isn't which means rebels such as myself figured out that if we changed the last letter of our post code we will be eligible for another 3 month free trial with the postmen still being able to deliver the discs to us. I've done this and currently have Star Wars Force Unleashed and Top Spin 2 as well as having rented Saw 5 and the latest 3 Star Wars films.

I played Star Wars the day I got it and really liked it, thing was you spend like an hour on the prologue level getting easy achievements and this therefore killed me out. I haven't bothered to play it since, not because I don't like the game, mainly because at the time Tony Hawk's Proving Ground was my focus (I got my 1000 now by the way, review coming soon) and now it's Top Spin 2. I will get round to completing it, hopefully start playing once I'm done with Top Spin.

So here's the story with Top Spin. I was one of the unfortunate people not to get the 1000 Career Points achievement, I in fact fell miserably short and only got 760 points or something at the end of the 5th season. This is my fault however the developer can be blamed for not making it clear what career points were and not letting us check our current score at any point. If you haven't already played the game then you need to know that there's also another scoring system in the game, this is the score which I thought was career points and therefore considering I was over the 1000 I did a fair bit of simulating. Now back then when I first played Top Spin 2 (like 3 years ago) there were no Achievement Guides (that I was aware of) or Road Maps so I was just playing on my own initiative. I really wish I did do some research because now, 3 years later I am replaying the whole of career mode again, repeating everything I've done just to get the 1 last achievement worth 250 gamerscore.

I have discovered that I'm actually pretty darn good at the game, this could be due to the fact I've already completed Career mode before but nevertheless I have mastered all of the different types of shots and am storming through the career winning all competitions in site (including grand slams in my second season with low stats!). I'm getting bored of it though as I've played it for what feels like 10-15 hours over the past 3 days, trying to get it done as soon as possible and although the game is fun and I enjoy playing it's a tennis game, tennis games do get very repetitive for a gamer that doesn't really like the sport in general.

Either way I'm hopefully going to finish Season 3 tomorrow morning and then will look at my Career Points and will hopefully already have 1000 or near by thanks to me participating and winning grand slams so soon in my career. Don't think I got 200 points your supposed to get for becoming Rank 1 last year, that was a right bummer for me.

Game Completed: Pac-Man Championship Edition

Like Feeding Frenzy (the last game I completed) I also got this on disc with 4 other arcade games for £4. That's enough for an intro, on to the game.

I was now around back when Pacman was first created I believe however I have managed to grow up playing it due to it's popularity. I'm yet to play the original on the 360's Arcade but I have gone and completed MS Pacman which I enjoyed. Championship Edition is definitely a brilliant remake of the classic, adding various different game modes to spice up the gameplay a bit. It works brilliantly as does the achievements which involve you needing to play through every mode (ranging from having tinted light so it's hard to see to changing arenas and more) as well as eating the key and crown which crop up during the game and eating 8 ghosts in succession. The other two achievements are for getting a high score of 200,000 and 400,000 in any game mode you wish. I was able to get 200K quite easily but 400 was confusing me. After 30 minutes of trying to work out the best way to get points I finally decided that simply trying to eat lots of ghosts for 3200 points each isn't the best way, it's in fact staying a live so every pellet you eat is worth 50 points. When I put my theory to the test it worked and I was delighted to see the achievement pop up!

Final Verdict: - If you like Pacman then you'll be sure to like this game as it improves on the classics and gives it much more replayability. It's good on the gamerscore as long as you stay motivated long enough to get the hang of it (as in learn how to react when ghosts are nearby so you don't get caught). Try this out, it's 200 gamerscore than can be gotten in an hour and is fun challenge in the process.

After 5 Hours of Boosting I Have My Achievement

The 1000 online games achievement is quite a bitch in Tony Hawk's Proving Ground. I have played on my own (friend left his profile on and left me to it) for the past 5 hours and have successfully completed 700 more games, added to the 300 I already had to get me 1000 and achievement unlocked. I'm surprised I calculated when I would reach 1000 so well, the achievement unlocked when my hit counter was at 1001, meaning I had over judged it.

However I'm not quite so sure as I did play games online when the game first came out which should surely count towards the total. Also my friend (VolcomCR) also should have gotten the achievement as he's been with me the whole time I've boosted online. I did an extra 22 matches after I got the achievement but he still didn't, this leads me to conclude that you either have to host or win the matches for them to count (I always hosted and always won).

Either way I'm glad my ordeal is over, just need to arrange to get 5 of us together to get the Online Domination achievement now. And then have to find 100 more cash spots (got 30 so far, I been tracking) and then it's mod spots and gaps and I'm done! Yesterday I got the other achievement I needed which was All Pro, this was frustrating at times thanks to how crap the game is (as in the developers mess up a goal to make it impossible the way it's supposed to be done) but it wasn't too bad in the end.


In other news Star Wars Force Unleashed arrived through my letterbox this morning from Lovefilm and I was every so pleased. I didn't play much as I spent like an hour grinding achievements in the prologue level with Vader but I do look forward to playing it properly soon as the storyline seems to be great!

I'm Actually Going To 1000 Tony Hawk's Proving Ground!!!!

So when I finally reached Rank 1 on Project 8 after 500 to 1000 times of trying Animal Chin goal (have to combo across the entire world) I was over the moon, thinking I had accomplished the impossible. Proving Ground was Project 8 all over again but had been stepped up a notch once again as there is now 6 specific achievements regarding you doing all of them type of goals in Sick. These are:

Classic: - Old school where you need to do all 10 objectives in 2 minutes
Hawk-Man: - Have to follow a line in one combo doing specific moves
Line: - Must skate on every obstacle that turns green whilst getting a few million points
Skill: - These vary but you need to reach the Sick marker, may be doing a manual for ages in one combo to trying to launch yourself really far to get distance
Film: - Need to do a crazy trick over an obstacle or something in one combo
Photo: - Same as film but now have to push in right stick to take a photo mid-air

Through commitment and dedication I have now managed to get sick in every one of those goals in the above 6 categories. It's taken probably around 50 hours to do but I'm glad, Tony Hawk's Proving Ground is 10th on TrueAchievements when it comes to the amount of gamerscore it has (6,254 as I type this) and should be higher as new games such as Fuel and Red Faction are there currently due to the fact people haven't had enough time to play them.

I'm not going to quote a comment I left on Youtube to the following vid. This is the video I was using to help me get Sick grade on Classic in the Air and Space Museum and took me 5 hours to do. This is due to it being ridicolously hard to land in a Natas spin on the tip of that Rocket, 80% of the time I would mis judge my speed and Ollie and not land on it, thus meaning I needed to restart. There are plenty of other niggles in the line the person does in the video (which I mimicked) such as the game not always registering the fact you did a triple backflip and not being able to land in the hole doing a Indy 900 as it's hard to judge. So finally after 5 hours I did it and unlocked the last of the sick achievements, read below to see how I finished off the goal in style

"Wow I've finally done this after 5 hours or so of trying and I did it in style!

The triple backflip also didn't register for me and I was going to give up but then decided to carry on for the heck of it. After getting the last letter for skate I thought I'd try go back to the craters in one combo (ran out of time) and I managed to Natas both computer things again and then do a triple backflip without aggro kick to get me speed. God I'm happy!!!"

So due to the game glitching I had to go back and do the triple backflip again which I amazingly managed to do in one combo.



So what achievements do I have left to do?

With just 6 achievements left and the hard ones out of the way I am almost certain to get the full thousand gamerscore in Tony Hawk's Proving Ground. The 6 remaining achievements and how/when I will get them can be seen below.

All Gaps: - This is the third time in a row an achievement has been added for getting all gaps. I did it in American Wasteland and Project 8 so when I can be bothered I'll be sure to do it again but for Proving Ground
Cashtastic: - Am slightly confused about this achievement. You need to find all cash points throughout the game but I believe they respawn everytime you restart the game. I think this will benefit me I will follow a guide to get all 130+ of them in one playthrough.
All Pro: - I may have got 6 on all Street missions but there's still Career type goals I need to go back to and upgrade a few goals from AM to Pro. There's 25 or so needed to be done, I'll enjoy this as it's been ages since I played the core storyline of the game.
1000 online games played.: - This is not fun. After boosting for a few hours I've currently played 300+ online games. Me and my friend shall continue to boost.
5 out of 5! Online Domination.: - Problem with this achievement is that you need 5 people all to be in the game and for you to win all 5 rounds in a game. Chance of doing this legit is extremely slim so I need to gather some people together in order to boost this. Will be done in minutes though as rounds can be completed in 10 seconds.
Mod All Spots (secret): - A friend tells me this can be done in 20 minutes by searching the whole world for the hammer icon. Have put off doing this as I don't like having to find things.



And that's that. Getting thousand in this game is going to be fantastic. Having 1000 in the other 2 Tony Hawk games and Skate 1 and 2 means I have 1000 gamerscore in all the other skateboarding games on the console, Proving Ground is the last one. It is going to be conquered, eventually.... soon! :D

Game Completed: Feeding Frenzy

Feeding Frenzy was one of the 5 games I got when I spent £4 on an Xbox Live Arcade package from CEX. As I had previously gotten 200 gamerscore on the sequel to the game I decided I'd put the time in to complete this one too.

I did enjoy playing Feeding Frenzy 2 and therefore I was happy to be able to play a Feeding Frenzy game again, even if it wasn't as good as number 2. Ultimately the second game didn't improve much on the first as I wasn't able to notice much different, apart from the achievements.....

I didn't appreciate how quickly Feeding Frenzy 2's achievements could be gotten as they were done quickly in a doddle in comparison to having to eat 40,000 fish with 1,000 of them needing to be sharks. These 2 achievements are the ones that will have you bored out of your skulls has you keep grinding to get them after doing the simple story and time trial completion completion. It could be tricky to get 300,000 points as it requires skill to ensure you don't die much so that you can build up lives which you can waste near the end where you get to a level which scores you lots of easy points. There's a 10 hour played achievement which I believe takes much longer than 10 hours to do as the grinding of 40,000 fish took what felt like forever, nevertheless it did pop up soon after getting the 40,000 achievement so it didn't bother me too much.

Final Verdict: - This is a game that just like the second is not hard to get 200 on. Once the 300,000 point achievement has been gotten it's definitely a walk in the park from them and just simply needs motivation to complete. I'm not going to recommend it though because Feeding Frenzy 2 is quicker and not as boring I believe however if you were like me and had already completed the second and fancied eating a bit more fish then give Feeding Frenzy a go, ultimately it's a straight forward easy 200.

Bought Fantastic 4 & Shrek The Third for £7

As I was going to strawberry fair yesterday (a local big festival where thousands of people do drugs, drink and listen to music) it meant I would be venturing into Cambridge. As I still had £10 on my HMV Gift Voucher I thought today would be a good time to make use of it as it was a Christmas present I've been meaning to spend. I ended up putting that £10 towards One Tree Hill Series 5 for my girlfriend but the temptation to get Fantastic 4 for just £3 meant I also bought that. After leaving the store I decided to go back and get Shrek The Third too for £4. So why did I buy these games when I've played them before...?

Fantastic 4: So I rented this game a year and a big ago and got every achievement except the last one which needed you to complete the whole game again but on hard difficulty as the two difficulty achievements are not stackable. At the time I was sick of the game and just couldn't be bothered to go through it again for the 160 gamerscore the achievement offered. I've now changed though and become more of a completionist which meant I knew this game should be finished off. As of right now I've finished the first 2 acts again and started on the third meaning I'm already nearly halfway there after a few hours of play. This achievement could be gotten tonight and most likely will be as I'd love to trade it in tomorrow.

Shrek The Third: If you read the first paragraph of this blog you'd have realised I left the shop and then came back for this game. I did this because I was already aware that CEX will give me £4 cash or £6 trade in value for this game which meant I had nothing to lose and the potential to gain £2 in store credit at CEX plus the chance to finish off the achievements in this game before hand. I am not sure if I'm going to bother to do these though as I can't remember the game very well, all I remember is getting frustrated that I kept dieing at this one point on the hardest difficulty and ended up giving up. As I can't remember the game I'm unaware of how hard/long it will be to have to achieve a Perfect on every level so it does put me off wanting to put this game back into my console. I'll check out the guide on X360A later and hopefully the game will have a Road Map, back when I played Shrek they didn't exist.

So there you have it, the reason why I spent £7 on these two games yesterday is to hopefully finish the achievements off on them. Fantastic 4 will definitely be done and it would be nice to do Shrek however I can foresee me simply using it as a tool to help me get a better game when I trade these two in at CEX. With the likes of Overlord and the newest Tomb Raider being sold for £12 it's very tempting to trade my games in and get one of these. Tomorrow might be my last day going to College though which will mean it will be months until I get the chance to go CEX so there's a good chance I'll end up keeping the games until September. Just have to see what happens.

Tony Hawk Ride Will Fail

With e3 over all the articles you'll be reading will be summing up Project Natal or big game announcements like Left 4 Dead 2 and Crackdown 2. I however have been checking out as much news as possible on Tony Hawk's latest game, TH Ride. As I have been skateboarding for 5 years I naturally love to play the games and the prospect of being able to now stand on a deck and actually do the tricks is great, however it's not going to work.....

After seeing it be demoed at e3 thanks to Gamespot's live feed I was able to see how crap the deck is going to be. They must have been very impressed with the Wii board when designing the deck as when I saw the guy using the board it looked just like what you do on a Wii board. Every flip trick I saw the guy do was done by simply leaning in a direction as I've seen be done on a Wii board (have never played one so I am just assuming). This is not good as it really does not mimic skateboarding as every flip trick done in real life has a certain position your feet need to be in to do it, seeing this be done infuriates me. It also makes me think the inclusion of Nollie and Fakie tricks will be removed from the game as the guy simply stood in the middle of the board (where the bolts would be) and never moved, making it impossible to tell what stance he was in.

I'm not too confident grabs are going to work either. Now for people that don't know if your in Goofy stance (right foot forward, left foot behind) like I skate and you grab the side of board toe side where your feet point with your left hand it's called an Indy with the right hand being called a Mute. I can't see the sensors being able to realise which hand is grabbing the deck which will limit the amount of tricks significantly. This also brings me on to the fact that the guy wasn't even grabbing the board, just putting his hand in front of the sensor which yet again is not realistic.

My next complaint is the vert skating mode they were showing. What they've done is gone and made vert skateboarding a different mode all together where the only direction you can go is up and down! Now it's given that they have added some lip tricks such as Blunt Kickflips out and stuff which looks cool but being limited to not move across the ramp from left to right is really going to frustrate me. If you go and watch Tony Hawk or any other vert skateboarder in a run you will see that they make use of the whole ramp, hitting raised bowls in the corner ect which is now not possible due to the limitations they have forced.

Finally in this mode (vert as described above) I saw that when the skater did flip tricks it was always done late! It looked ridiculous as the skater meets his optimum height and then flips the board, that's not how it happens!!!!! I would have loved for the developers to have implemented this properly, something that EA haven't managed to do yet with both the skate games. You see in real life when a skater does a flip trick to grab on vert they don't catch the board on their feet and then grab, instead they flick the board so it flips and then grabs it with their hand and places under their feet. It's a silly minor complaint which I've had with every skateboarding game to date but for an avid skateboarder like me it is a shame that the true realism of the sport hasn't been captured correctly.


So after all of those complaints I think it's fair to say that Tony Hawk Ride is not going to get good reviews. I appreciate the transformation in the genre (done simply because they realised EA's skate was waaaay better) however it's just not been done to the level it needs to be done to in order for a consumer to spend £100 on. I'll be buying the game for sure, just how long it will be kept for is another matter.

Game Completed: LOTR Conquest

I completed this on the 9th (22 days ago) of May but due to laziness I have not gotten around to documenting it. It's 12:12AM right now and I'm tired so this may be quick, I just feel I really should do some blogging whilst I'm in the mood.

This was a game I was very excited for when I first heard about. Being slightly avid towards the LOTR trilogy I was very excited at the prospect of being able to relive the battles I saw on the films and hopefully be able to immerse myself in hours upon hours of gameplay like I did with the film tie in games which were excellent.

Problem is I've become a gamerscore whore, meaning I rarely play games to their full potential unless the achievements tell me to do so. Although playing through both the Good and Bad campaigns was enjoyable it was incredibly quick and didn't have much depth. I can see how many people may be very disappointed with the game as it fails to live up to the hype surrounding it however if your in need of a quick burst of gamerscore then this game should tickle your fancy without boring you too much. The achievements aren't terrible as you need to ensure you do feats such as backstab 10 enemies as a scout and storyline specific ones such as defeating the Witch King with Eowyn but other than that you just need to play through the campaign and then spend an hour or two doing some pointless boosting online. Finally a few achievements are rather dumb to have to bother to get instead of skill, the main culprit being the achievement which involves you having to kill 300 hobbits which took me 15 minutes or so and was boring.

Final Verdict: - Although the game is really quick and pretty repetitive it does spice it up enough for you to be able to play through the 6-8 hour campaign and enjoy yourself at the same time as you rack up easy gamerscore. It doesn't quite have the spark that Return of the King had when I played on my PS2 but it's given me a quick 1000 gamerscore and has met my need of a little bit of fun from Middle Earth.

100,018 Gamerscore

Yeah there's an extra 18G on the end of the 100,000 there, that's because I messed up and couldn't be bothered to find another game I could use to try and even out my score (Sonic the Hedgehog won't work for some reason).

But I've finally hit 6 digits and I'm quite pleased to have done so. Only an hour or so of Golden Compass was needed and in that time period I was able to get 360 gamerscore which helped me reach my target.

It's taken me over 3 years to get to 100K and it may well take the same amount or longer to hit 200K. I want to take it easy for a bit really and work on my completion percentage (that matters to me much more these days than when I first became a gamerscore whore) which involves me going back to time consuming games I've had and ignored for years. I am not going to turn down the chance to whore out a 1000 on an easy game everynow and then though, once your a gamerscore whore your always one I think as I'm always going to get the desire to want to get my score higher.

For now though I'm walking around with my chin held high as I embrace the reality of joining the 6 digit gamerscore club. :D

Under 1,000 To Go

As 100,000 gets closer my motivation to want to play xbox gets weaker. With 880 or so points left needed I am aware that 735 of that can be gotten from Trivial Pursuit, I just can't bring myself to play it. I started working on the 1000 for Tony Hawk's Proving Ground and have a True Achievements score on it of over 2400 already. It's going to be a long ride going for the 1000 in that and I should really wait to play it until after I have my 100k, think I will stop and wait for now.

I have completed 3 (basically 4) games which I need to review which are LOTR Conquest, Feeding Frenzy, Pacman CE Edition and Afro Samurai (minus 2 achievements). I meant to do LOTR on Tuesday but got lazy and today I thought I should focus my attention on analysing the fact I am very close to 100,000 gamerscore instead of writing a review. If I get a chance tomorrow to write one on LOTR I will, the chance of that happening is slim so in reality my next blog post will probably be in a few days time when I'm congratulating myself on reaching 100k. JJBDude over and out!

Game Completed: Pure

Little behind writing this blog post due to being lazy. I completed Pure a week ago today and it's the second game I am going to write a mini review on, focusing mainly on getting the achievements.

Now everytime I play a new game I have a habit of having to look at the achievement list and trying to learn/remember as many of the achievements as possible with Pure being no exception as it contained 50 of them. The reason why I do this is to try and eliminate the problem I got when playing this game, missing out the possibility of getting an achievement in one playthrough. This one achievement in Pure called No Messing wasted me an hour or so as after I discovered you had to complete the game playing in the least amount of events as possible I knew that I was going to need to delete my save and start again as I had already played all the events in series one for another achievement.

But after that slight technicality I was off on my way to the 1000. I had read threads about people bitching on x360a's forums about how hard the game is, that's not true. I'm an average racing fan and am not the best yet I had little difficulty winning races, in fact I think the difficulty is spot on because it requires full concentration as to not mess up but when you do manage to do 3 laps flawlessly you get that feeling of accomplishment. After completing World Tour mode I needed to go into single player races and try a few random achievements such as doing all tricks in one race and triple backflip. There were others and as a whole they were fun to do and a good challenge, I was worried about doing the Comeback Kid achievement (go from 16th to 1st on last lap) but when you have lots of boost it can be done quite easily. The other achievements the game offers are 4 online ones which can all be boosted with a friend. But having to win with a D class engine against an A class I managed to get legitimatelly as my friend hadn't unlocked the A class yet so I let him beat me and then tried to beat someone else, and did!

Final Verdict: - Pure is an excellent game that I would give 10/10 to (which is rare for me). It has excellent AI difficulty, good variety of entertaining achievements and is a fun experience throughout despite the sometimes repetitive events. I recommend for fun + gamerscore.

Countdown to 100,000 Begins!

Okay so I meant to write this blog when I was 5,000 gamerscore away from the elusive 100k however I've either forgotten or not bothered and as a result am now just 3,500 gamerscore away. So I'm now going to make a list of games I need to play and the optimum amount of gamerscore I believe I can get from them. This is as follows:

LOTR Conquest: - 1000
Trivial Pursuit: - 935
Golden Compass: - 490 (could be more if I can be bothered)
Crash of Titans: - 500 (a guess)
Feeding Frenzy: - 30

That's the gamerscore I currently have my eyes set on but that will leave me 500+ short! I think I may try and get NBA Live 09 off of a friend which will hopefully give me enough gamerscore to reach the 100k, if not I've got lots of other games such as Shaun White and Tony Hawk's Proving Ground which need to be played sometime.

My aim is to be able to reach 100k before June. It's quite a big ask but Trivial Pursuit will be done quick and LOTR Conquest shouldn't take too long. Few more hours of Golden Compass should complete the game and give me the remaining achievements and making sure the time spent with my girlfriend is spent on Crash of the Titans will get me the gamerscore from there. Finally if I am able to get NBA Live 09 and if it can be simulated (I hope so) I'll be sure to reach my goal quite easily.

Game Completed: Phantasy Star Universe

This is the first of hopefully many blog posts I write which give a mini little review of the game I have completed and my story of how I got the achievements. I do not plan to review the game properly, just bring up points that I liked/disliked about the game.

So Phantasy Star Universe! I was aware this game gave you 1000 just for completing the game, no collecting or tricky/frustrating achievements and no need to examine a Road Map careful, I just went straight into the game and started my 30 hour quest. Despite it being extremely cheesy (the universe is going to die, we must save the world crap) it did manage to amuse me and I ended up watching the hours worth of cut scenes throughout the game. I need to mention that it sucks I wasn't able to fully appreciate what the game had to offer as I stuck to the same sabre and gun throughout (despite getting better versions). The main reason for this was because I didn't understand how to synthesise weapons and stuff. The game did explain well but I never picked it up and it was only on the last level of the game did I realise there was armour which was explaining why enemies were being able to kill me so easy! Last point I can be bothered to make is moan about the lack of checkpoints as having to go and repeat 30 minutes worth of progress when you die really isn't fun.....

Final Verdict: - If you want easy gamerscore then play this but it'll take you 20+ hours for the 1000. It's fun but does get repetitive and can become a bore but the game does offer enough RPG characteristics to spice it up and make it more enjoyable. I recommend.

Changes to Friends on XBL

Okay so Thrawn wrote an interesting blog explaining why he doesn't just accept anyone into his friend's list. I ended up writing a long comment in response and then thought I could make a blog post out of it. Read what I had to say below.

"There's aboslutely nothing wrong with declining friend requests, especially with Microsoft having a 100 limit (I've been at that for years now!).

I too do get quite a lot of random friend requests and when they come without a message it's usually an automatic decline (unless I can be bothered to send a message back asking who they are and why they added me in case it's for boosting). The worst for me is on Youtube, I'm a unique skater and people seem to dig it on there so I get friend requests every other day from randomers I don't know, I have a message in my bio on there similar to yours.

Finally I think the friends list should be enhanced. I know it is going to be eventually but no word has been given (I believe) except that the total amount of friends allowed will rise. I am hoping for groupings to be created allowing you to split up your friends in to groups with "authority" levels granted on how they can access you. We all have family, friends and online friends but I also get random online people who seem cool add me and others that want to boost. The latter two would be added to my list just so they could see I'm online but features such as game invites, party invites and other features wouldn't be granted until/unless they get into my "authorised" list.

Now I've blabbed loads here and apologies for doing so, it's just a problem that bugs me."


Read his original posting here.

End of GSL Statistics

With the organization of GSL being pretty poor it's meant that trying to gather these statistics together a frustrating task. Nevertheless check out what I accomplished.

Bolt: - 37 Achievements, 1000 Gamerscore
Boom Boom Rocket: - 7 Achievements, 60 Gamerscore
Call of Duty 4: - 9 Achievements, 200 Gamerscore
Call of Juarez: - 19 Achievements, 440 Gamerscore
Condemned 2: - 12 Achievements, 240 Gamerscore
Dark Sector: - 1 Achievement, 30 Gamerscore
EURO 2008: - 27 Achievements, 660 Gamerscore
Facebreaker: - 1 Achievement, 60 Gamerscore
Feeding Frenzy: - 7 Achievements, 110 Gamerscore
Golden Compass, 6 Achievements, 220 Gamerscore
Guitar Hero 2: - 1 Achievement, 30 Gamerscore
Guitar Hero World Tour: - 3 Achievements, 20 Gamerscore
Halo 3: - 5 Achievements, 415 Gamerscore
Hour of Victory: - 32 Achievements, 620 Gamerscore
Jericho: - 42 Achievements, 1000 Gamerscore
Kung Fu Panda: - 39 Achievements, 1000 Gamerscore
LMA Manager 2007: - 22 Achievements, 1000 Gamerscore
Luxor 2: - 1 Achievement, 15 Gamerscore
Madden 08: - 37 Achievements, 750 Gamerscore
Mirror's Edge: - 8 Achievements, 295 Gamerscore
NBA 2K7: - 16 Achievements, 335 Gamerscore
NFS Pro Street: - 1 Achievement, 20 Gamerscore
Pacman CE Edition: - 6 Achievements, 80 Gamerscore
PGR 4: - 44 Achievements, 845 Gamerscore
Phantasy Star Universe: - 2 Achievements, 200 Gamerscore
Prince of Persia: - 12 Achievements, 170 Gamerscore
Prizefighter: - 12 Achievements, 140 Gamerscore
Rainbow 6 Vegas 2: - 1 Achievement, 20 Gamerscore
Rock Band 2: - 3 Achievements, 65 Gamerscore
Sega Rally: - 7 Achievements, 135 Gamerscore
Skate 2: - 37 Achievements, 850 Gamerscore
Smackdown vs RAW 08: - 1 Achievement, 350 Gamerscore
Smackdown vs RAW 09: - 7 Achievements, 260 Gamerscore
Stuntman Ignition: - 20 Achievements, 375 Gamerscore
Summer Athletics: - 37 Achievements, 1000 Gamerscore
TNA Impact: - 19 Achievements, 365 Gamerscore
Turning Point: - 2 Achievements, 75 Gamerscore
UEFA Champions League 06/07: - 8 Achievements, 385 Gamerscore
Vampire Rain: - 13 Achievements, 650 Gamerscore

For a Grand Total of.....

564 Achievements, 14485 Gamerscore

Now on the GSL page of x360a where the scoring is shown I currently have 14005 gamerscore being shown, 480 less than what I have calculated I gotten. If 480G had been lost from all 6 of our members and L4A had lost none (hypothetically) then that would have given our team enough gamerscore to have taken 7th Place. Now this angers me but there isn't much I can do as I can't be bothered to go through the hour long process I have just spent on myself for 11 more people to determine if the Not So Silent Ninjas did deserve 7th place. But enough of that, a few more statistics to give before I finish this post.

Number of Games played: - 39
New Games added to Gamercard: - 27
Number of Completions: - 5

I have gotten achievements on a total of 39 games throughout the GSL league with 27 of them being newly added to my Gamercard since the start back in the 18th of February. You can see how the GSL has impacted my Completion Percentage as I only managed to complete 5 of the new 27 games added to my card. Since the end of GSL I have been working on improving that number (is at 7 now I think) but the damage hasn't been as bad to my percentage total as you may think. I'm still at the 55% stage which is the same as when I started, just have to bump it up to 60% now.

My GSL Daily Updates

Throughout the GSL weeks I played I would write a paragraph explaining what games I played in the day and what gamerscore came with it. As the x360a forums for GSL will be deleted soon (I assume) I decided I would copy and paste all of what I said into a blog which can be seen below.

Week 1

JJBDude48's Gamerscore Daily Update - Day 3

Yesterday, on the 20th of February 2009 I unlocked 18 Achievements giving me 375 Gamerscore.

Boom Boom Rocket: - 2 Achievements, 25 Gamerscore
Prizefighter: - 7 Achievements, 55 Gamerscore
Skate 2: - 2 Achievements, 10 Gamerscore
Mirror's Edge: - 3 Achievement, 220 Gamerscore
EURO 2008: - 4 Achievements, 65 Gamerscore

Not as good as the previous day but things should improve as I've now got Call of Juarez and Summer Athletics at my disposal. I'm glad I finally completed Mirror's Edge, such a god damn frustrating game.

JJBDude48's Gamerscore Daily Update - Day 4


Yesterday on the 21th of February 2009 I unlocked 15 Achievements giving me 153 Gamerscore.

Summer Athletics: - 10 Achievements, 108 Gamerscore
Feeding Frenzy: - 2 Achievements, 20 Gamerscore
Pac-Man CE: - 1 Achievement, 5 Gamerscore
Luxor 2: - 1 Achievement, 15 Gamerscore
Boom Boom Rocket: - 1 Achievement, 5 Gamerscore

Was a bad day as I had to babysit the younger children and went for a skate during the day. Playing on Summer Athletics helped get achievements for Sunday though.

JJBDude48's Gamerscore Daily Update - Day 5


Today on the 22th of February 2009 I unlocked 28 Achievements giving me 902 Gamerscore.

Call of Juarez: - 1 Achievement, 10 Gamerscore
Summer Athletics: - 27 Achievements, 892 Gamerscore

Must have spent around 10 hours today playing Summer Athletics in order to get the 1000 on it and be able to send off for a replacement to arrive for week 2. Got worried at times I wouldn't be able to do it but I persisted and it payed off.

End of Week 1

JJBDude48's Progress at End of Week 1

From 18th of February 2009 at 9PM to 22nd of February at 9PM I unlocked 85 Achievements giving me 2180 Gamerscore.

It definitely hasn't been a brilliant start but it hasn't been terrible. I did get messed around slightly by my rental company and I didn't game saturday so I have a couple of excuses but really not much can be said. I don't have any 2K6 or other easy games to play so gamerscore has come from games like Summer Athletics which are moderately easy but take 10+ hours to play. I need to try and better this score next week, that should be my permenant aim, to keep improving.


Week 2

JJBDude48's Gamerscore Daily Update - Day 1


Yesterday on the 25th of February 2009 I unlocked 4 Achievements giving me 110 Gamerscore.

EURO 2008: - 4 Achievements, 110 Gamerscore

The day is only 3 hours long on a Wednesday but still just 110G for a day is pretty poor I'll admit. I am also a completionist and therefore wanted to get the most out of EURO 2008, the hour and a half it spend getting 15G for winning the tournament wasn't the best of time management but oh well.

JJBDude48's Gamerscore Daily Update - Day 2


Today on the 26th of February 2009 I unlocked 21 Achievements giving me 380 Gamerscore.

Jericho: - 19 Achievements, 355 Gamerscore
Pacman Championship Edition: - 2 Achievements, 25 Gamerscore

Full day of college meant getting home at 5:30PM knocked lots of potential gametime here. Still I have managed to complete 3 out of 5 missions on Jericho and aim to get the 1000 tomorrow (645G more) which will be good. Over the weekend I will play Call of Juarez and hopefully be renting an easy gamerscore game which will keep me on track for getting 3K this week, the aim Dan set for us.

JJBDude48's Gamerscore Daily Update - Day 3


Today on the 27th of February 2009 I unlocked 14 Achievements giving me 430 Gamerscore.

Jericho: - 14 Achievements, 430 Gamerscore

Okay so I didn't quite manage to complete Jericho, the gun achievements took longer than I thought and I wanted to relax with girlfriend as college always tires me by the end of Friday. Shouldn't have any problems getting the 200G rest from it tomorrow morning though so no big problem.

JJBDude48's Gamerscore Daily Update - Day 4


Today on the 28th of February 2009 I unlocked 15 Achievements giving me 325 Gamerscore.

Call of Juarez: - 4 Achievements, 80 Gamerscore
Feeding Frenzy: - 1 Achievement, 10 Gamerscore
Pacman Championship Edition: - 1 Achievement, 20 Gamerscore
Jericho: - 9 Achievements, 215 Gamerscore

I finished of Jericho really quickly this morning which was good and I've been working on Call of Juarez. Problem is I really can't be bothered with it, it's fun but the collectable achievements are infuriating me and putting me off wanting to play the game. So I took a break and played Pacman and Feeding Frenzy getting 1 achievement respectively.

Good chance I will game all day tomorrow, I need to if I want to reach 3,000 gamerscore for this week.

JJBDude48's Gamerscore Daily Update - Day 5


Today on the 1st of March 2009 I unlocked 15 Achievements giving me 370 Gamerscore.

Skate 2: - 4 Achievements, 80 Gamerscore
Call of Juarez: - 11 Achievements, 290 Gamerscore

I really shouldn't have boosted for 300 online kills on Call of Juarez, that wasted a few hours of my time but people were ready to boost so I wanted to get it done. Still finding Single Player frustrating despite the game being fun. Went on Skate 2 at the end just to boost my score a tiny bit more as it's been a disappointing day for me overall.

Will either make a new post or edit this later when I can be bothered to do my weekly total.


Week 4

JJBDude48's Gamerscore Daily Update - Day 1


Today on the 12th of March 2009 I unlocked 17 Achievements giving me 535 Gamerscore.

TNA Impact: - 11 Achievements, 225 Gamerscore
Mirror's Edge: - 2 Achievements, 30 Gamerscore
LMA Manager 2007: - 3 Achievements, 250 Gamerscore
Guitar Hero II: - 1 Achievement, 30 Gamerscore

Easy for 2 hours of gaming as TNA is very quick, LMA I had ore-played and Mirror's Edge and Guitar Hero had easy achievements to get too. Hoping to get Halo 3 done tomorrow and will then play one of the many games I have at my disposal.

JJBDude48's Gamerscore Daily Update - Day 2


Today on the 12th of March 2009 I unlocked 16 Achievements giving me 695 Gamerscore.

Pacman Championship Edition: - 1 Achievement, 20 Gamerscore
Vampire Rain: - 13 Achievements, 650 Gamerscore
Mirror's Edge: - 2 Achievements, 25 Gamerscore

I didn't play too much today so I decided in the evening to give Vampire Rain a go in order to make it look like I have gamed today. Truth be told I barely did and me and Wadinho boosted together on Vampire's Rain for an hour and a half getting 650 gamerscore respectively. I urge anyone who hasn't played this to rent it, very easy indeed.

JJBDude48's Gamerscore Daily Update - Day 3


Today on the 13th of March 2009 I unlocked 6 Achievements giving me 70 Gamerscore.

Golden Compass: - 1 Achievement, 10 Gamerscore
TNA Impact - 5 Achievements, 60 Gamerscore

70 Gamerscore is baaaaad but I did boost Dan to 650 on Vampire Rain which should be mentioned. I also want to say OMG to Golden Compass! It's taken me like an hour and 20 minutes to finish the prequel and level 1, makes me think the game is going to be a long boring process.

But anyway, better gamerscore to come from me tomorrow and Sunday.

JJBDude48's Gamerscore Daily Update - Day 4


Today on the 14th of March 2009 I unlocked 15 Achievements giving me 620 Gamerscore.

Halo 3: - 5 Achievements, 425 Gamerscore
NBA 2K7: - 1 Achievement, 30 Gamerscore
Skate 2: - 6 Achievements, 85 Gamerscore
TNA Impact: - 3 Achievements, 80 Gamerscore

Big shout out to Darth who went through the last level of Halo 3 I needed to do, giving up an hour of his time to get me 425 Gamerscore. I finally did the tag team crap on TNA (which I am proud of lol), did 1 quick match on NBA and did quite a bit of progression on Skate 2.

Hopefully game a lot tomorrow to end the week off strong so I hit my target of 3k. Now sure how far away I am from it but it can't be too far.

JJBDude48's Gamerscore Daily Update - Day 5


Today on the 15th of March 2009 I unlocked 25 Achievements giving me 475 Gamerscore.

Skate 2 :- 9 Achievements, 195 Gamerscore
Feeding Frenzy: - 4 Achievements, 80 Gamerscore
NBA 2K7: - 7 Achievements, 145 Gamerscore
Sega Rally: - 4 Achivevements, 45 Gamerscore
Pacman Championship Edition: - 1 Achievement, 10 Gamerscore

Today was frustrating, especially on NBA 2K7. I wasted lots of times thanks to carelessness if I'm honest, making the match too short so I didn't reach the criteria in time, wasting 30 minutes or not realising the criteria hasn't actually been met when I think it has. Was happy to get 300,000 score on Feeding Frenzy and glad I am able to play Sega Rally, the game is hard! Skate 2 is all easy for me as I done it all before on PS3 getting trophies, just need to put the time in and I did a bit today.

End of Week 4

JJBDude48's Progress at End of Week 4

From 11th of March 2009 at 9PM to 15th of March at 9PM I unlocked 79 Achievements giving me 2395 Gamerscore.

Day 1: - 17 Achievements giving me 535 Gamerscore
Day 2: - 16 Achievements giving me 695 Gamerscore
Day 3: - 6 Achievements giving me 70 Gamerscore
Day 4: - 15 Achievements giving me 620 Gamerscore
Day 5: - 25 Achievements giving me 475 Gamerscore

This has been my best week on paper but has it really? I wouldn't say so as 425G was gotten from Halo 3 which was easy and a few hundred from LMA which was pre-played and finally easy TNA, Vampire Rain and Skate 2 achievements. I don't mind, it just means I definitely should have got 3,000 and guess what, yet again I haven't lol. Might have done if I bothered with SvR 2008 for 350G and if I boosted TNA online but oh well, as long as I get over 2,000 I am personally happy, my aim will just be 3k though for Dan. heheh


Week 5

JJBDude48's Gamerscore Daily Update - Day 1


Today on the 18th of March 2009 I unlocked 8 Achievements giving me 235 Gamerscore.

Skate 2: - 4 Achievements, 90 Gamerscore
LMA Manager 2007: - 4 Achievements, 145 Gamerscore

Was unable to finish pre-loading my Spanish league unfortunately on LMA Manager 2007 so that 100GS will be gotten next week. Also got quick gamerscore from Skate 2 which I had pre-loaded.

JJBDude48's Gamerscore Daily Update - Day 2


Today on the 19th of March 2009 I unlocked 4 Achievements giving me 170 Gamerscore.

Skate 2: - 4 Achievements, 170 Gamerscore

I didn't know what to play so I ended up being inefficient and going through lots of challenges on Skate 2 which I should have done off weak in order to save time. I don't mind though as I was unmotivated about what to play.

JJBDude48's Gamerscore Daily Update - Day 3


Today on the 20th of March 2009 I unlocked 9 Achievements giving me 210 Gamerscore.

Call of Duty 4: - 6 Achievements, 120 Gamerscore
Stuntman Ignition: - 3 Achievements, 90 Gamerscore

I'm glad I bothered to play Stuntman, have had it for ages and always refuse to play it when I shouldn't as it's really good fun. Also got Call of Duty 4 today (with Oblivion and other games which my dad bought as he got a 360 for the family) which gave me an easy 120 gamerscore as kizwiz recommended me to play (there's your credit before you moan kiz!).

JJBDude48's Gamerscore Daily Update - Day 4


Today on the 21st of March 2009 I unlocked 9 Achievements giving me 145 Gamerscore.

GH World Tour: - 2 Achievements, 15 Gamerscore
Stuntman Ignition: - 8 Achievements, 130 Gamerscore

Slap my wrists I'm bad. I barely played today, wanted to skate and go out instead. Really not had the motivation this week, will hopefully try make up for it tomorrow.

JJBDude48's Gamerscore Daily Update - Day 5


Today on the 22st of March 2009 I unlocked 22 Achievements giving me 535 Gamerscore.

Stuntman Ignition: - 9 Achievements, 155 Gamerscore
Call of Duty 4: - 3 Achievements, 80 Gamerscore
LMA Manager 2007: - 2 Achievements, 125 Gamerscore
Prizefighter: - 5 Achievements, 85 Gamerscore
Sega Rally: - 3 Achievements, 90 Gamerscore

I gamed for pretty much the whole day, so we're talking like 10 hours and I got 500+ gamerscore to show from it. Thanks to kizwiz I got Prizefighter done which is quite annoying as 85G for an hour and a half of boosting (just me) isn't really worth it. Sega Rally also took the same amount of time and got me 90G but I boosted back for the other guy. The rush of gamerscore I've gotten on Stuntman will most likely stop now unless I am able to put the time and effort in to 5 starring everything or finding an online boost buddy. Finally I went and did another level on Call of Duty 4 on Veteran and finished of my Spanish season on LMA. Not the best scoring day ever but I'm happy.

End of Week 5

From 18th of March 2009 at 9PM to 22nd of March at 9PM I unlocked 52 Achievements giving me 1295 Gamerscore.

Day 1: - 8 Achievements giving me 235 Gamerscore
Day 2: - 4 Achievements giving me 170 Gamerscore
Day 3: - 9 Achievements giving me 210 Gamerscore
Day 4: - 9 Achievements giving me 145 Gamerscore
Day 5: - 22 Achievements giving me 535 Gamerscore

This may actually be my worst week for scoring. Again there are excuses such as not being able to get hold of Kung Fu Panda/Indianna Jones and not being able to boost TNA with Ducky Dan but at the end of the day I just haven't put the required effort in. I'm happy with how I ended the day though and I'm still on track for reaching 90,000 by the end of the competition as planned (depends if i miss out 1 or 2 weeks though).

Bought NFS Undercover for £5.55 from CDWow last night, heard it's easy for gamerscore (although maybe timeconsuming) and considering I can trade in for £9 cash afterwards I didn't see any reason not to buy it.


Week 7

JJBDude48's Gamerscore Daily Update - Day 1


Today on the 1st of April 2009 I unlocked 27 Achievements giving me 550 Gamerscore.

Hour of Victory: - 5 Achievements, 85 Gamerscore
Madden 08: - 21 Achievements, 365 Gamerscore
Phantasy Star Universe: - 1 Achievement, 100 Gamerscore

In just 2 hours I managed to rack up this gamerscore getting 100 from Phantasy Star in just 1 minute and then simulating in minutes on Madden and finished it off on Hour of Victory by boosting online. I continued to game into the next day, will discuss that below.

JJBDude48's Gamerscore Daily Update - Day 2


Today on the 2nd of April 2009 I unlocked 26 Achievements giving me 715 Gamerscore.

PGR4: - 4 Achievements, 90 Gamerscore
Madden 08: - 6 Achievements, 135 Gamerscore
Hour of Victory: - 5 Achievements, 135 Gamerscore
LMA Manager 2007: - 11 Achievements, 455 Gamerscore

Had stayed up until the early hours of the morning from the previous day in order to get a couple of achievements on Hour of Victoy and spent an hour finishing off my pre-played LMA Manager. Had to go college during the day but got home and was able to get more achievements on Madden thanks to super sim, few more boosted ones on Hour of Victory and played PGR4 for fun getting 90G in the progress. This was another good day which had me gaming until the hours of the morning so the 335G i got from UEFA Champ League will be in tomorrow's update.

JJBDude48's Gamerscore Daily Update - Day 3


Today on the 3nd of April 2009 I unlocked 44 Achievements giving me 1505 Gamerscore.

Madden 08: - 10 Achievements, 240 Gamerscore
Smackdown vs RAW 2009: - 4 Achievements, 70 Gamerscore
Disney Bolt: - 18 Achievements, 340 Gamerscore
UEFA Champ League: 3 Achievements, 335 Gamerscore
Smackdown vs RAW 2007: - 1 Achievement, 350 Gamerscore
NBA 2K7: - 8 Achievements, 160 Gamerscore

Thanks to having a day off of college I was able to get a lot of gamerscore on this day. From the previous night I got the 3 achievements from UEFA which was good and then went to sleep. Playing when I woke up consisted of playing a bit of Madden and Smackdown in the morning and Bolt during the day. In the evening I bothered to get the 350 achievement on SvR 07 and kizwiz helped me get some easy gamerscore in NBA 2K7. A very good day for me.

JJBDude48's Gamerscore Daily Update - Day 4


Today on the 4th of April 2009 I unlocked 29 Achievements giving me 970 Gamerscore.

Kung Fu Panda: - 3 Achievements, 60 Gamerscore
Smackdown vs RAW 2009: - 3 Achievements, 190 Gamerscore
Disney Bolt: - 18 Achievements, 625 Gamerscore
Dark Sector: - 1 Achievement, 30 Gamerscore
Skate 2: - 2 Achievements, 35 Gamerscore
UEFA Champ League: - 2 Achievements, 30 Gamerscore

Managed to play for the majority of the day again today as I played Skate 2 and UEFA the previous night and got easy achievement on Dark Sector and SvR 09 in the morning. The day has consisted of me completing Bolt for the majority, got a bit of Kung Fu Panda in later on too.

JJBDude48's Gamerscore Daily Update - Day 5


Today on the 5th of April 2009 I unlocked 53 Achievements giving me 1210 Gamerscore.

PGR 4: - 10 Achievements, 135 Gamerscore
UEFA Champ League: - 3 Achievements, 20 Gamerscore
Kung Fu Panda: - 36 Achievements, 940 Gamerscore
Facebreaker: - 1 Achievement, 60 Gamerscore (thanks Dan)
NFS Pro Street: - 2 Achievements, 20 Gamerscore
Disney Bolt: - 1 Achievement, 35 Gamerscore

I was starting to feel the burn on this last day but thanks to staying up until 7:30AM of the night before I was able to get lots of Kung Fu Panda done, completing it within 24 hours of starting. Kung Fu took up the majority of my time throughout the day but I was able to play Bolt, NFS and Facebreaker during the previous day night to help get some easy gamerscore. Finally after I was done with Kung Fu Panda I spent the last hour and half or so of the competition getting easy gamerscore on PGR4 and a couple on UEFA. Was a grand ending day of the competition for me, I'm extremely satisfied with my performance this week.


Week 8

JJBDude48's Gamerscore Daily Update - Day 1


Today on the 8th of April 2009 I unlocked 4 Achievements giving me 195 Gamerscore.

Phantasy Star Universe: - 1 Achievement, 100 Gamerscore
Skate 2: - 3 Achievements, 95 Gamerscore

This has pretty much all been pre-played, Skate 2 just took 5 to 10 minutes to finish off and I hadn't quite gotten to the boss yet on Phantasy Star (was pre-playing just an hour before GSL started) and ended up taking up an extra hour than anticipated. Have gone on to play PGR 4 too, will be posted in tomorrow's daily update.

JJBDude48's Gamerscore Daily Update - Day 2


Today on the 9th of April 2009 I unlocked 24 Achievements giving me 490 Gamerscore.

PGR 4: - 24 Achievement, 490 Gamerscore

You might have not known it but PGR 4 is an easy giving gamerscore game. Not had to play excessively today and still managed to get a good amount of gamerscore. Will probably leave the game for now (unless I can get some online) as the rest will be time consuming.

JJBDude48's Gamerscore Daily Update - Day 3


Today on the 10th of April 2009 I unlocked 37 Achievements giving me 575 Gamerscore.

Condemned 2: - 7 Achievements, 115 Gamerscore
Rock Band 2: - 3 Achievements, 65 Gamerscore
GHWT: - 1 Achievement, 5 Gamerscore
Hour of Victory: - 20 Achievements, 360 Gamerscore
PGR 4: - 2 Achievement2, 30 Gamerscore

Didn't think I'd be able to improve on Day 2 but I have done, a day of rain made it possible for me to game most of the day and that time was mainly taken up by playing Hour of Victory during the day and Condemned 2 in the evening. Playing PGR 4 in the morning and 30 mins of Rock Band 2 and GH World Tour got the other points. Was a good day for me.

JJBDude48's Gamerscore Daily Update - Day 4


Today on the 11th of April 2009 I unlocked 21 Achievements giving me 405 Gamerscore.

Skate 2: - 3 Achievements, 90 Gamerscore
Rainbow Six Vegas 2: - 1 Achievement, 20 Gamerscore
Prince of Persia: - 12 Achievements, 170 Gamerscore
Condemned 2: - 5 Achievements, 125 Gamerscore

Was able to boost for easy gamerscore last night in the hours of today for a hundred gamerscore and played Prince of Persia for an hour or so today simply to get quick easy gamerscore from there. Other than that I've wasted plenty of time on Skate 2 and quickly took a picture of myself for RSV2. Definitely could have gamed more but I'm exhausting myself and just want to enjoy my gaming again now lol.

JJBDude48's Gamerscore Daily Update - Day 5


Today on the 12th of April 2009 I unlocked 11 Achievements giving me 350 Gamerscore.

Hour of Victory: - 2 Achievements, 40 Gamerscore
Golden Compass: - 5 Achievements, 210 Gamerscore
PGR 4: - 4 Achievements, 100 Gamerscore

I had to resort to horrible Golden Compass today which took up like the whole day nearly for only 200 gamerscore, hated doing it but I needed points so I could get to my 2000 total for the week. Played PGR 4 for hours in the morning and was able to get 100g there while boosting on Hour of Victory in the evening netted me 40G (was hoping for extra 50 but it's glitching on me ).





So there it is! A lot of typing I did during the GSL as I gave myself daily updates. My next blog post will be my final on GSL 7, I will be analysing my gaming and hopefully come up with some interesting statistics to share!