Push to 200,000 Gamerscore

The other day I got given an extra shift at work when I didn't really fancy doing it. I decided the money gotten from the shift should be spent on treating myself to some easy gamerscore games in a bid to help motivate myself to get to 200,000 gamerscore. I mean my progress in Gamerscore ths year has been pretty poor I have to say so myself, as I'm currently on 189,000 at typing it means I've gained just 9,000 gamerscore in the past 3 and a half months of this year. That roughly equates to about 30,000 gamerscore this year if I manage to get another 1000 in the next few weeks. In 2010 I got 55,000 gamerscore throughout the year so I set myself the challenge of slightly upping myself this year and going for 60,000.

As I just showed my progress has been slow but ultimately I'm not really too bothered. I put a lot of time and effort in to creating my website the first couple months of the year (check www.thedumblife.co.uk) which reduced my Xbox gaming time plus Lidl have been giving me 40 to 50 hour weeks sometimes which is more than the 20 or so hours I used to spend at college this time last year. It's also worth mentioning that lots of my real life friends that I skate with have all been banging out prestiging on Call of Duty Black Ops so I have played that with them for a while. After prestiging for the very first time ever on any Call of Duty game I decided to call quits and go back to getting some gamerscore, I now only play it when all my mates are on instead of on my own at times trying to rank up haha.

So, where to go from here. Well the 8 games I ordered from CEX all have enough gamerscore between them to get me much closer to 200k. I expect I will continue to play other games too to make up the rest of the gamerscore so now it's just time to put the games in and bang them out. Although if the weather continues to be really sunny I'll be spending all my spare time out in the Sun and that will hinder my progress. Without further ado, here's a picture of the games I got.



All the games there I believe will all be easy completions for me, the exception being Army of Two which I only bought because it was £4 and I wanted it for the collection (I own 40th Day but am yet to play). Oh and HSM is already on my tag but I got red rings and never finished it, should get few easy points from that. The other games are not the usual ones you'll find in shops, in fact most of them were the last in stock from CEX. I have never played a Cabela game so African Safari will be interesting and playing through a game featuring owls 4 whole times will be sure to drive me insane.

Nevertheless it shall be done as I would like to hit 200k, will be nice feeling to know I've scored 100k (what few of my online friends have yet to do *cough cough* tractakid *cough cough*) a total of two times. It would be made even sweeter if I got there before Bemusedbox does but after chasing me for a while he's finally overtaken me on gamerscore and is just 8,000 away, I doubt I will beat him now. It was painful when rover08 overtook me, now yet another of my "close" online friends has gone past me. Next up will probably be adiash73, stay away from me I tell you!

Photo Collection Time!

First I have to say I haven't posted an entry in months and I'm aware of that, I personally don't mind that though as my interest in Xbox in that time has been hindered slightly but oh well. I feel like posting something now though so whilst I have my mojo I'm going with it.

Basically today at work I had an 11 hour shift after having just a few hours sleep, this was after I had just done a 10 hour shift yesterday with just a few hours sleep as I worked a close the day before on Thursday. Enough of that though. The point of that is what got me through today was thinking about all the games I have and wondering what it would be I'd play tonight. I recently played Summer Athletics 2009 to the point where I can't really earn any more achievements so I need to figure out what new game to start. This lead me to thinking about posting pictures of my games collection, some of you may be interested so that's what I'm going to do. :)

The obvious picture to show everyone is every game I have and where they're positioned on my shelf, well I took a picture of each shelf so this can be seen.



Then I decided to get out all the games I am yet to put on my tag and check them out. All the titles in this following picture have not ever been put on my tag. There's plenty others I have but they may have the odd achievement in and therefore I left out.



As I am currently in the Great True Achievement Challenge it is important that I score some points tonight in order to stay in. There's a few games there I'm sure I could rip some easy points out of if I needed to. There's a lot of Xbox Live Arcade games I always have available to me. Since there's no physical copy of an arcade game I have decided to write a massive long list of them all. This is for my benefit mainly as I may refer to it in the future when trying to decide what to play.

3D Ultra MiniGolf 2
A World of Keflings
Arkadian Warriors
Assault Heroes
Assault Heroes 2
Castlevania HD
Comic Jumper
Costume Quest
Deadliest Warrior
Deathspank
Deathspank 2
Golf Tee It Up
Greed Corp
Hydro Thunder
Lara Croft GoL
Microbot
Monkey Island 2
Outrun
Portal Still Alive
Raskulls
Risk Factions
Snoopy Flying Ace
Sonic & Knuckles
Sonic 4 Episode 1
Sonic Adventure
Sonic Hedgehog 2
Sonic Hedgehog 3
The Maw
The Undergarden
Turtles in Time RS
Undertow
Xmen Arcade
Yaris
Zeit 2

It's nice to know I have a bunch of arcade games I can just feel like playing whenever I want but I don't want that list to get too big! Before I know it the same will be happening for my Windows Phone as I already have a couple of games queued up on there waiting to be played.


Now slightly changing the flow of direction, I started wanting to show off my collection in specific genres. First up is the Music/Rhythm genre which I have been a big fan of ever since I got Guitar Hero 2 for my 16th birthday nearly 4 years ago. Since then a lot of Guitar Hero games have came out plus Rock Band has been added in to the mix yet I have played pretty much every one in existence. There's a few like the Rock Band Country Packs which are not easily available but the main ones I've played. Here's the pic.



What's missing from there which I consider a game I should have for the Guitar Hero franchise is Aerosmith, Greatest Hits and Warriors of Rock. I've played all of them just don't own any of them, when they're cheap enough I'll get them for the collection. ACDC on the Rock Band is one I would like for the collection but don't have, same applies for Song Pack 2 although I have played both of them before.

The main collection you may have heard me talking about is the extreme sports one, specifically skateboarding and snowboarding games. As I skate in real life I have an immediate link to the games which draws me in to liking them, even the shitty Shaun White Skateboarding which came out last year had me entertained at times.



From that picture there is 12,000 available Gamerscore to be gotten, I have a total of 11,000 from them. I'm 1,000 short because I am yet to play Shred as I only just got it the other day. I don't particularly want to but in order to continue saying I've completed every skateboarding game on the 360 I need to do it. A game which is missing but I've done is Stoked, a fairly decent snowboarding game which I don't own as my brother does so I just borrowed from him. There's 2 copies of Proving Ground as my first copy got some severe scratches on it from a short period of time when I had my Xbox 360 located vertically. This also messed up my Halo 3 so I had to get another copy of that. My xbox is always horizontal now and it shall stay that way. It's a shame Proving Ground got ruined as it was an American copy I paid £45 for as I got it 8 days before the UK release. That's because a local shop used to import games in order to get extra sales from people like me. I also like to state to people that I finished Proving Ground without inputting the perfect balance cheats, sorry if you get sick of me going on about that but I was quite chuffed with myself haha.

Might as well go and talk about the 4 Tony Hawk games I have on the original Xbox. My ex girlfriend did make me happy for one of my birthdays (can't remember which one) when she went and got me them games. Thanks to her I have the full Tony Hawk Xbox collection as the two original Pro Skaters were only ever released on the PS1 I believe. I do also have American Wasteland on the original Xbox but I think I let a friend borrow it years ago and never got it back. I don't care really though as I have it on 360. I bought it on release on Xbox for £40 and then on release for 360 for £45 the day after I got my Xbox 360. I didn't fancy spending £45 on a ported game but I never had Xbox Live on my original Xbox so I was prepared to spend the money in order to play online. Back in the day when I didn't know what achievements were and I just wanted to play a game for fun haha. But yeah I spent a lot of hours playing American Wasteland online for fun, I usually credit THUG 2 for getting me good at balancing and getting high combos but I forget that all the hours of countless fun playing against people online helped a lot too.

The last picture I wanted to take to show off a collection was all the peripherals I have gotten for my Xbox 360. The total cost of all of it brand new is probably around a grand, that's a lot considering the majority of it is plastic instruments haha.



I'll list it all from top left to right.

RB drums
GH3 Guitar x2
Kinect
GHWT Guitar
Scene It Controllers
DJ Hero Decks
RB3 Keyboard
RB Wired Microphone
Lips Microphones x2
Xbox 360 Controller x7
Xbox 360 Wired Headset
20GB Hard Drive (original from 2005, hard to see in pic)
GH 2 Guitar (my oldest one yet the one I always use)
RB Guitar
EA Active Heart Beat Monitor
EA Active Green Elastic Band
RB3 Pro Guitar

Quite a lot there, most of it barely ever gets used and just ends up cluttering my room. Especially the RB drums, they are a right nuisance to have up over there in the corner.


Finnnaaaallllly I thought I should take a picture of my TV and monitor so you can see how close I sit when I am gaming. I've done this because often people can hear my television, you may understand why now as I am usually about 2 feet away from the TV when I game sitting up on the chair.




And that's that, all done! Taken me a lot longer than I had hoped it would to do all this so I'm glad it's over now, probably wont blog again for ages lol. I need to play a game or something, got to get some points to stay in the competition!