Gaming Habits

145 Untouched Games Collection!

2011-12-28T13:42:00.000-08:00

Time to have a check on how many games I own which I have yet to even start. I'm worried it's going to be far over 100 titles, here's a list of them all. I also wanted to show a picture to friends of my new shelf display. I knew I was going to run out of space soon and decided to stack 2 bookcases on top of eachother. As a result there is now more free space in my bedroom and my games collection can continue to grow woo!

Retail: -

007 Quantum of Solace
50 Cent Blood on the Sand
Army of Two 40th Day (missing from pic, lent it out)
Assassin's Creed Brotherhood
Bionic Commando
Blur
Brave a Warriors Tale
Brutal Legend
Crackdown
Crackdown 2
Dancing Stage Universe
Dancing Stage Universe 2
Darksiders
Deblob 2
Def Jam Rapstar
Deathsmiles
DiRT 3
Duke Nukem Forever
Enslaved Odyssey
Fairytale Fights
Family Game Night 3
FIFA 09
Football Manager 2007
Fracture
GTA IV (missing from pic, lent it out)
Harry Potter Deathly Hallows
Homefront
How to Train a Dragon
Iron Man 2
Legends of the Guardians
Lego Indianna Jones (not shown in picture, have in sleeve)
Left 4 Dead
Left 4 Dead 2
Lost Planet
Madden 09
Planet 51 (not shown in picture, have in sleeve)
Mass Effect 2
Mindjack
Morph X
My Sims SkyHeroes
Mini Ninjas
Pro Evolution Soccer 2009
Pro Evolution Soccer 2010
Red Faction Armageddon
Red Faction Guerrilla
Resident Evil 5 Gold Edition
The Saboteur
Scene It Box Office Smash (not in picture, is downstairs)
Secret Service
Stoked Big Air
Terminator Salvation
Tomb Raider Underworld
Tony Hawk's Shred
UFC Undisputed 2010
Velvet Assassin
Wolfenstein
X Factor

That's 56 games I have 10 feet away from me on my shelf that have not been put on my card. There's another 10 or so that are on my tag with barely any achievements too but I won't include them in the total. My brother has games too I have access too but I'll leave them out.

Kinect: -

Disneyland
Get Fit With Mel B
Kinectimals
Sonic Free Riders
Yoostar Movies

5 isn't too bad, I tend to play a Kinect game as soon as I get it which is why this is low.

XBLA: -

3D Ultra MiniGolf 2
A World of Keflings
Assault Heroes
Assault Heroes 2
Bastion
Beyond Good and Evil HD
Bloody Good Time
Braid
Castlevania HD
Comic Jumper
Costume Quest
Days of Thunder
Deadliest Warrior
Death By Cube
DeathSpank
DeathSpank T.O.V.
DeathSpank The Baconing
Dead Rising Case Zero
Ecco The Dolphin
Family Game Night (Connect 4x4)
Fancy Pants Adventures
Final Fight Double Impact
Fruit Ninja Kinect
Galaga (Namco Museum: Virtual Arcade)
Galaga Legions (Namco Museum: Virtual Arcade)
Gatling Gears
Golden Axe
Golf Tee It Up!
Greed Corp
Gunstar Heroes
Happy Tree Friends
Hydro Thunder
Hydrophobia
Islands of Wakfu
Kinect Fun Labs: Avatar Kinect
Kinect Fun Labs: Battle Stuff
Kinect Fun Labs: Mutation Station
Lara Croft Guardians of Light
Magic 2012
Marvel vs Capcom 2
Microbot
Monkey Island 2
Moon Diver
Mortal Kombat Arcade
Mr. Driller Online (Namco Museum: Virtual Arcade)
Ms. Splosion Man
New Rally X (Namco Museum: Virtual Arcade)
Nin2- Jump
OutRun Online Arcade
Panzer General
Peggle
Rock of Ages
Scrap Metal
Serious Sam TFE
Serious Sam TSE
Snoopy Flying Ace
Sonic & Knuckles
Sonic 4 Episode 1
Sonic Adventure
Sonic The Hedgehog 2
Sonic The Hedgehog 3
Sega Rally Online Arcade
Stacking
Super Meat Boy
The Dishwasher VS
The Maw
The Path of Go
The Undergarden
TNT Racers
Torchlight
Turtles in Time RS
Unbound Saga
Undertow
Voodoo Dice
Warhammer 40,000
Xevious (Namco Museum: Virtual Arcade)
X-MEN
Yar's Revenge
Yaris
Zeit 2

Ahhhhh 80 here, again another 10 roughly on my tag and barely played.

WP7: -

Assassin's Creed
Hydro Thunder Go
Rocket Riot
The Sims 3

Only 4 here, safe to say that Windows Phone I am best at keeping the list down.

So 145 games I make that! Wow that's pretty damn high, not sure why I do it to myself sometimes I just can't help buying Arcade games on deal or Retail games cheap when I see them in the shops. I'm close to adding another few Arcade titles to the list as a few like Plants Vs Zombies and Renegade Ops are on offer for a few more days I wonder how many of those games I will actually ever get round to playing, it's scary to think at least half of them will probably never get touched. Anyway I think I'll end this little blob entry here, I spent way too long doing it, time I could have spent on actually playing one of the games!

Eurogamer Expo 2011 in London Thoughts

2011-09-26T02:50:00.000-07:00

Last year I went to the Eurogamer Expo and was so excited as it was the first time I had the chance to play the big upcoming games before they had been released, it was a great day and you can see my thoughts on it on the blog entry I did at a year ago which can be seen here.

Journey There

London is only an hour and a bit away by car journey, something I always tend to forget. I spent my time in the car playing on Fable Coin Golf trying to get all the Gold medals and finish off the game. I managed to get all but 3 which I was quite happy with. We managed to park on some red lines (which you're able to do on a Sunday for free) and a few minutes walk and we was there. 15 minute queue and we were in.

Wandering Around

First thing you do when you get to a place like this is walk around finding out where everything is, checking out the queue sizes for the games. First booth we got to which had an available seat was for the new Ace Combat game. The flight genre is probably one of my least favourites but I looked forward to sitting down so gave the game a go. I wasted 5 minutes of my life trying to shoot down an enemey, I must have fired 50 missiles and thousands of bullets yet the bugger didn't go down. My brother or Dad didn't have much luck either but at least my Dad enjoyed it.

Just Dance 3

After getting off of the Ace Combat game we managed to stumble accross Just Dance 3 which I was quite interested in. The kid playing at the time seemed half decent which gave me a good chance to see what the game is actually like. Now I didn't seem to impressed. Now if you know me you know how I rant and rave about how good Dance Central is, Harmonix are great at making games so they set the bar high. This Just Dance just didn't seem to match. I failed to see any way of the game letting the performer see where they was going wrong. On Dance Central the characters body glows red to let you know what part of your body is slacking in the dance move, I didn't see anything like that in Just Dance. Instead the game was playing around with lights, making it like a rave scene. You can kind of see what I mean from the top picture I took although it was taken from a distance(as to not disturb the gamers). I did like that it shows you the lyrics in the bottom left corner, gives you a chance to learn the words to a song which is neat.

I decided to take 2 photos for this game as when I was coming around later on in the day I saw how 2 ladies had now started performing in these little booths. Needless to say a photo needed to be taken haha. Ultimately I'm sure this game will be decent and fun but Dance Central 2 does seem to be far superior. I'm not creating a section for DC2 so I'll say briefly here what I saw. It looked like the same formula we have already seen with a few changes. I noticed that you now get like gold moves, I assume that getting perfects on them will gives you more points, probably because it's an important move to nail. Either way I have already researched Dance Central 2 from online videos and know it's going to be great, didn't need to see it much at expo.

XBLA Time

Joe Danger The Movie
Towards the back of the show floor you could find the indie and XBLA games. First one I had a go on was Joe Danger The Movie. I think I may have briefly heard about this game but didn't know what it was about. Basically it's a 2D sidescroller where you're in a type of contraption which you need to perform tricks on in order to shoot a movie. You can jump, do flips, combo moves with the bumper buttons all in order to string together really high scores. They had 5 different levels available to play and I had a go on most of them. One time I was skiing jumping over slopes whilst another level had me acting as a policeman on a motorbike doing wheelies. They had a developer there who spoke to me a bit who told me it would be at the £9.99 price point (the original was a PSN exclusive I believe) which works out at 1200 points. It seems like good fun but I reckon the novelty will wear off quite quick, make it 800 points please and it's a worthy purchase.

Awsomenauts
There were 4 consoles set up for this game with each console squaring off against another one. Me my brother and Dad went on one as we got ready for the 3V3 battle that the game was advertising. There is nothing special to see here, just a standard game which I know I'd enjoy playing for gamerscore if it was at the 400 point mark. You spawn as one of 5 characters and have to take down the oppositions towers whilst you defend yours in the 2D sidescroller. My dad wasn't keen and put down the pad in a couple of minutes (probably because he didn't know what he was doing) so I didn't stay on it long.

Rayman Origins

I was sure to give this one a try as I know when it was announced my brother was hyped about it, having 2 player co-op play meant me and him stayed on and had a play on all 3 levels they had to offer, Cave, Jungle and Desert. There's no need to go in to gameplay details here as it's what you'd expect to see. Challenges and puzzles as Rayman and Globox have to get from screen to screen. It was definitely good fun and caused me to use my brain a few times to figure out how to get through certain obstacles. I can't remember if this is an arcade game or full retail (I know it swapped from one to another) but needless to say it's going to be great.

Free Stuff and Turtle Beach

Now is a good time to mention what we left the expo with. At one point a lady working at the event had a bunch of Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 posters to hand out, she didn't have too many but I thankfully managed to get one off her before they went. I then had kids asking me throughout the day where I got it from, I was lucky. Still haven't put it up in my room yet but it will go somewhere, just need to think a bit more. My dad one something much better though. The guys at Alien were giving out scratch cards and my dad happened to win on one of them. Whether or not there are plenty of winners or not I don't know but eitherway after filling out a form and signing up to the competition on the computers he was able to walk away with an Alien keyboard. The guys were claiming it's worth £100 however Google told my dad it's actually about £40. Still, for 10 minutes of your time it's definitely worth it.

The purchases come in the form of pairs of turtle beach. I've always been slightly interested in them but never enough to fork out the cash for a pair. Just so happened that the guys had a stand at the expo and I decided to go take a look. They had about 12 pairs on sale ranging from £20 to £120 but the one that caught my eye was the one on offer, the DPX21 for just £65. I didn't have much knowledge in the value of this product until I started checking the Internet on my phone and seeing it be sold for over £100 on the Internet. Knowing I was getting a bargain I finally decided to go for it and so did my brother. Since being back I have set it up and they are fantastic. I've been watching Prison Break late at night so it was a perfect opportunity to test them out and I'm really impressed. Need to fiddle with the settings still as there's a lot and it's complicated however I have no regrets thankfully, worth £65.

All The Rest

There were a lot of games, most of them I didn't play and those that I did were only for 5 minutes max really. For the rest of the blog I'm just going to write a paragraph on the games.

SSX: - This was the most exciting part for me, checking out an SSX game. It was the only booth where the developer would boot you off after you've rode to the bottom of the slope. I meant to come back to give it another go later on in the day but never managed to. Eitherway I had mixed opinions. I liked it as it was a snowboarding game and I know I'm going to enjoy playing it however it seemed too damn easy. I didn't fall over at all, in fact nobody I saw playing did as it's not possible to. It seems that no matter how many flips or spins you do you're rider manages to stay on his feet somehow and roll away. I don't like that as there doesn't seem to be much challenge! I hope they address this but we shall see, game modes haven't been announced yet but fingers crossed as this is a big one I'm looking forward to.

Lord of the Rings War in the North: - I managed to sneak my brother in to the 18+ section with me to give this a go. We were thrown in to a story mission in co-operative play, I was a dwarf and he was an elf. Obviously I went for hand to hand combat and he stayed back with arrows. At first it seems great, classic hack and slash gameplay with a LOTR feel to it however I started to realise that once a few enemies gang up you become defenseless. I'm used to being able to take on as many enemies as there are when you're surrounded by them, looks like that may not be case here as I'd get 20 hits on me before I can even do anything, 5-10 seconds of this every 30 seconds really does start to bum you out. I wont let this put me off eventually playing the game but it is food for thought.

Ghost Recon Future Soldier: - LAN battles were going on with 6v6 battles. Me and my brother both got on next to eachother on the same team and I'm ashamed to say he ended up getting a better kill death ratio. I started off good with 2 kills in a row and then proceeded to get 5 deaths and no more kills in the 5 minute game. I'm not quite sure what the game mode was as I presumed it was Deathmatch but there did seem to be some objectives to do. Anyway, gameplay wise it's really good and I can tell this game is going to be loved. I found it hard to be accurate when shooting but I presume this is because it's third person perspective, I'm used to Call of Duty at moment so that explains why I didn't do well. I never figured out how to do anything like turning invisible or playing around with futuristic weapons which is a shame but oh well.

Saints Row The Third: - Man I was much more impressed with this than I thought I would have been. I'm not really in to sandbox games, it's because I like to keep things linear as I otherwise feel like I am missing out on doing something which results in missed achievements (which really bugs me). But yeah, starting the game off going in to a club with your team and gunning people down was so much fun. The way the enemies fell is what made all the difference. Think about it, when you kill somebody in a shooting game you're used to the usual body falls to the floor sequence. Well when playing this game I noticed much more animation on the death of an enemy. It's only little things like firing bullets towards the roof as they fall down but it gives a great impression. I am actually going to download the demo for the game when it comes out just to see if I feel the same way again or if I'm just slightly biased towards wanting to enjoy it as I was at the expo.

And that's all I can be bothered to say really as any other game I didn't play properly or only watched being played, this includes the two big guns Call of Duty and Battlefield 3. I wasn't going to bother queuing up to play these games so I just watched from a difference. The Spec Ops Survival mode looked good in Modern Warfare 3, similar to that of Horde from Gears of War which I think is great so I approve of it being implemented in to Call of Duty. There was UFC games, Ridge Racer, the MMORPG that is Star Wars (which had massive attention from people, big queue) Batman, Skyrim and plenty more but it just can't all be seen properly in the 5 hours I was there. Oh and Rage, that looks to be quite brutal for a 15 which surprised me. They had like 20 consoles set up for that game which is quite a lot and I was surprised.

The End

As we left woman were handing out free packets of doritos which was nice, I got 2 packets as I must be special haha. On the way home we saw a fire starting off in a skip which was pretty cool to witness as the fire truck came and started dealing with it. It wasn't too serious but was enough to get me to stop playing Fable Coin Golf to switch to camera mode and take a picture. Afterwards it took me another 45 mins to get Gold medals on those 3 levels and the 200G and game completion was mine. It was a good day and I would go again next year. I would much rather go with friends though as my dad only plays chess over the Internet and even my brother isn't too in to games anymore. So yeah, anybody wants to meet up next year so we can go in a group I would be more than willing. It's a year away though so no planning now, Jason over and out!

Post GTASC

2011-08-27T06:26:00.000-07:00

This has been copied and pasted from the blog I have over at True Achievements. If you don't know what the GTASC competition is then this may not be a good read for you.

As you probably know 3+2=6 got eliminated from the GTASC last week, a 2 man team of me and tractakid. What you may have not known is the team name originated from the tattoo I have on my foot, not sure if tracta told many of you that because I know I haven't.

But on to the nitty gritty, my thoughts on the whole competition. Having a competition that goes on for a year is always going to cause problems, a lot can happen in a year which can have direct or indirect influences on how one may contribute scoring points for their team. My main concern was how fast the sign ups went. Just a day or two I believe for 100 people to sign up. The question is, how many of them actually had the heart in them to give the competition a good go?

You may not agree with me here but I believe you should have over 100,000 gamerscore to be considered knowledgeable in the field of score whoring for a competition. Of course this isn't a definitive figure but I tend to use it as a guideline, somebody who has over 100k should hopefully know how to put points on when it's needed as they would have most likely been at a deadline before, be it a previous Gamerscore League or wanting to simply finish a game in order to trade it in as soon as possible.

I've kind of rambled off point a bit there so I'll go back to where I was heading haha. I remember the start of the competition was really lame. So lame. I have a friend that would have loved to be in the competition and I have no doubt would still be in now whoring away as strong as ever. He wasn't able to partake though as he wasn't quite quick enough to get his team signed up. It's hard to be a judge and decide who should or should not take part in a competition but I'd have thought some checking in to the gamers background could be done to see if they are truely capable of taking part in the competition, at a serious level. Sure they may not want to take it serious and I would be okay with that but when others that would take it seriously get left out I feel a bit bummed. Don't quote me but I'm sure a lot of the teams that went out early on are probably on low gamerscores that got that day excitement of taking part in a competition and then lost it the next day, not caring to score points and take advantage of being in the GTASC.

I mean I'm signed up for the GSL over at x360a which starts in a couple of weeks and I've taken a look at my competition, a lot of them with low gamerscores. They should be in a favourable position to beat me and anybody else with a high gamerscore as they will have games such as Avatar which have not been put on the there tag. But how many of them will actually outscore me? I'm in it for fun but I'm still going to use it as an opportunity to knock out a few of the easy unplayed games sitting on my shelf. It just makes me laugh a little when I see gamers with low scores talking the talk but then unable to walk the walk.

Getting gamerscore in a competition can be compared a lot to boosting I reckon, they both require determination and commitment to succeed. I'm not on about a few hours of boosting, I'm on about doing something that takes at least 10 hours to do which means planning has to be done. Lots of people just don't know how to commit. It means you can't bail and decide to go out with your mates nor does it mean you want to go to the movies with your girlfriend as you haven't seen her in a while. The GTASC has gotten very tight now and it will separate the men from the boys. Those that want to stay in now will need to make sacrifises and play Xbox more than they probably would like to. The guys with the big gamerscores understand this and they should ultimately get the job done as they have experience. Team The Hoarders I'm going to call you out, with one person on your team at just 50,000 gamerscore there is a lot of potential scoring to be done by you but will you get the job done? Team Disposable Income have done the majority of easy games on the console (in 3 different regions!) yet they continue to put up the points and stay in as they are true professionals to gamerscore whoring.

It was a shame my team went out last week but my thoughts and opinions I had (which I shared over TA feed) do remain the same, despite Van Uden's response to me about it. tracta made a mistake (although was small) which meant our team got knocked out. In the previous week I kept us in, I got the job done. It's not a dig at you Andrew, it's just backing up what I've been saying during this blog post. I said it was going to be my last week and I was sticking to that, to have kept going in the competition I would have had to make the sacrifises of ignoring my girlfriend, not going out skateboarding and potentially missing work just to get the available time to put up the needed points. I knew the workload was getting too much and I wanted out before we got eliminated.

This is where me and tracta both had different opinions. He wanted to get knocked out knowing he had given it his all and had done his best. Now that's all very good and all but how do you know you've really done your best? That's where I find flaws in that thought process. He may have felt like he did his best last week and went out with his head held high but me, I feel like a loser. What if I didn't see my girlfriend that day or what if I didn't go skateboarding, I could have played a new game and scored extra points to survive. Matter of fact is there are 168 hours in a week, there's a lot of gamerscore that could be earned in that timeframe. But no sleep you say! Well giving it your best shot could very well mean that you don't sleep. Only you yourself know what your best is (I'm speaking to everyone, not directly at tracta by the way) and I know my best was never shown in this competition.

I speak from experience as I did a Gamerscore League back in 2009 on x360a and had to put up 5,000 gamerscore in a few days to get my team in 8th position I think, which was our aim. I remember abandoning my girlfriend and skateboarding for those days and staying on the Xbox finishing games like Kung Fu Panda (which was enjoyable I must admit but still, it's tedious). We never did get that 8th position but we can't have been too far off. I did truely feel like I had given it one of my best shots as I was sick of playing Xbox and exhaustion had set in. You can only truely say you've given it your best efforts if you've felt those effects. Now I am speaking directly to you tracta, did you really give it your best try? I know I didn't and therefore I feel like a loser. Had I really given it my best shot and still gone out then I would be fine with it. For these reasons I would have rather just gone out in a week where I didn't try as at least then my conscience is clean for knowing I didn't try and fail. As they say, the first step towards failure is trying.

Think that would be all for now. I did have plans to mention more about what I've been up to since my elimination from the competition but this blog post is surely long enough as it is. I could double or even triple the length of it by including more details and thoughts/theories I have (I've missed out the whole dilemma of how I disagree with how scoring works in this comp) but I think I've summed up most of what I wanted to say. Remember they are just my thoughts and feelings and I'm not saying I'm correct and your wrong. Especially on the needing to have over 100,000 gamerscore part. There's guys with double my score who may think the same of me, if so they have the right as they're more experienced in achievement earning than me. Anywho that's me done, until next time!

Rambling Time

2011-05-05T13:31:00.000-07:00

I was thinking whilst playing Green Day Rock Band what I should title this blog post, I originally intended to just write about the Great TA Challenge however more ideas about what I want to say sprung to mind This has lead me in to changing the title of this blog. I'm about to ramble so the title does suit this blog post.

The Great True Achievement Challenge

So first up is The Great TA Challenge, something I haven't mentioned yet in blogs I think so it's about time I did. A year long challenge featuring 52 teams of 2 people, me and tractakid have managed to stay in the competition so far as we approach the halfway mark. I was quite frustrated with how the scoring worked at first (using TA points means negative scores at times which I still don't agree with) but with time I've come to accept it and have just got on with my gaming.

Now when I told tractakid I would partner him in this competition I wasn't entirely sure I wanted to as I had a project going with The Dumb Life which means for the first couple of months of the year i poured hours of hard work on to the website I created (www.thedumblife.co.uk for those interested). Turns out I've been scoring more than plenty of others in the competition and to be honest, I've barely tried. We had a few scares where we left it to late to score but really it's been easy as there's always a team or two that just don't bother the whole week. It defeats the whole purpose of having a year long tournament if all you need to do to stay in is score a little bit of points and you're fine. Sign ups for this challenge went very quick I remember and as such Bemusedbox and others were unable to participate. Now I know somebody such as him would have been a good competitor to this challenge yet he's not in as plenty of other people signed up without any serious content of actually bothering to participate. Slightly hypocritical of me I know but I have gotten down to business and scored points when needed to, it's a big shame plenty of other people do not.

My Dilema

Now since I've been in this challenge for quite some time I've started to take it a bit more seriously. I don't believe for one minute me and tractakid are capable of winning (smrnov and tjayars are too beasty) but that doesn't mean I don't want to give it a good shot and see how far we can go. This had lead to me being conservative in a bid to save points for future weeks when I could need them. Right now as I type this though me and tractakid have a combined total of 2653 score and are in 6th place, that's quite a lot better than the team in last place with 121 points. I'm getting frustrated with myself for letting this competition take over me and stopping me from getting gamerscore like I want to. I recently bought a bunch of games to help me hit the 200,000 gamerscore mark yet I "can't" touch them as I'll be wasting easy points which may come in handy. I decided to buy Assassin's Creed on my Windows Phone as that only has 300 TA score and has a playtime of like 10-15 hours so that would be good to occupy me with. However I've still held off playing it just because I don't like scoring uneeded points. I suppose it's just the principle of it, quite infuriating for me.

So What I've Done

Well yesterday I decided that there would be no more need for me to score points this week as me and tractakid are surely to be safe, therefore I needed something else to do to get me by. I've been playing Green Day Rock Band as completing all of the challenges on that game is a bit of a grind but I don't mind, I love the band which makes playing this music/rhythm game much more fun than some of the others. So I'm going to probably put a bit of focus on to that for this and next week and hopefully get it to the point where there's only a few hard achievements left which I'll be happy to leave. I'm a big fan of GH/RB type games and have played practically everyone on the console to date (apart from non UK releases) yet Band Hero is the only one I've gotten to 1000G. That doesn't bother me though as they all have 1 or 2 tricky achievements in so I don't blame myself for not finishing them.

What I do blame myself with though is the lack of time I've put in to the pro instruments on Rock Band 3. I've got £170 worth of plastic instruments under my bed designed for the game and that game only yet I've barely used them. I like the Keyboard and Pro Guitar/Bass yet I haven't had much desire to play on them. I think the main reason is because I need some friends to get them (go on Andrew ;) as the competitiveness of it is key I reckon. I might have a go on them soon once I'm done with Green Day, there's something else on my mind though.....

What I Plan To Do Next

..... and that's playing Harry Potter and The Order of the Phoenix. I haven't mentioned in a blog but most of my online friends know that I have started reading and watching all of the Harry Potter books and films again. I've had the desire to do this for a while yet it took my girlfriend saying she was going to read them all to give me the motivation to do it. The books don't take as long to read as I remember (I'm currently 220 pages in to the fourth book, The Goblet of Fire) yet it's still time I would have usually spent Skateboarding or playing Xbox. Anyway, the point of mentioning this is that now would be a good as time as ever to finally play Order of the Phoenix which has been sitting on my shelf for probably around a year or so now. I dislike using guides as I'm always paranoid I'm going to miss something and waste my time, this game shall test me with it's collectibles. It's Hogwarts though and I absolutely love J.K Rowley's imaginary world so I'm hoping that will keep me from going insane. If I do manage to complete the game I'll be sure to buy Half Blood Prince and get Deathly Harrows Part 1. The 2nd part of the last book comes to cinemas the second week of July I believe so that's when I would like to get this all done by. Another 2 months, should be enough time.

Push to 200,000 Gamerscore

2011-04-13T06:07:00.001-07:00

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!

2011-04-02T10:38:00.000-07:00

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!

Shaun White Skateboarding = EPIC FAIL!

2010-12-05T15:16:00.000-08:00

I've played Shaun White Snowboarding and I thought it was pretty good. It had its problems but nevertheless it was an enjoyble experience I recommend all to have. Surely they could replicate this for skateboarding and be a success. No, just no.

Firstly you need to be aware that there's 2 skateboarding genres, realistic and arcade. Tony Hawk has always dominated with the arcade style but Black Box have came and destroyed that franchise with realism, creating the most authentic skateboarding game to date. For Shaun White to have stood a chance at being successfull he'd have needed to ensure his game went on the arcadey side of things so that people such as tractakid who are unable to master Skates controls could play the game no problem.

But no, Shaun White Skateboarding has it's own retarded variation of the excellent flick it control scheme which is used in the skate franchise. I haven't played the game too much yet but if you get told to do a Kickflip to Tailslide or something then you're going to have just as much trouble in this game as you would if you are incapable of doing it consistent on a Skate game. To piss me off even more they've decided to lock the majority of the tricks from the get go meaning I've been forced to use just basics such as Kickflips and 50-50's, not fun..... But it gets worse! I finally unlocked the 360 Flip trick and to my horror they have completely ruined the animation of it. The 360 Flip is one of the most awesome looking tricks in skateboarding so it's essential it looks just as sexy in the game. What we're given is a retarded version of it, I can't quite put my finger on the reason why but it kind of looks as if the skater underflips it before hand, eurgh.

The game can't even get it's FS and BS's right. If you approach the rail and it is infront of your feet as you Ollie then the trick you are about to do is Frontside, even if you turn your body to looking backwards (which one may assume meant the trick was Backside). It's that simple yet the game seems to muddle it up or just not even register a FS or BS at times. I was messing around with a few BS Bluntslides and I get "FS Tailslide" register, what the hell! There could have been a win in the game as when you flip trick above coping on vert your skater flips the board in to your hands so you catch it and then place it under your feet. This is how Shaun White and other vert skaters do fliptricks in to grabs in real life yet the Tony Hawk and Skate franchise have failedto incorporate the ability to do that in the game, instead you catch the board with your feet and then grab it. Thing is Shaun White fails as it FORCES you to do it like that. Lets say I want to do a little Kickflip to Fakie on a 4 foot ramp, guess what happens? I can't because my skater automatically tries to grab it even though there's clearly not enough time to do so.

And I'm still not done moaning. There's no way of powersliding to reduce speed or help turn round a corner quick, you can't jump whilst off your board (makes traversing terrain a bitch at times) and I've already encountered a few glitches such as bobbing up and down on the floor. Did I forget to mention there's a marker feature? It's nice but you need to wait 5 seconds for it to re-load you, that would be fine but skate does it instantly.....

You may think I'm being harsh on the game but you need to understand these small things do matter and are important. How would you feel if you placed a racer such as Forza and your small crappy Mini started roaring like a McLaren does. You'd be shocked right? That's how I feel with Shaun White Skateboarding, where's the polish to remove all the stupidness. I can probably find myself getting some fun out of the game once I've unlocked all the tricks, time will tell. It seems like a mediocre game, there's just one big problem.... Skate is so much better. :)

Lost the Desire :(

2010-11-21T03:07:00.001-08:00

I feel like I owe it to my Xbox friends to write an entry in this blog explaining what I have been up to and why if you've seen me on the xbox this week I was most likely on the dashboard (thought I'd give dashboard saving a go like tractakid does :P).

Truth be told my girlfriend of 3 years left me on Sunday after I discovered a few of her secrets she been hiding the past 4 months. It's the worst kind of betrayal and hurts. As a result I've needed my friends more than ever and I have once again focused my attention on skateboarding, the only love in life that will never hurt me (least not emotionally).

Right now is a prime example of my lack of motivation. It's a sunday morning and it looks pretty wet outside so chances of skateboarding properly are really slim. My usual self would say "screw skateboarding, I'm going to get some achievements" but I just don't feel like that right now. Heck I have new copies of NFS Hot Pursuit and AC Brotherhood sat right under my nose as I type this yet the desire to play them is slim. In 3 days I've gotten hold of Kinect, a HTC 7 Trophy (mobile with Windows Live on) and the 2 games I just mentioned. That should be enough to hype anybody but i's not quite working. I'm starting to regret buying Call of Duty BlackOps too as that has barely been touched at all. No regrets on purchasing Green Day Rock Band though as I know eventually I will love to play that.

This is the best time of the year to be a gamer and the worst time to be a skateboarder (due to weather) however my priorities are stopping me from enjoying my Xbox to it's fullest. Life sure is crappy for me right now. [cry]

Spoilt for Choice

2010-10-31T05:47:00.000-07:00

Been a couple of weeks since my last post, in that time I've managed to assassinate 7 people in Assassin's Creed, progress which was going well but has since slowed down in the last week as it hasn't been played. The reason for this is because of the sudden burst of new games coming out.

Before I get on to that reason though I should state that my Xbox time this past week was low due to the fact I have had a free house which means I've hosted numerous parties. I also hosted a big FIFA 11 tournament (making sure my profile is never signed in whilst playing as I do not wish to be associated with the achievements on that game yet) which combined a total of me and 6 friends battling it out in a league to see who was the best FIFA gamer. I wont dwell on this topic too long, I'll just say that people get agitated when they lose and the whole fun spirit of the competition is lost (well really it's all Shane's fault) so after just 2 days we called it quits. In that time we did manage to play eachother at least 3 times though so enugh games were played. For anybody interested I came 3rd out of 5th teams as I played with Liverpool, I was gunning for Golden Boot against Wayne Rooney until Shane got pissed off and let Man Utd beat him 8-0, causing the fun to end and Rooney to destroy Torres on goals scored. That's enough blabbing, click the link below to see the scores.

http://img259.imageshack.us/img259/9746/fifa11tournamen....jpg

(We did play a few more games on Day 3 but I can't be bothered to sort out a picture and upload it).

Having to stop myself from playing FIFA 11 during the week I also had th temptation of Guitar Hero Warriors of Rock which a friend brought round for us all to play. I already have this on my tag so that's not a problem however having to complete Quest Mode twice (which equates to 93 songs x 2 = 186 songs played) would take up too much time so I've left that for now. Last Thursday saw Sims 3 and EA MMA arrive through my letter box (thankyou rover08 :)) and both of them games have been put straight on to my tag. I had my first proper go on Sims 3 last nigh for an hour and I can tell the improvement to the franchise is massive compared to when I played the games on Playstation 2 back in 2003. I think the game will be a big hit with my girlfrind too so I plan on keeping this game, no rush to play it now.

There would be a rush with EA MMA however a lack of achievement guide and road map (plus a low trade in price for the game at CEX alreadt) has meant that I plan to just keep the game now and play it at my own pace. I put it on my tag as I could see there were a lot of easy achievements to be won on it. I haven't ventured online nor have I gave Career mode a go but I've already obtained 9 achievements for 135 gamerscore. This will be on the backburner for potentially ever however it is nice to know I have a fighting game in my collection to work on at any point as I see fit.

The new games trend continued as I decided to spend £94.85 on Rock Band 3 with the Keyboard peripheral. I had been tempted on this bundle for a while but it was the factor of having house parties which led to me giving in and deciding to actually buy it. The game is absolutely fantastic and leads me to believe that there wont be a Rock Band 4 as there really is no need for it. The new pro instruments are sure to keep gamers occupied for hundreds of hours (my progress on Pro Keyboard is yet to start, got other games to play instead) an the interface on the game is excellent. A small but VERY helpful feature is being able to swap instruments via the character select screen without signing out of gamertags and all the usual nonsence we've come accustomed to in Guitar Hero and Rock Band games. All that being said I do think GH Warriors of Rock is a good game too as it has some features which are unique and would have been nice to see on Rock Band 3.

Finally I can't forget Medal of Honor which is still a new game to my collection. I finally started on campaign yesterday and have managed to do 3 levels on Hard already. The game is not Hard at all, in fact I find it a joke that I'm even playing on Hard difficulty. I don't hide behind cover as required in Call of Duty veteran, I just run around guns blazing to get the job done. I've got just one achievement left on the multiplayer aspect (for ranking up to top level) and then I will hopefully be done with the game (depending on how tricky Tier 1 mode is). HMV are offering Call of Duty Black Ops for just £7.99 when Medal of Honor is traded in. I believe Black Ops is reatailing at £45 so that's a really good deal.

I've still got plenty of other games to play too but no time. With a job hopefully in the works within the next few days my gaming timewill be cut down even more. I plan on playing Rock Band 3 endless setlist today as I may not have free time to do it in the future. It seems to be a lot less stressful than the previous games so I do believe I shall get it done.

Why Hello Assassin's Creed

2010-10-16T03:23:00.000-07:00

With the release of Brotherhood only a month away I have finally decided to properly play Assassin's Creed and then move on to it's sequel all before Brotherhood drops. It's not too much to ask of myself however with a job interview on Tuesday which could lead to 20+ hours a week of work and new games like Medal of Honor arriving (came through the post today, big thank you to rover08 for that :D) I can see it becoming a problem due to a lack of free time. I'm also edgey on the fact that I havn't quite filmed enough tricks for my yearly skate video but that's another topic all together.

On to Assassin's Creed, man I love it! I am not too in to sandbox games like GTA, I tend to get bored running around killing random people but Assassin's Creed hasn't bored me yet. Yesterday before I went to bed I had a quick play with getting some of the combat achievements such as stealth killing 50 guards and 100 enemies defeated without dying. I thoroughly enjoyed getting those achievements as there isn't much else that's as satisfying as sneaking up behind an enemey and BAM, knife to the gut to a calm but cool walk away before anybody notices. I'll tell you this, if I was female I would want altair's babies.

But then again I am only on to my third assassination target and I've seen the weaknesses of the game shine through. It's so god damn repetitive..... It's shameful really that the bureau's in the game all look the same, the dialogue of citizens you save quickly repeats itself and the whole process towards getting ready to assassinate your target is the same. Now I'm sure everybody is going to tell me that the sequel isn't so stupid and fixes these problems, I really hope so as I can imagine I will have so much fun with it.

The achievements on Assassin's Creed have always been extremely off putting to me as friends such as adiash73 will know, I get extremely paranoid about the fact I'm going to miss something or do something wrong which will result in me messing up an achievement. Well now after playing it for a good few hours I can safely say I have a good enough understanding of the game to know what it takes to get all the achievements and I don't foresee any serious problems causing me hassle in the future. I think I should give an apology to tractakid for all the paranoid banter I gave him in chat the other day. I don't feel guilty though as I've had to read countless lines of him moaning and groaning as he plays the music rhythem games.

That's enough for now, I always manage to make my blog entries rather lengthy and I can imagine people can't be bothered to read it all haha. Now I've got to force myself to not get engrossed in Medal of Honor whilst I continue to grind out Assassin's Creed, until next time!

Eurogamer Expo 2010 in London Thoughts

2010-10-04T08:53:00.000-07:00

First off this post will be long as I plan to write as much detail about my day as possible. Last time I went to an Expo I managed to blab about a lot, I'm sure I'll be able to do the same today. I'm going to lay the post out the same way I did for the Gadget Show back in April as that worked quite well. Here we go!

Sunday 3rd October 2010 - Eurogamer Expo at Earl's Court in London

The Journey There

Waking up at 8:30am when you've been getting used to waking up at midday (Halo Reach IS the reason to blame for this) is a bit of a shock to the system but when you're excited for the day ahead you're able to get out of bed with a spring in your step! My dad drove me him and my brother to London in a little under an hour and a half I think which was good timing. Upon arrival the queue seemed to be really long but after waiting 15 minutes it was 11am and the gates opened. Thankfully the gates moved quick as we was in.

PS3 Move

Don't Know Game Name (I tried researching!)

At the entrance is where the Playstation 3's Move technology is located, therefore making it our first stop. We stumbled accross one of the most bizarre games of our current generation. I remember watching developer videos of it at e3 and thinking how it will be fun to play despite the strangeness of it. I'm not quite sure of the purpose to the game but basically you have to try get to the bottom of a hill as fast as possible whilst collecting coins. That doesn't sound too bad however then I tell you that your character is riding a shopping trolley that can spin attack people and allow you to duck under objects.

Unfortunately me, my dad and my brother were unable to get to grips with the game in the few minutes we all spent with it. I am happy to report that the controls do work and the game responded with everything I did well. I crashed a lot and did kind of crappy but I can say this is due to lack of practise and not doing the tutorials (which my dad did). I was quite impressed with the amount of different types of ways you could interact with the character, especially how to jump. To do that you have to point the wand upwards and then raise your arm quickly. Failure to point the wand before hand means there will be no jump and instead you will power up your guy for a speed attack. The only disappointment I discovered with the Sony Move was that if you twist the remote it there's no way the Eyetoy can pick up on the movement. I always thought it was call that the Wiimotes on the Wii could.

The Shoot

The Shoot is a Time Crysis type of game but with robots, not humans. I had a quick go and found that although the controller was responsive and I was able to aim at enemies I ended up just pointing anywhere and shooting without tactically thinking about it. Everynow and then a rocket would come at us and we needed to try and dodge them by moving to the side. Everytime I tried and everytime I failed. I asked a rep to explain to me and he didn't seem to know how either which kind of bummed me out so I left.

Heroes on the Move

Didn't get any pictures of this (maybe some videos but will look later) but from what I saw the game appeared to be quite amusing. My brother had to throw a razorblade as a frisbe with Daxter (from the Jak & Daxter series) and then aim where the frisbe was going with the Move controller. Simple concept but it seemed to be effective. The enriovnment had lots of objects to interact with meaning getting high scores on the game could become quite a fun challenge. Afterwards I saw my Dad play as Clank (from the Ratchet and Clank series) shooting at lots of enemies. I wish I got to see a bit more of the game and took some photos as it seemed rather decent. I do wonder sometimes why games can't be released sooner, it has a date of Spring 2011 but it seems complete already.

Other Mentions & Move Round Up

There were a few more games on show which made use of the Move controller but I never had a chance on them. I watched people play The Fight: Lights Out a few times and it seemed to always get a good reception and a crowd wanting to play. I noticed a trend though which happens in all fighting type games, people start swinging like crazy and forgetting to block. It leaves me wondering whether they enjoyed swinging there arms like a maniac to look good even though in reality they probably did pretty badly. I walked past Socom a few times I think but I kept forgetting to go and properly check it out, bummer.

Overall I think the Move is a good product which is worth a buy. It's not groundbreakingly amazing since the Wii has been there and done that really however it's nice to know that in the future there will be core games made that make use of this technology. Since it's around the £50 price mark I reckon my dad will end up buying it soon. I look forward to this as I reckon I would quite enjoy it.

PS3 Games

Motorstorm Apocalypse 3D

There's a few franchises I wish were on the Xbox 360, Motorstorm is definitely one of them. We have the original in my household however a lack of achievements stopped me from proper playing it (although I really did enjoy the few hours I spent on it). I was curious to see how a racing game could handle 3D so we got hold of a console as soon as possible to give it a go (which was a good thing as I never managed to give it another go later on).

3D is an aquired taste with most people being negative at first but then enjoying it once they're truely experienced it. There will always be a few naysayers though and when it comes to video games I can see why. I put the glasses on and it just felt so weird. I had a dab at 3D gaming with Avatar back in April but things are hectic in Motorstorm and I had rubbish and rubble flying around everywhere. It's a lot to take in at first and I found it slightly infuriating. I've got to say that they've done the 3D well for the game but I have to question whether it really needs 3D. It's cool and all but I think I'd just rather see sexy high definition graphics.

But the gameplay was fantastic as I expected and I loved the level design for the track I was on. It's a bit like Split Second where the environment crumbles around you. I was hinted to press the square button and as I did it zoomed in on some skyscrapers about to collapse so I had to use my boost to get past them before I was squashed. I didn't notice too much as unfortunately I decided to get off really quickly. Good stuff.

Other PS3 Games

I didn't actually play any of the other Playstation 3 exclusive games that were on show. I did watch people play most of them though so I'll quickly say my two cents

Gran Turismo 5: - I kid you not when I say I thought I was looking at Forza Motorsport for a bit. Both have ace graphics with the same cars and tracks, do you blame me? They had an area set up so you could play this in a dome shaped seat thing and a steering wheel. It looked pretty sweet and I can't believe we didn't take a photo. It was also in 3D at booths.

inFAMOUS 2: - I havn't played the original but have been interested in it. I watched the sequel today for a minute (only 2 consoles set up and they were hidden kind of) and what I saw looked really good. We were in a chase and needed to catch up to the limo so with our powers we were able to slide accross a telephone wire and then jump off in to a glide. We saw the limo down below and landed on it for a cutscene. Some unique type of gameplay there if I do say so myself.

LittleBigPlanet 2: - What I saw was the same brilliant formulae and therefore I didn't feel the need to play. I was hoping to see some mini games (new to the sequel I believe) but everytime I looked people were just creating their own levels or completing pre-existing ones.

Xbox 360 - Kinect

The most anticipated thing about this event for me was Kinect, whether or not the technology really works to make it a success. I loved the concept of it at e3 2009 when it was announced however since then my views have differed due to it's negative response by consumers and it's high price point. None of that would matter though if I liked it, I left the show feeling slightly bitter...

Dance Central

It's the big Kinect game for launch as it aims to get the whole family off the couch and learning some dance moves to popular dancey songs. It was the first time I saw Kinect and I felt my stomach doing backflips due to excitement haha. Throughout the day two woman were demoing it and at the end of every song they tried to rally people together to take over so they could get a breather. Eventually I decided to give the game a go with my dad to see what it was like. I was surprised that it's not as hard as it looks to copy the moves shown on the screen. I mean yes I made sure we were on Easy difficulty so the moves probably changed at a slower pace but to me that was still a good adequate difficulty to be on. On the right side of the screen there is a silouhette of your body which shows you how you look. There's also the characters dancing on screen as well as images coming up showing the move which is coming next as well as the scoring system, I didn't know where to look! I was able to see that Kinect picked up my body extremely well, if I move my knee up in the air in a certain way then I'm mirrored just like that.

Unfortunately I was unable to see any of the other modes that the game had as they only wanted to show off the mode I was on. I have heard there is a jam mode which could be very interesting. What I played the characters on screen perform perfectly no matter what I want to do, I'm hoping the jam move will let your avatar move exactly like you do so you can really see how you look (instead of looking at a small silhouette). There's most definitely going to be a training mode to help you learn each move too (and there's going to be a lot of them). It's being developed by Harmonix who I have a lot of faith in thanks to the excellent Rock Band franchise they have created (more on that later). Therefore there is no cheating in this game like you can do in games such as Just Dance on the Wii, oh no. As I watched other people play I noticed how they were able to get yellow or green ratings on easier simple moves which repeat for a few seconds however on quick complex moves lots of red was coming up (which I presume means no points). I LOVE this as it proves that Kinect technology can really tell if you're doing the dance move correctly or not, something I was worried about.

What is key to note about Dance Central is that you can take away the scoring system and even Kinect and people will still love it. There's a reason why Just Dance has sold so well on the Wii despite it being terrible and it's because people just love an excuse to sing and dance. I saw plenty of people having fun on the stage (including woman) and I'm sure plenty of them didn't care for the score or how good they looked, just laughing at the pictures that are taken in the freestyle section is funny enough for them. Problem is it's not going to be cheap and I can't see people forking out the money for it despite it being an excellent product. We shall see.

Joy Ride

This game angered many of gamers such as myself when Microsoft announced it would no longer be a free aracade game, instead it had become a full retail title for Kinect. I had one quick race on Joy Ride against my brother and I was very disappointed with what I saw. Firstly there is no way of accelerating or braking, that's pretty stupid in my eyes but I can forgive it (to make it easier for non gamers). All you really need to know is if you move your hands like a steering wheel you move left and right, at least you're supposed to. I had a horrible time trying to move as I went left to right to left to right repeatedly and as a result crashed plenty.

Throughout the couple of minutes the race took I tried all I could think of to steer better by moving my hands quick to slow or stiff or relaxed, nothing helped me. I came in 8th place (which was last) and felt pretty damn disappointed with what I had just experienced. My brother seemed to do okay on it as did other people I watched play so maybe I just didn't quite get it or got unlucky. I'm hoping it's the latter as I was watching people have fun with the game and I was jealous. I managed to make the boosting work quite well (pull to body then push out quick) and I did a drift once (by leaning my body to the side) so I can say that Kinect did work in that respect however it's useless if the steering fails like it did for me.

Kinect Sports

Probably the worst game of the show this was, it's just Wii Sports but probably worse. There were 4 games to choose from which was volleyball, 100m sprint, table tennis and bowling. I watched all of them in action (volleyball and table tennis were popular due to 2 players) and they all seemed to make little use of Kinect. I saw two kids infront of me in the queue do the race together and the on screen avatar did not mirror how the kids looked whatsoever. It left me wondering how the technology was being used as I was expecting to see a representation of how you sprint show on the game. Instead what I presume happens if Kinect looks at how fast your less are moving and adjusts the speed as a result. I'd need more time to confirm that it's rubbish but it more than likely is.

Next one to discuss is table tennis, the fan favourite (it always seemed to be on everytime I walked past). There's only one compliment I can give to this and that's that Kinect is able to recognise whether you hit the ball with the palm of your hand or the back. The avatars were able to mirror your body movement pretty well like that however the ping pong ball could not react with how you swung your arm very well. I saw this one guy keep trying to aim to the left and everytime the ball just went in a straight line, not diagonal like his arm was clearly doing. Maybe he was doing it wrong but if he was then I have to question the whole mentallity of Kinect, I thought it was meant to be easy for the whole family to play, controller free and all. I've played table tennis on Wii Resort and I have to say I think it's much better.

Volleyball suffered from the same problem the table tennis did in that the game doesn't react to how you hit the ball, instead it justs acknowledges you made contact with the ball and hits it back to the same position over the net everytime. Now I didn't play it and only saw one game between too guys but I got the sense that they were just jumping and frailing their arms, not tactically trying to place the ball. As I just said I believe this is because the game wont change the path of the ball even if you hit it to the left or the right but maybe the guys I were watching were simply doing a bad job. The frustrating thing about this game though is that people will still have fun with it, despite it being pretty bad just like Just Dance is on the Wii.

So when I got my chance to play I picked the other game I hadn't seen in action yet, that was bowling. It was time to see whether or not Kinect would change the path the ball took depending on where I aimed. I wasn't too hopeful it would due to what I saw in the previous games but I remained optimistic. I grab the ball by either moving my left or right hand to the lane I want to pick a ball up from, that worked well everytime but nothing too impressive there. There's about 6 to 8 arrows on the lane with one being selected at a time, this selected arrow shows what position you are bowling from. If I took a step left or right the game would recognise this and change the selected arrow, I found that quite impressive however it didn't always seem to work and I had problems doing it at times which was a big shame. When it came to the bowling it was shambles. I've done bowling in real life and I'm half decent plus I'm pretty good on the Wii so I know how my arm needs to behave in order to direct the ball to where I want it to go. More often than not the ball did not go where I asked it to which was very dissatisfying.

In conclusion I have to say to everyone avoid this Kinect game! It's a clone of Wii Sports and not a very good one. There's no point buying this for a few awes at one Kinect does when the Wii already made a fairly decent attempt to recreate the sports for the living room. If Kinect Sports had innovated and allowed gamers to use real skill then I would be sitting here telling you it's a pretty decent title, but it's not. The least they could have done is added in different modes or challenges but I don't think they have. This may be a bit of fun for the kids and elders but please, stay away.

Kinect Adventures

I can safely say that Kinect Adventures is not a big disappointment like Kinect Sports was, instead Kinect Adventures does what Kinect Sports fails to do, actually let skill determine the gameplay. The demo that was being played was of a career type mode I believe which kept repeating which meant that we were unable to pick the type of event we wanted to do.

I had my eye set on one where you are in a cart on a track and you need to move around and duck to avoid obstacles and collect coins. I was very impressed when I saw a video for this at e3 this year and yet again I was impressed when I witnessed it being played live. People seemed to have great fun making their body in to Y shapes and spreading their arms diagonal to collect coins whilst preparing to move left or right to avoid hitting blocks coming your way. I do wonder though if there's any way of ranking the difficulty up on it though as otherwise after playing it 5 times you're going to remember the course well and probably get a perfect score. Nevertheless I am sure anybody who plays that will get a good sense of satisfaction from the game as Kinect really is able to mirror your movements on to the avatar brilliantly.

An effective but potentially boring game on show was one where you are in the sea and your tank gets hit by fish, causing leaks. Your job is to rub your hand on all the holes to heal them. I think kids are going to like it but one go will be enough for us adults unless there's a way to change the difficulty. The 2 people I saw on it weren't having to move much however if there starts to become lots of leaks really quickly then it could become a knackering game to play.

Problem with this one is that I've seen it all before years ago with the Eyetoy. Hopefully you can use other parts of your body such as your feet to do the job too, if so it could be pretty funny.

I got to play on the game where you and a friend are in a raft and you need to collect coins as you head down river. Unfortunately for my dad I wasn't too interested in actually trying to play the game properly as I had seen before me fail. As you are now working co-operatively together it's important that both people move the same way at the same time and jump in unison. I did this briefly with my dad and it seemed to work quite well despite us not doing too good. Before long though I was just dancing around checking to see whether Kinect's 1 to 1 ratio is plausible, and it is. I was able to get in to a crouching position on the floor and my avatar mimicked it plus I was doing karate kicks and Kinect recognised it and displayed on screen accordingly. It's not perfect though as it's unable the movement in your fingers which is a shame plus I was unable to get my hand on my avatars head despite a few tries. I'll try upload a video of me and my dad playing it sometime, it's quite amusing.

My Thoughts on Kinect

I am left slightly bemused with the game selection choice for Kinect that was shown at the show. The technology does work (although it's not perfect) yet game developers don't seem to be making most of the potential, instead opting to bring out generic games which we've already seen on the Wii. Dance Central is probably going to be a brilliant game yet wont reach sales it deserves because people don't need to spend £125 on a camera when they already have a Wii which works perfectly fine. I can imagine the average mum leaving the game show yesterday thinking Kinect was good fun but not much better than the Wii. The reality is that it's got a lot better technology, it's just not being used quite right yet.

As for me I shall keep my fingers crossed that my dad goes and buys it as I'm not prepared to fork out the money because I don't believe it's worth it yet. With Sony Move being really good though I can imagine him opting for that as a purchase instead and to be honest I can't blame him.

Xbox 360 Games

To be honest there wasn't really many games that I played properly, most of them I had a minute or 2 on near the end when the queues died down. I didn't really feel the need to play most of them as I know what to expect. Sure there's new features in Fable but it's nothing I've never seen before. I spent the majority of my time on Rock Band 3 (I shall discuss that at the end of this blog though) as that has new peripherals to try out. Nevertheless I'll give my thoughts on what I saw as I watched others playing.

Assassin's Creed Brotherhood

Two people I know online both played this a lot they've told me and I can see why, the new multiplayer is a good bit of innovation for the franchise. Now I havn't played much of Assassin's Creed 1 as I borrowed it from a friend however I played enough to understand the concept of the game. Online is the same in the sense that you need to hund a target and assassinate them however it's made different as you need to watch your own back to (as you're also a target).

I was in an 8 player game and excited to see how this was going to work. You get to choose a character to be with all of them having strengths and weaknesses plus a selection of different weapons could be picked. There's a arrow that works like a compass which allows you to know where your target is so I tended to walk slowly in the crowds with all the other civilians, trying to blend in so I'm not seen. What tended to happen is I could tell that there's a human player around as they are sprinting which makes them obvious. I was able to get my target a few times and had a great sense of accomplishment everytime I did. I'm not sure but I think I'm the target of the target I'm trying to get, meaning we're both on to eachother. However there are 6 other people in the game and anyone of them can be assassinated by me and I will get points from them as a result of it, just not much plus there's no arrow pointing to their direction (making them harder to spot). When you or your target dies you both get given a new target, and you continue from there.

I only got to play one 5 minute round which was not very much time so I was unable to really get to see what the online offers. There's ways to set up traps and fool your targets by numerous different ways so I'm quite excited to play the game now when it comes out in November. It's very fresh and I think will become a big hit.

Brink

Had the longest queue of the event Brink did despite having 20 consoles set up for it. I never had a go on it (although I would have done if I had friends with me) but I did spent a few minutes watching somebody have a go on it. Seemed like a decent online shooter. I know there's lots of unique features for the game but I wasn't able to notice any from just watching, I'll need to look in to it more sometime.

Fable 3

As this was one of the games I knew my brother was most looking forward to playing on we went and queued for what felt like forever for him to be able to get a go on the game. I wasn't interested because I didn't want to spoil any of the story or check out any new features as I am happy to wait to play the full product. Lionhead definitely made the best demo out of all the games on show as they had picked around 8 different demos and put them in to one, giving you the choice to choose what part of the game you wish to play.

I watched people play through a few of the modes and as I expected it just Fable 2 with a new storyline. Sure there's going to be small little improvements but there's nothing that I felt the need to go and check out there and then. Not too sure what else to say on this really so I'll just post some pictures up.

Def Jam Rapstar: - Really enjoyed watching the guys on stage perform on this game. They probably rap in real life so they got quite enthusiastic and got the crowd going. I didn't bother having a go because I can't rap but I quite enjoyed hearing So Solid Crew - 21 Seconds being played throughout the day. Classic!

Just Dance 2 (on Wii): - Looked like the same crap the original had so I didn't want to play. I was hoping to talk to a representative so I could question them on the scoring system but nobody was around.

Need for Speed Hot Pursuit: - I did want to play this but I whenever I went past it always had one of the longest queues going. I ended up forgetting about it though and left sad that I didn't get a chance to play. I think what was playable was a hot pursuit in a LAN game with half people as cops and other half as robbers. That would have been fun to try, hopefully it will be released as a demo on the marketplace in the coming weeks.

Pro Evolution Soccer 2011: - It's out soon so I didn't feel the need to play it plus there's already a demo on the marketplace. I prefer FIFA anyway so I don't care too much for the PES franchise. The last one I played was 2008 though and I not played much of that. Thing is I reckon I could play the new one and it'll still feel similar, sports games don't seem to change much each year.

Vanquish: - Didn't play it but from what I saw there was a LOT of fighting and shooting. It seems like it's going to be a game where you have the trigger held down for shooting non stop.

18+ Section

Proof of identification was needed to get entrance to this area which was closed off by curtains stopping any underagers seeing what was going on. This sucked as it meant by brother couldn't come in and play with me so I only popped in to here 3 times. The final time I went in most of the games didn't have a queue so I had a quick blast on the majority of the games.

Bulletstorm: - Only 4 consoles were set up for this and it wasn't easy to find which is disappointing as I have big expectations for this game. I was unable to play it was always crowded so I didn't even watch for very long. Therefore I can't give any opinions on it.

Crysis 2: - I have been anticipating this game so when I saw a console free I walked there swiftly to nab the spot before anybody else took it. I got thrown in to a 12 person LAN game on a level which seemed like a crumbling hotel. I thought the environment on the game was amazing, I've never played a level in multiplayer that had so much going on in the scenery. Rooms has collapsed to floors below and there were flames from explosions going on. I managed to get 12 kills compared to 10 deaths which I was happy with (however would have been better if I didn't start sucking at the end). I had a problem with aiming as my accuracy seemed to be terrible although I wont fault the game for that, maybe I'm just too use to Halo Reach at the moment. I didn't bother experimenting with the guns or classes, instead I just stayed assault the whole time and got my kills that way. I did press the LB button a few times though which I believe made me invisible (which also means that must have been my type of special power I had selected or something). I wasn't able to use it for any benefit though which was a shame but it was only a 10 minute game which I spent most of the time just running around admiring the level. I did notice that all of us looked exactly the same, hopefully there will be some customization in the final version of the game. In conclusion I can state that I'm sure the game will have decent online that I may get sucked in to. We shall see.

Dead Space 2: - I wanted to check this out as I havn't played the original and have always heard good things about it. There always seemed to be somebody at a console though so I never got my hands on it. I watched for a minute though and thought it would be a creepy game to play in the dark. Some of the monsters you have to fight on that game are so deformed, the art team deserve credit for their inspirational creatures.

Dragon Age II: - Not played the original and have never really wanted to, I can love RPG's but I can tell Dragon Age is not one that I would. The combat on it seems terrible, I found it really slow paced and boring. I would go up to an enemy and press A and they will get sliced up but there didn't seem to be any types of combos that can be used so I would then turn around and press A on the next enemey. Everynow and then my powers recharged and I hit X or B to do a special power. Still, it was repetitive.... Maybe RPG games are meant to be like that, I just havn't played one properly in ages. Dragon Age looks like the type of game where I could go crazy and hack n slash. The cutscenes looked really lame and cheesy plus I thought there was way too much blood, not appealing if you ask me.

Fallout New Vegas: - After just a minute of running around a wasteland I was bored wondering what to do. I did manage to find an enemy and got prompted to go in to the menu which lets me choose which part of an enemy I would like to aim at. I decided to hit his arm which was a great success as it meant the dynamite he had in his hand blew up and killed him. I then proceeded to more wandering around until I got bored again (in about 20 seconds). I didn't like Oblivion either, I guess I just don't like Bethesda's style.

Gears of War 3: - Everytime I looked at a TV which had Gears of War 3 on I always was impressed by the graphics. I don't think they're anything special, they were just unusually bright and I quite liked it. There was only one game mode on offer and it was one of the new ones I think. You get to spawn as a locust and have to kill the COG. I think it's the reverse of Horde mode and it seems to be a good idea. For a split second I got excited that I may see some achievements for the game as I hit the guide button and realised I was signed in to a profile (all the other games I had been on were not, I always checked :P). I looked at game history and unfortunately no Gears of War 3 achievements were to be found, instead somebody had been playing the new Spiderman Dimensions and had unlocked a few achievements.

Killzone 3: - Another really crowded area which meant I didn't get a chance to play. I really wanted too as well so I could check out the 3D in it. I've never played Killzone too so it would have been nice to get a taster of the franchise but I'm not too fussed, I'm sure it's just a tranditional shooter type game.

Mafia II: - As the game has now been out for a month or so I was shocked to see they had as many consoles set up for it as they did. There was probably 16 set up in total and towards the end of the day over half of them were free to play. I bounced on one and killed a few policeman who got out of their car with my shotgun. I proceeded by getting in the car and crashing really quickly. That was the end of my playtime as I decided to move on after just 30 seconds lol.

Medal of Honor: - One of the most queued for games second to only Brink. The whole back wall was filled of Medal of Honor but I didn't get a chance to play it. I'm sure it'll be good though and I shall hopefully find out in a couple of weeks time.

Saw II: - Didn't feel the need to play as I'm sure it will be the same as the original with a few new puzzle additions. I didn't want to spoil anything either as I know I'll eventually play the game as I really enjoyed the original.

Rock Band 3

The best part of the whole day for me was experiencing the new pro mode on Rock Band 3 which has a bunch of new peripherals that come alongside of it. I have decided to give Rock Band 3 a lot of attention as there is a lot I have to say on the game. I've saved the best until last.

Pro Guitar

Critics I have since Guitar Hero came out years ago that the plastic guitar doen't replicate playing an actual guitar whatsoever. The guys at Harmonix have now gone one step further and have created gameplay which can cope with a total of 102 different button presses for every note a real guitar can play. There are a total of 6 strings and 17 different frets (I think that's the word) that go down the neck of the guitar so multiply them together and you have your total amount of buttons.

I've played a little bit of guitar before and my friend was able to teach me some simple songs such as Seven Nations Army by White Stripes therefore I know how it feels to hold down a string in different places. I believe this peripheral replicates that same feeling brilliantly, I can't tell the difference between holding the button down and an actual string. Where you strum though with your other hand the peripheral actually does have strings there instead of buttons, this only heightens the authenticity of the product even more.

But how does it all work? Well you still have the same runway with colour rectangles (as we've become accustomed to from previous Rock Band games) but there's now a 6th purple lane for the 6th string. The notes come down from the top of the screen still but there's now a number on the rectangle, this number represents how far down the neck you have to go to find the fret. I was playing on Easy so I didn't see any numbers above 10 however if you do rank up the difficulty I'm sure you'll be needing to hit 14 to 17 where the frets get so tiny it seems to me impossible to find/judge without looking. So when you see the number you need to find the fret on the neck, once that's done you'll need to work out which of the 6 buttons on that fret you need to hold down. That is done by looking at the colour of the rectangle and the position it is in. For example if it was a blue rectangle it will be the 4th button I'll need to have held down.

As I was playing on Easy difficulty I was only really dealing with the first 7 frets on the neck and the first string (red on runway). It's strange that it's red as I'm used to green being there, they seemed to have changed it around for some reason. I did at times have to hit the second string and that proved to be pretty damn difficult. I was getting used to going from 3 to 6 to 3 to 7 to 4 (for example) on the frets pretty well and I was happy with that however tell me to then start pushing down the 2nd wire instead and we have difficulties for a newcomer to guitar such as myself. You also need to ensure you strum the 2nd string if a green has come up, that then equates to me having to work out placement for 3 separate things all in a second or so it gives me before the note needs to be strummed. I believe that with time and practise I shall be able to play Easy mode without much problems but that's only because you're given ample time to prepare for the next note. The speed Expert goes would make me go crazy.

I didn't even bother attempting any other harder difficulty as the 3 goes I managed to get on the guitar I spent doing the easiest songs on Easy. I did try Beast and the Harlot by Avenged Sevenfold at one point but quickly came to regret it and change song as it was too hard. It's strange knowing a song I can 4 star on usual Guitar on Expert can be put to Pro Guitar on Easy and become a nightmare for me. As the difficulty ranks up chords will start to come in to play, that's just far beyond the capabilities of my brain right now so I wont even consider trying until I have the basics done well.

At the price of £120+ this new guitar is not cheap and may scare you off wanting to get it. But I can ensure you that this is the future of the music rhythem genre if you have gotten bored of the same generic easy songs that come out on normal guitar. Now I've seen pro mode there's no going back for me, I want that guitar so bad. I know it will offer me hundreds of hours of gameplay and by the end of it I will be an established guitarist. I may decide to wait a while for the price to drop but I know for sure I will eventually get that guitar. Harmonix have stated that in 2011 they're going to make it possible for you to play the game with your own real guitar, that may be something you want to look in to if you already own a guitar.

Keyboard

Sure so I was already buzzing with excitement from the new guitar however that didn't mean I had forgotten about the other new peripheral for this years iteration of the franchise. The keyboard is a brand new feature that hasn't been seen before in the music rhythem genre and it is a pleasant entry I must say. I started off on standard mode and was able to do it practically straight away. There's 5 keys in a row which are colour coded the standed colours from green to orange, all you need to do is tap them down at the right time. As I am an Expert player on most instruments I wasn't afraid to try Keyboard on Expert straight away and I was right to think I could do it, as it's not that hard. I did the Beautiful People by Marilyn Manson and after a minute in to the song I had figured out where I wanted my fingers positioned and could probably FC the song if I had another try. I played Du Hast by Rammstein as a band with some strangers though and that was a bit more trickier as it was a higher rated song on difficulty. I've got a video of me doing it which I plan to upload at some point.

But you don't want to buy the Keyboard so you can play it on standard mode. Sure it is fun but you're only hitting 5 keys when there's a total of 25 on the Keyboard. I started off Pro Keyboard on Easy mode as I had just realised how bad I was on Pro Guitar and was expecting the same treatment from the Keyboard. This wasn't the case however as after 30 seconds I realised it was relatively easy so I restarted and put it on Medium. I knew that Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen was going to be a challenging song but with No Fail mode on I was quite happy to give it a go. Me or my brother unfortunately didn't take any pictures of the gameplay for the keyboard so I have just searched googles images to find the image below. I believe they are playing on Easy mode as I can't remember if there was red available to me but there was definitely one orange note at the end that I had to hit a few times.

I presume that each time you knock it up a difficulty more keys become available to you as there was at least 6 keys on the left of the Keyboard which did nothing when I pressed them down. Anyway I managed to get 3 stars on the song and I was pretty damn chuffed with myself. Without looking I was able to magically find the right key at times (although there was a lot of mistakes) and with training I expect I will be able to know where my fingers are positioned without looking (slightly similar to having my hand down a slot on guitar).

I was told that the Keyboard would be bundled with the Rock Band 3 software for £70, if that's the case then where can I pre-order. However when I checked Amazon they had it listed at £110, meaning they are charging £70 alone for the Keyboard! Sure it's cheaper than their new realistic guitar peripheral but it's still rather expensive. I'm not made of money, I can't see why they can't bundle it at £70 like Activision always do with a guitar on the Guitar Hero games.

Other Bits

The guys that were working there as representatives on hand to help people out were such friendly people, I really did enjoy speaking to them throughout the day and asking lots of questions. One key question I wanted to know about though they were unable to help on, and that was questioning them on how gamer profiles will be tied to each console. On Rock Band 3 it is possible to have 2 people on Vocals, 1 on Guitar, 1 on Bass, 1 on Drums and 1 on Keyboard which makes a combined total of 6 people all playing at once. The guys were able to confirm this works but then when I started asking them how everybody will be signed in to their gamer profiles they started getting confused and unable to answer me. We all know that the Xbox 360 only allows 4 people to be signed in on a console, so how is everybody going to be signed in? It sucks that I didn't find out but I'll experiment myself when I end up getting the game eventually.

I wanted to have a go at the Pro Drums but there wasn't a console set up entirely for it, instead the only way to have a go was to play as a band which had a large queue the whole time. I did see it get shredded by some very good players quite a few times throughout the day though and really it's just a slight advancement of what was already a realistic experience. Guitar and Keyboard have big changes in Pro mode but Drums does not, the inclusion of 3 cymbols only changes the gameplay slightly. If you don't see a rectangle and instead see a circle then you need to make sure you hit the cymbol up high. I didn't see anybody having any problems with it but nevertheless it is a welcomed addition to the franchise. I hope I can buy the extra pads for £10-£20, if so I will be interested.

Final Words

I had a great time at Earl's Court and I'm super glad I went. It was fantastic getting to experience new games before they have been released and I look forward to going again next year with hopefully some friends to keep me company. I may update this in the coming days to add in bits I have forgotten plus I could always mention a few more games which I've left out due to being exhuasted from all the other pieces I've been writing. It's taken me a good 5 hours to write all this so I appreciate anybody who has bothered to read it all. I wont be in a rush to write another blog entry anytime soon! I leave you with a funny picture my brother took of my dad at lunch.

If you have any questions or queries about games which I didn't cover then let me know and I'll make adjustments. For now I'm out!

Eurogamer Expo in London This Sunday

2010-09-29T14:47:00.000-07:00

This weekend at Earl's Court in London the Eurogamer Expo will be kicking off and I am going! I'm incredibly excited as I will be able to see and play new triple AAA titles which have not been released yet. A list of these games can be seen here - http://expo.eurogamer.net/whats-on.php - but I know I wont be having a chance to try all of them games, there wont be enough time. So here is a smaller list below showing the games I'm interested in seeing and then the ones I am definitely going to check out (they're in bold).

Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood (Ubisoft)
Brink (Bethesda)
Bulletstorm (EA)
Crysis 2 (EA)
Dance Central (Microsoft)
Dead Space 2 (EA)
Def Jam Rapstar (Konami)
Fable 3 (Microsoft)
Fallout: New Vegas (Bethesda)
FIFA 11 (EA)
Gears of War 3 (Microsoft)
Goldeneye (Nintendo)
Gran Turismo 5 (Sony)
inFAMOUS 2 (Sony)
Just Dance 2 (Ubisoft)
Killzone 3 (Sony)
Kinect Adventures (Microsoft)
Kinect Joy Ride (Microsoft)
Kinect Sports (Microsoft)
LittleBigPlanet 2 (Sony)
Medal of Honor (EA)
MotorStorm Apocalypse (Sony)
Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit (EA)
Pro Evolution Soccer 2011 (Konami)
Rock Band 3 (MTV)
Saw II: Flesh & Blood (Konami)
SOCOM: Special Forces (Sony)
Sports Champions (Sony)
Vanquish (SEGA)

I am a big fan of technology therefore checking out the Kinect and Sony Move games is essential plus being able to play some more games in 3D will be great (I found Avatar in 3D on Xbox pretty decent). Rock Band 3 is also very exciting for me as I can't wait to check out the pro instruments as well as the new keyboard. I found LittleBigPlanet on the PS3 fantastic and therefore I'm interested in how the sequel is (although it's a big shame it's an exclusive, it barely gets played by me because of that). The other bolded games I have on pre-order so I'll be interested to see if they are going to be worth playing or not.

I will be writing in-depth reviews on the products and the event itself the day after I get back (so Monday) with the intention on answering questions which have not been asked. I have lots of queries involving Kinect and hopefully I can clear them up by getting down and gritty with the hardware myself. If there is anything anybody wants me to check out for them just let me know (like any questions you'd want me to ask). I will be taking photos and video footage so look out for that soon too.

Finally if anybody reading this on my friends list is also going to the event on Sunday then feel free to get in contact with me and we could meed up.

Gamer League!

2010-05-17T11:09:00.000-07:00

Not quite sure how I've managed to let the days fly by since my last update (it's been about 3 weeks!) but I'm here now to mention the Gamer League which started last Friday.

There is me, tractakid, Dalimbak, Mr F5 TORNADO, BemusedBox and adiash73 all competing to be the first gamer to get the full 1000 gamerscore in 7 games. It's important to state that none of us had played any of the games prior to Friday (apart from BemusedBox and Mr F5 TORNADO being 2 slight exceptions) therefore this competition is as fair as possible. The seven games are as follows.

Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs
GRAW 2
MX vs ATV Untamed
Orange Box
Rise of the Argonauts
Stoked
World Championship Snooker 2009

Quite a variety there in game type as each player picked one game to add to the list and we all suggested we boosted Orange Box together. A couple of games on there will be hard and take a long time therefore I don't expect anybody to be hitting the finishing line for months yet. I've gone ahead and finished Cloudy already (although that is easy and quick) and adiash73 is closing in on finishing Stoked. This is good and all but everyone is aware that this is just the beginning of what will surely be a long gruelling task.

So far I have managed to have daily totals being displayed on a website for everybody to see. tractakid told me about WetPaint as a Wiki site and it's great. I haven't put too much content on but it's enough to make it worth a little look at. If you're interested then here's the link - http://gamerleague.wetpaint.com/ (be sure to navigate via the links on the navigation bar to the left of the page).

In other news I have lots of new games to my collection. My girlfriend got me Avatar (2009 movie) and Batman Arkum Asylum for my birthday (both of which I haven't touched yet :() and I've gone and got Spongebob for an easy 1000. Skate 3 and Alan Wake arrived on Saturday as well as Lips which I am borrowing from my friend rover08. As always there's too many games on my mind and not enough time to play them all, especially not now considering I've started this Gamer League!

My Incomplete Games List

2010-04-22T22:59:00.000-07:00

I've seen people do post like this a few times (especially you jackanape :P) and I've decided I shall bother to do one for myself. This post is probably going to take me a while to write up as there's a lot of games I have not completed but I am curious to see how high the number is. Here I go then, in alphabetical order!

A-Train - 610/1000
Aegis Wing - 170/200
Afro Samurai - 965/1000
Age of Booty - 160/200
Alone in the Dark - 950/1000
Assassin's Creed - 125/1000
Banjo Kazooie Nuts and Bolts - 130/1250
Battlefield 2: Modern Combat - 115/1000
Battlefield: Bad Company 2 - 675/1060
Beautiful Katamari - 495/1250
Bee Movie Game - 670/1000
Bejeweled 2 - 10/2000
Beijing 2008 - 430/1000
Beowulf - 460/1000
Bionical Heroes - 940/1000
Boom Boom Rocket - 85/200
Bomberman Live - 10/200
Brain Challenge - 160/200
Bully - 180/1000
Bulletwitch - 250/1000
Burnout Paradise - 5/1250
Burnout Revenge - 490/1000
Call of Duty 3 - 425/1000
Call of Juarez - 440/1000
Cars - 900/1000
Cars Race-O-Rama - 900/1000 (glitched, not my fault)
Chromehounds - 20/1000
Condemned - 440/975
Condemned 2: Bloodshot - 240/1000
Crash of the Titans - 313/1000
Crystal Quest - 160/200
Dark Sector - 30/1000
Dead or Alive 4 - 210/1000
Dead Rising - 40/1000
Def Jam Icon - 30/1000
DJ Hero - 600/1000
Dynasty Warriors 5 Empires - 730/1000
Duke Nukem 3D - 10/200
Enchanted Arms - 125/1000
Fable II - 1000/1350
Family Game Nights - 200/1400
Facebreaker - 625/1000
Far Cry Instincts Predator - 470/1000
Fatal Inertia - 340/1000
FIFA 08 - 295/1000
FIFA 10 - 210/1250
FlatOut Ultimate Carnage - 435/1000
Football Manager 2006 - 325/1000
Forza Motorsport 2 - 970/1000
Forza Motorsport 3 - 460/1000
Frogger - 140/200
Full Auto 915/1000
Gears of War - 60/1250
Gears of War 2 - 65/1750
Geometry Wars Evolved - 20/200
GRAW - 125/1000
Guitar Hero Aerosmith - 930/1000
Guitar Hero II - 910/1000
Guitar Hero III - 435/1000
Guitar Hero Hits - 450/1000
Guitar Hero Metallica - 875/1000
Guitar Hero World Tour - 850/1000
Guitar Hero 5 - 950/1000
Gun - 730/1000
Halo 3 - 815/1750
Hexic HD - 40/200
HSM3 Senior Year Dance - 350/1000
Import Tuner Challenge - 30/1000
Infernal - 800/1000
Kameo - 600/1000
Lego Rock Band - 960/1000
Lego Star Wars II - 350/1000
Looney Toons: AA - 820/1000
LOTR BFME II - 555/705
Luxor 2 - 92/200
Madden 07 - 645/1000
Madden 08 - 805/1000
Marble Blast Ultra - 165/250
Marvel Ultimate Alliance - 80/1250
Meet The Robinsons - 400/1000
Metro 2033 - 930/1000
Mirror's Edge - 730/1250
Monkey Island - 180/200
Monopoly - 600/1000
Moto GP 06 - 20/1000
NBA 2K7 - 955/1000
NBA Ballers: Chosen One - 900/1000
NBA Live 08 - 800/1000
NFS Carbon - 85/1000
NFS ProStreet - 20/1000
NHL 2K8 - 370/1000
NHL 08 - 300/1000
Nintey Nine Nights - 400/1000
Oblivon - 100/1250
Outpost Kaloxi X - 175/200
Over G Fighters - 50/1000
Overlord - 880/1250
PDC World Champ Darts - 650/1000
PES 2008 - 280/1000
Perfect Dark Zero - 390/1000
PGR 3 - 650/1000
PGR 4 - 1010/1250
Phantasy Star Universe - 1000/1250
Prey - 935/1000
Prince of Persia - 170/1250
Prizefighter - 140/1000
Quake 4 - 100/1000
Rainbow 6 Vegas - 215/1000
Rayman Raving Rabbids - 600/1000
Ridge Racer 6 - 70/1000
Robotron: 2084 - 50/200
Rock Band - 475/1000
Rock Band 2 - 650/1000
Rock Band AC/DC - 225/250
Rock Band Beatles - 615/1000
Rock Band Song Pack 2 - 200/250
Rock Revolution - 930/1000
Rumble Roses Double X - 30/1000
Saints Row - 50/1000
Samurai Warriors 2 XL - 150/1000
Scene It? LCA - 915/1000
Schizoid - 160/200
Sega Superstars Tennis - 940/1000
Sega Rally - 730/1000
Shadowrun - 250/1000
Shrek The Third - 640/1000
Small Arms - 175/235
Sonic The Hedgehog - 25/200
Soul Calibur IV - 700/1000
South Park - 160/200
Spiderwick Chronicles - 750/1000
Splinter Cell Conviction - 250/1000
Splinter Cell Double Agent - 50/1000
Splosion Man - 50/200
Spyglass Board Games - 105/200
Stuntman: Ignition - 555/1000
Superman Returns - 680/1000
Superstars V8 Racing - 960/1000
Table Tennis - 340/1000
Tetris Evolution - 180/1000
Texas Hold Em - 155/200
Tiger Woods 06 - 50/960
Tiger Woods 07 - 85/1000
The Force Unleashed - 700/1345
The Golden Compass - 660/1000
The Outfit - 420/1000
The Simpsons Game - 20/1000
Thrillville - 925/1000
Top Spin 3 - 50/1000
Totemball - 10/200
Transformers: The Game - 90/1000
Trivial Pursuit - 710/1000
Turning Point - 895/1000
Two Worlds - 60/1000
TNA Impact! - 365/1000
UEFA Champions League 2006/2007 - 390/1000
UEFA Euro 2008 - 895/1000
Vampire Rain - 650/1000
Viva Pinata - 140/1000
Wik: Fable of Souls - 120/200
Worms - 185/200
Worms 2: Armageddon - 110/200

And there we have it. According to Microsoft Word there's 162 games in that list there, that's a hell of a lot! You may have noticed plenty of games in there with low score, games you may not have even heard of (such as Rumble Roses and Over G Fighters). I pre-ordered my Xbox 360 but got it a couple of months later, this has meant that I've seen the Xbox 360 evolve throughout the years like others haven't. Originally once a game had been put on your card there was no going back. Didn't matter if you had 0G on it, you couldn't remove it. For this reason I had nothing to lose once I started playing a game and I remember putting a bit of time and effort in to getting my one and only achievement in Bejeweled 2 (which I now regret).

The point I'm trying to get at is that in the past I didn't give a damn about my completion percentage. It was only a year and a bit ago when I decided I wanted to change this as the arrival of TrueAchievements has inspired me and many others to up our percentage. I've gone from 50% to 68% in over a year which I am quite impressed with. I've got a way to go until 75% but if I could just remove these games from my profile.....

Bejeweled 2 - 10/2000
Boom Boom Rocket - 85/200
Bomberman Live - 10/200
Burnout Paradise - 5/1250
Chromehounds - 20/1000
Dark Sector - 30/1000
Dead Rising - 40/1000
Def Jam Icon - 30/1000
Duke Nukem 3D - 10/200
Gears of War - 60/1250
Gears of War 2 - 65/1750
Geometry Wars Evolved - 20/200
Hexic HD - 40/200
Import Tuner Challenge - 30/1000
Luxor 2 - 92/200
Moto GP 06 - 20/1000
NFS Carbon - 85/1000
NFS ProStreet - 20/1000
Over G Fighters - 50/1000
Ridge Racer 6 - 70/1000
Robotron: 2084 - 50/200
Rumble Roses Double X - 30/1000
Saints Row - 50/1000
Sonic The Hedgehog - 25/200
Splosion Man - 50/200
Tiger Woods 06 - 50/960
Tiger Woods 07 - 85/1000
The Simpsons Game - 20/1000
Top Spin 3 - 50/1000
Totemball - 10/200
Transformers: The Game - 90/1000
Two Worlds - 60/1000

That's a list of the games on my profile which have less than hundred gamerscore on them. Take out the arcades if you want and you've got 21 retail games each with 1000+ gamerscore on them. If it was possible for me to remove them from my card and plunk them on to someone else's who has a nice percentage (such as jackanape) if they would go below me and I would rise above them. I can't be bothered to work out the maths but I'm sure we'd see a dramatic change.

Poor Cars Franchise

2010-04-20T23:03:00.000-07:00

What has happened to the one children franchise on the Xbox 360 that I always defended if it came under scrutiny? It was the Cars franchise. I got 900 on the original (back then I didn't care for completion and couldn't be bothered with finding the post cards) and I had the 1000 on Mater National (the 2nd in the franchise) but I had not played the third game. Race-O-Rama came out towards the end of last year but I ordered it for £10 a week a go as I fancied another easy 900 gamerscore from a game I hoped would be enjoyable, I was wrong.

Race-O-Rama is unfortunately broken and the worst in the series. First off the controls are the same from the previous instalments with A being accelerate and RT being your turbo. The control setup for the controls is fine, how they have been executed is not. How could a formula that worked fine in the previous two games be taken and ruined for Race-O-Rama? Steering has become more dodgey in your standard races (when you're the red car Lightning McQueen) but what on earth were the developers thinking when they programmed the mini cars and monster truck races. It's insane to think that I am playing a children's game on the easiest difficulty and was finding it hard to get just a bronze medal in some of these races, meaning I would do up to 10 retries which was very frustrating. What happens is your vehicle will just spin out with no good reason for doing so. At first when this started happening I thought it was my controller being weird, it didn't make sense to me that I could just be steering round a corner and then bam, a 360 donut occurs and I've lost all speed and probably been knocked over by my opponents.

I've since completed this game and thought I want to share my experiences with you as well as doing a bit of reseach of my own. Wikipedia is always my friend just like it's proven this morning when I went on it to see who Developed the 3 Cars games on the 360. Now a studio called Rainbow Studios has its name in the Developer(s) section on both the original and Mater National however it is missing in Race-O-Rama. I am lead to believe that a company called Tantalus Interactive were the ones to develop Race-O-Rama, a company that previously did Mater National on the DS and GBA. It's a shame they ruined the controls so badly on the game otherwise it still would have been an all right game to play for gamerscore. Still, stay away from this if your prone to throwing controllers out of anger, I've read a few people admit to do so from playing this game just by reading the posts in X360A's forum for the game.

The Gadget Show Live

2010-04-10T03:13:00.001-07:00

Firstly I should make one thing clear to readers, this is going to be a long post that will probably take you 5 minutes to read and much longer for me to type up. After thinking about how I should write this post I came to the conclusion that I want to make it as detailed and descriptive as possible. This is mainly for personal reasons, I like to think I have a good memory but I'm sure I will forget things unless I document it now.

I do advise you to skip parts of the story if they bore you, I completely can understand why however it will be worth hearing me rant about the gadgets that I got to see and test out. :)

Thursday 8th April 2010 - The Gadget Show Live at the NEC in Birmingham

The Journey There

Months ago my college arranged a trip for classes to go to the Gadget Show Live. I had seen the Gadget Show on channel 5 before and was aware of who the presenters were and what they got up to with gadgets. With this in mind I saw the opportunity for me to go to my first e3 type event which I had been dying to do for years. I paid the £30 for my ticket straight up, no questions asked I wanted to go.

The morning came and I woke up at 5:45 in order to get ready in time to arrive at Bedford for 8AM. I planned on getting the 6:28 bus but as it happened there isn't one scheduled for that time therefore I got the 6:58 instead (they come every half an hour) and was able to get to Bedford quickly thanks to minor traffic and met my two friends in McDonald's for some breakfast before our long journey to Birmingham. Upon arriving at the college we spoke to a few of the teachers and met one of their son's (she's so proud of him, it's funny) before departing on a 20+ seat orange minibus type vehicle which I wish I have a photo of as it looked hilarious.

Considering I only had 5 hours sleep the night before I was quite proud of myself for being able to stay awake on the 1 and a half hour journey to Birmingham, usually when I get up early for college I nap on the 45 minutes journey to Bedford. Today was different though as I was excited. I enjoyed speaking to my teacher (Karen) son (Bradley) as well as waving at all the men (and a couple of woman!) who were driving trucks in this early hour of the morning. We even got one guy to toot his horn for us, we were stoked on that.

Arrival

We got off in the car parking area which still happened to be half a mile or so away from where we needed to be. Thankfully the NEC has shuttle buses running constantly so we hopped on one (free of charge) and got to the entrance in just a few minutes. After splitting up with the group Karen's son wanted to come with us as we were the closest people he knew, therefore the four of us entered and made our way through what reminds me of a terminal before arriving at the entrance.

First Impressions

It was roughly 10:15AM when we first got in which left us with 45 minutes to explore before the Live show took place in the theatre. The place was so big we just didn't know where to go first. If my memory serves me right the first place we went to was to check out some of the 3D TV's on display near the entrance. 3D TV's were a big thing at the event but it was only at this "stall" (I say stall but it's not, just the easiest way to describe it) that I really checked out what 3D was like. After a couple of minutes of watching others I was able to pick up the 360 Pad, put on some glasses and play Avatar in 3D. I've seen the film in 3D and that was great, playing the game in 3D is also great. Everytime I jumped in water it would splash up at my face, the recoiling bullets from my shotgun also did the same. I really did enjoy my few minutes on this (as well as actually playing the game) but I left wondering if 3D TV's are superior to high definition. I conclude that neither is superior to the other as they both are great in what they do, they're just different and both deserve a place in your household (if money permits). Sky 3D was being shown to the left of me which I took a few glances at whilst playing Avatar but didn't really see much as the angle I was sitting wasn't too great. There was a mini cinema near by which was showing off some kiddy pirate film in 3D which looked cool but nothing new that I hadn't seen before (although it would have been if I hadn't seen Avatar months ago).

Next we found a small gaming section where Band Hero, Tony Hawk Ride and Super Mario Brothers were being played. Me and two of my friends were able to get ourselves a grasp on the peripherals for Band Hero as I immediately changed the difficulty setting to Expert in an attempt to pump up the crowd (haha). I wasn't too keen on the guitar (it's the latest in the franchise I believe) as the strum bar was pretty stiff like the Rock Band guitar (which I dislike). This meant I was making mistakes and not keeping up a x4 combo like I really should have been. Unfortunately I forgot to try out the slide bar which is a shame but I'm sure it's nothing special. After my friend Conor was done on drums I nagged him to get off as I had not tried out the Guitar Hero drums peripheral yet and was excited to try it out. We played Dirty Little Secret by All American Rejects (my friend Olly's favourite band who he's seen numerous times and even been in pubs to have a drink with the lead singer Tyson!) and I was quite proud with how I did on Hard difficulty on the drums. It was a bit weird at first getting used to hitting the top cymbals but towards the end of the song I was rocking a x4 combo pretty consistently.

My memory is hazy as to what we did next but I'm sure we just walked around with excited grins on our face like little school children being given sweets. We ended up finding where some cars were and I just had to get my photo taken in this Volkswagen that we stumbled across. I don't know much about my cars but I know when I see a sexy one that I'd love to own. There wasn't too many gadgets on it so I'm not quite sure why it was there but a car nearby could be transformed in to a mini living room and kitchen. The front seats could swivel around and the back seats be pushed back in to the boot so that a family could all sit around and talk to each other. With a microwave and cooker on the side there were no limits to what a family could do in this car. I did however think having what appeared to me as a shower head in the boot at the back was one step too far..... We didn't take a photo of this car, I wish my friend did :(

Time was ticking at this point so we knew we needed to start heading in the direction of the theatre and try not to get distracted. This was hard to do when we came across one of those people that perform by staying still and not speaking at all. We were able to make this guy move and played around with him for a minute as he begged for money to be placed in to his hat, it was rather amusing. We didn't really see much else afterwards except from my friend getting sidetracked by one stall which had real drum kit and guitars set up for anyone to go on and play when they feel like. Another attraction next to this was a big silver camper van type thing which had a recording studio inside for recording songs. A TV on the outside was on a continuous loop showing a band actually recording a song in there before. Finally there were real DJ decks set up to allow anyone to go and do a mix (or whatever it is you do). Prior to DJ Hero's release I'd have had little to no idea as to what to do however I now understand how it works. I don't think the general public do though as numerous people would ruin what was already being played and then go off on to something else, leaving the guy in charge having to re-do a good beat every time. We finally got to the theatre and queue jumped really badly in order to get in. I feel bad but it's a dog eat dog world so I led the way whilst my friends followed.

Live Performance

Upon sitting down inside the 4000 seated theatre my attention was quickly diverted towards the dolphin type things floating above us in the crowd. I naturally at first presumed they were attached by a wire from above but after a few minutes I realised why people were getting so impressed, it's because there was no wire. I still find it hard to fathom how these "creatures" were able to stay up in the air defying the laws of gravity. We were told later on that there were propellers on each wing to keep it up in the air but still, I'd have thought the weight would outweigh the up-force. Check out the picture below to see what they looked like. It's unbelievable to think they could be controlled via a remote controller too.

The show began with the best robot I have ever seen walk on to the stage and welcome us to the show. He made numerous appearances throughout the show (coming in to the audience by walking down the aisles once, spraying water at people which was funny) and continued to amaze me at how life like it was. There was no AI there (everything he said was pre-recorded and he didn't seem to be able to react to any human activity) but the precision of his movement has left me in awe. I'm not sure if this robot was being controlled via a remote but I am going to have to assume he was as he did at times get just inches away from some of the audience and was able to look at them face to face.

I was personally slightly let down by the performance but that is because I was believing it to be something that it isn't supposed to be. I was hoping to see breathtaking new technology being shown (nothing new being revealed but the appearance of Project Natal would have been AMAZING) but instead it was a very cliché performance from the Gadget Show presenters. There were numerous competitions going on throughout the hour (which did begin to frustrate me) and instead of being shown cool tech I was presented with staged entertainment where the outcome would have surely been pre-determined prior to show time. The first game we got to do was to play an app for Apple products but with a little twist. The way to get your teams motorbike to go faster and therefore jump a further distance was to shout as loud as you can and then raise your arms in to the air to make the bike jump. Now the presenters assured us the technology had been created to make this possible however I do have to doubt it. Sure I can believe that microphones may be able to detect a larger sound from one team over another but how could a camcorder recognise 2000 hands going up in to the air? There were 3 attempts for each team and it was only on each teams last attempt that the motorbike effectively jumped. I can't believe for one minute that 2000 people all changed the way they moved their arms up in the air on the last attempt in order to make the motorbike jump properly. I do think that it was a scam and really it was somebody playing the game behind the scenes (especially at it was a clichéd climax type ending to the game).

Other games were played throughout the show such as participants having to fold away a tent the fastest whilst being put off by the presenters. Another one was guests getting their heart beats monitored to see how they went up when put in to a simulation of a roller coaster (which was a fail as both the guys heart beat decreased instead of increased!). I have to admit I found these boring to watch and instead was more amused by watching races that went on between the presenters. Suzi and Jason strapped in to jetpacks as they launched in to the air over the crowd's heads and then turned around to get back to the stage as quickly as possible. Again this was staged as a wire was used to support them (so there wasn't really any jetpack being used :() and Jason's just so happened to break and go all smokey half way through which was predictable from the description on how he made it (coca cola with a mint put inside). The last race of the show was when three of them got on to different type of transport vehicles and had a race to see who could go down all the aisles first. I did enjoy seeing Jason on a skateboard type advice but yet again I got frustrated at the outcome of the standings (Jason was by far the quickest yet didn't win as he waited for Ortis to return to the stage first). Finally it's worth mentioning that a team of performers with a ridiculous name (something with the word Fish in) did some juggling with electronic changing lights which although wasn't amazing it was good enough to entertain me for the few minutes.

3 Hours of Checking Out the "Stalls"

After the live performance was finished we had 3 hours until we had to meet up with the rest of the group and then go back to the college, then home. I thought that 3 hours would be no way near long enough to see everything there was to see here and I was right. However it did get very tiring walking around with a bag on my back the whole day so I eventually was happy to go after 3 hours.

First thing we planned on doing was going to check out the glasses that were like mini TV's, I think it's called virtual reality? We had seen the stall previously and had a rough idea of how to get back to there so after 5 to 10 minutes of traversing through slow moving traffic we finally got there. They had a few machines set up to show off the technology (I saw a 360, PS3 and Wii) so I went over to play on the Wii as it had the least amount of people wanting a go on it (plus I fancied playing Mario Kart). After a few minutes I got my turn and was very impressed. They were nothing special but they did just what they were supposed to do as I was able to play the game with no problem and enjoyed my time wearing them. I don't think these should replace our traditional televisions however I would definitely love to have a pair myself that could wireless connect to my Xbox 360. I can get back ache at times in my desk chair, how cool would it be for me to lie down in my nice comfy bed and play my Xbox. If this technology is already available to be bought for the Xbox 360 then please let me know, I don't think it is but there's a chance.

Now to be honest there wasn't much else there that was too amazing and that you need to hear about. I'm getting typed of typing so much so I do plan on getting the few thoughts I still have in my head typed up as quickly as possible and posting this up for you to read. One stall were letting customers try a new type of cigarettes that are electronic and claim to be 99% healthier than traditional ones. My friend had a toke and found them effective however I personally believe that it was a scam and will never get mainstream to the point where that everyone knows about it. Around the same time we found a replica of a vehicle which has (or is attempting to) break the fastest speed done on ground. I viewed a stand which had a list of statistics on it which claimed it could do 0 to 1000MPH in 42 seconds, very impressive.

There was a long section dedicated to the history of computer games which seemed to attract a lot of attention from all ages. I went over to the Playstation 1 and played a racing game as well as seeing an original Gameboy in working condition. There were much older consoles in working display too however because I am in a younger generation I wasn't aware of what they were and therefore didn't give any of them a try. It was cool to see kids playing Pac-Man like it was originally intended for. There was a small booth where you could put your head in view of the camera and it would detect your face and turn you in to a Transformer. This isn't new technology I believe but still it was amusing for a couple of minutes to see it in action. There was a stall set up for Papershow, a program designed to enable you to draw on a piece of paper and have it input on to a computer. Stuff like this I believe has been done before however Papershow was different. It's possible to change colour and make corrections to errors all done with incredible ease (as my friend Conor discovered by drawing a dog). I personally don't have a need to get my art in to digital form (I do art?) however if you do go over to www.papershow.com to see a demonstration of how the product works, it's quite fascinating.

I have to mention the Game Zone, a section which was purely dedicated to letting you try out some of the hot games right now. EA seemed to be representing as they had Battlefield Bad Company 2 set up on dozens of computers letting anyone join in at any time. I believe there were even competitions going down, that could explain why I saw kids sat there continuously playing the game seriously. 2010 FIFA World Cup was on display however I didn't bother to go check it out. I'm not sure if the full game was being shown however I can imagine it was instead the demo which happened to come out the same day on the Live Marketplace. Ultimately I found this section pretty boring as it was full of games I had either played or seen before. It was no e3 that's for sure and I ended up spending more time shopping in the PC World and GAME stalls than I did gaming. Finally the Test Track section gave everyone a chance to try out different type of transport devices around a test track. The queue for this was gigantic though so I never got a go however to be honest it would have got boring for me after 30 seconds.

And that's about all I can be bothered to include for now. There was so much more there which I haven't even mentioned (let alone everything I missed myself) and I had a fantastic time there and would love to go back again. I do recommend everyone to go (even your wife and kids) as it's a difference experience and you'll be sure to have fun. It does get very tiring however the nice field outside did enable us to relax for 45 minutes or so in the sun as we recuperated. I hope you've enjoyed reading about my day at The Gadget Show, there's a few more pictures below of me and my friends experiencing the army stall and me outside in the sun. Goodbye for now.

Little Updating Following Last Post

2010-03-30T03:04:00.000-07:00

Last week I blabbed a post out as I explained how I have too many games to play and not enough time to get round to them all. I listed what games I had on my mind then and it helped me to decide what my plan was at conquering them all.

We'll start negatively, DJ Hero hasn't been touched once since I made that post. I'm near the end of the game and enjoying it but I haven't felt the need to push on with it when I am probably going to be borrowing it for many months to come. If not the game seems to be being sold with the peripheral for £40-£50 now, that's more like my price point. However the DJ set has come in handy for me, I've been using it as a wireless controller whilst I played Pro Faceoff matches against myself in Band Hero and Guitar Hero 5. The achievement unlocked on 25 wins on Band Hero which is precise, Guitar Hero 5 took a total of 98 games though, that's insane! Band Hero was the first music/rhythm game that I've got the 1000 gamerscore on, that's because it's definitely the easiest to do so in. Having felt good completing that I moved on to Lego Rock Band last night which at first glance seems like a very good game. I have to say I prefer the lay out of Rock Bands tour modes over the linear career mode seen in the Guitar Hero franchise.

Finally Metro 2033 has been touched yesterday and on Thursday, getting me to roughly half way through my first play-through. The achievement list on this game is driving me crazy and unfortunately putting me off what would otherwise be a half decent game. I need to be crystal sure on how to unlock achievements, if I don't know exactly how it's done then I may interpret it wrong and therefore lose out, this has happened to me on Metro. This is the problem when it comes to playing newly released games, achievement guides are incomplete as ongoing debates happen as people try to figure out what criteria makes achievements pop (Enlightened and Explorer in Metro 2033).

All in all it's been a good week of gaming with me unlocking roughly 1500 gamerscore. If I keep that up for the rest of the year then I am looking good on getting 200,000 before 2011. :D

Too Many Games, Too Little Time

2010-03-22T04:04:00.000-07:00

Do any of you know how I'm feeling? Just reading the title of this post should give you an indication to what I am getting at here, hopefully it's something you can sympathize with as I can imagine you are/have been in the same boat before. For those of you that are not in the know and don't understand what I am going on about then I shall elaborate.

As a gamerscore whore you are generally open to playing pretty much anything to boost your score. We've all rented Avatar for that quick 1000 and we've all played a few kiddy/move tie in games that afterwards we may have regretted (the stress some of them cause are not worth the 1000 gamerscore points you get from them). As a result of this I have turned in to someone that can't turn down an opportunity to bump my gamerscore no matter what the consequences may be. See a game for £5 which I know has some easy gamerscore on it? I'll most likely get it. Friend offering to lend me a game to see if I like it? Sure I say to myself, my gamerscore total will benefit from it. Friend offering to boost with me on a game despite me already playing a game I'm enjoying? Sure I'll stop and get me some gamerscore instead.

In order for me to get my head around the games I have and what I should focus my attention on I have decided to document it in this blog post, writing down my thoughts may help me to actually act and finish off games that deserve to be played.

My Deal With rover08

Firstly I need to point out again the "deal" me and rover08 have going on. He lives in Norway, a place where (from what I've gathered from him) games are not cheap. Over the past few months we've built trust up in one and other as he sends me money to buy him games at half the price he would usually pay for them. My side of the deal is that I get to play these games first, get the gamerscore and then post them off to him with the only payment being the postage (which is £1-£3). This is great as it's a win win situation for us both. It gets better, the trade in value of games in Norway also seems to be poor so he will send me his games I haven't played so that I can play them and then trade in for another game at a place such as CEX. This can ultimately mean I get to play 2 games for free which for me is fantastic. Finally we are now planning to lend each other games (I'm expecting Band Hero and Lego Rock Band in the post today except the postman has failed to come!).

This alone is the biggest reason behind me getting stressed about playing the games. I can't say no to rover08 as it's a fantastic deal for me and I love boosting my gamerscore. I don't however love trying to push through games quickly in order to send them to him or get a new one (that's not always true as at times I love pushing myself). He is quite a machine and gets through games very quickly enabling him to get nearly 100,000 gamerscore in a year and now has around 4,000 lead over me (a lead I don't think I will ever catch up on now :().

Buying Games Because I Saw Them Cheap

As I said in the intro I see games going cheaply and because I know it's such a great deal I buy them (losing £5 is not much right). The thing is in the past few months I've not really managed to play the new games I've bought as I've been busy playing the games I get from rover08. I had to stop myself ordering Fuel for £5.60 on Saturday because I still have an unopened copy of Bionic Commando which I bought a few weeks back for £4.50. I also got Fracture as a little gift from my girlfriend which hasn't been played, when I can't get round to playing them what chance have I got with Fuel let alone the 5+ other games I own and have never played.

Borrowing From Friends

This is the part I like to do the most as it's very cost effective (usually free) and I don't have to keep a game I will probably never play again once I'm done with it. I've been borrowing Army of Two from a friend (will call him FriendA) from college for around a month now and I am still unable to get round to playing it. I want to but I have too much other games to play. Another friend (FriendB) also randomly decided to bring Bioshock 2 in to college for me to borrow as he has barely played it and thought I might enjoy it. I was very grateful for his generosity but I decided I needed to play the original first so I understood the storyline. On the bus hope that very same day another friend (FriendC) got on and I told him about getting Bioshock 2. He offered to lend me the original so I could play that before I started the second. I haven't gone to get the game yet but I told him I very well might do.....

What I Need To Do!!!!!

The 3 above points show how I can have tons of games in my possession at one time which I have never played before but want to. I have a lot of free time (only have 3 days of college) but even so I don't have enough to manage the mammoth task of playing all the games I buy/receive. In the past I used to just play all the games and probably never get the thousand gamerscore and I just wouldn't care. For the past year though I have cared and it bugs me that games such as Prince of Persia sit on my gamercard unfinished simply because I got distracted in to playing something else. I decided that in order to stop this from happening again that I would only stick to playing a few games at once from different genres (an idea which originated from Thrawn). This works fantastically for me, as a result I have managed to finish the past few games in recent weeks.

WWE Legends of Wrestlemania (needed to finish quick to send to rover08)
Bayonetta (needed to finish quick in order to trade in for Bad Company 2)
Tony Hawk Ride (wanted to give it back to FriendC)

I did have 4 games I was rotated between at once and I was finding it stressful (especially knowing I had more I needed to play). Three of those games have now been completed and are in the list above, the other is DJ Hero which I've been playing quite a lot over the past few days and have nearly completed as much as I possibly can. From this perspective I've done good, now lets look at the other games that are currently on my mind.....

What I Need To Play

Army of Two
Bionic Commando
Fracture
Lego Rock Band
Band Hero
Metro 2033
GTA IV
Crackdown
Burnout Paradise
Battlefield Bad Company 2
Forza Motorsport 3
Bioshock 2

That above list consists of 12 games that are on my shelf right now (or would have been if the postman delivered today!) which I have yet to play. 11 games is a lot but I shouldn't forget the few games my brother owns (Stoked, Lego Indy, Lego Batman) which I also want to play at some point. How on earth can I digest all of these games and get them played? The answer is I don't think I can, instead I will prioritise a few and ensure I get them completed. Below are 3 games I want to have on my mind currently.

DJ Hero
Band Hero
Metro 2033

I say DJ Hero as I am nearly done and I think it will be good for me to polish it off as soon as possible in case FriendD ever wants it back. rover08 wants his Band Hero back as soon as possible as he will miss it so that's the priority in the Music genre and I want to finish Metro 2033 quickly so I can trade it in while it's actually worth something. For now I'm going to try and not worry about the other games, when I think about it I get stressed and it's not worth doing. I'll complete those 3 games and then decide what to do when the time comes. For now I am sick of typing as this post has gotten really long. Wish me luck, I'm going to need it with all these games to play.

I'm Top 10 At Something?

2010-03-15T17:00:00.000-07:00

I remember when I finished Tony Hawk's American Wasteland once upon a time, I was the 143rd (around that number) person to get the 1000 gamerscore on the game. I remember I used to check my leaderboard status over at www.mygamercard.net quite a lot and I do believe that years ago I did have a worthy rank on THAW. Next was Project 8 which was a lot harder and a fantastic accomplishment once I had done it. I can't remember the rank on that but it's bound to have been higher than American Wasteland. Next came Proving Ground and it's unbelievable bugs and glitches. That didn't stop me though as the hardest Tony Hawk's game yet (I didn't use cheats) fell beneath me as I proved I was among the elite. And now, the 4th Tony Hawk game on the console has also been completed, I managed to surpass Ride.

Here's a statistic as to how many people have completed each game (thanks to MGC).

Tony Hawk's American Wasteland - 2171 People Have
Tony Hawk's Project 8 - 913 People Have
Tony Hawk's Proving Ground - 124 People Have
Tony Hawk Ride - 43 People Have (only 7 have on TA)

Now first thing to take note of is that I have ordered those games in chronological order in terms of their release. A correlation can be seen between them and that is each game that comes out gets harder or less people bother to play because they've become tiresome of the Tony Hawk's franchise. But yeah, that's a different matter which I don't want to go in to right now.

So back on track, as you can see not many people actually complete the Tony Hawk's games and therefore I do take pride in knowing that I am probably one of the few that have gotten the full 1000 gamerscore on all 4 games. Activision have announced that Ride 2 is in production and scheduled for release at the end of the year. After getting used to Ride I was able to find some enjoyment in it however I do believe that the peripheral is too indecisive to be complimented, it's not fun having to re-do every task 5 times just to make the board recognise what you're trying to do.

Other gaming news I shall write about in a future post (might make it in a minute actually as I wrote this post days ago but was unable to finish as MyGamerCard wouldn't work for me). I'm going to say how I get stressed knowing I have so many games I need to play yet I still bundle myself with even more. I'll go in to detail in the post, bye for now.

Could I Really Complete Bayonetta

2010-03-09T05:17:00.000-08:00

I've gone further than I thought I ever would, I continue to push myself with the game and now I find myself just 5 achievements away from the whole 50. So how have I managed to conquer Bayonetta and practically complete it? The answer is all down to the accessories.

Once I grinded out my first playthrough on Normal everything else has become a breeze. I've gone to the telephone boxes and inputted cheat codes which allows me to purchase items and weapons early, this makes the game sooooo much easier. I'm on the Epilogue now on Hard mode (would complete it now but got the girlfriend coming round in 10 minutes, doh!) which will unlock 2 more achievements once done and then it's on to the mode without witch time which I do believe will be a piece of cake still thanks to my items and weapons.

It's the alfheim portals that may cease me to 1000G on this game because they're stipulations in them which can cause me to find them very hard. I only did a few on my Normal playthrough but I managed at least 5 more on Hard as I now had the weapons and items which made them much easier. I'm not too sure if I will bother to go back through the game for a 4th time on Normal mode in order to complete the challenges but I very well might. I would love for 1000G on Bayonetta but I am proud of what I've managed so far and that should be enough. Time will tell.....

200,000 Gamerscore before 2011

2010-02-21T10:20:00.000-08:00

Is it possible? For me to get my gamerscore past 200,000 before the start of the new year. Ask me this question a couple of months ago when I made my gamerscore goal of 160,000 for 2010 and I would have said no. I saw gaining 35,000 over the course of 2010 as being a relatively simple goal to follow and one that I wouldn't be extremely proud over but nevertheless happy that I had accomplished.

Things are changing though. Me and my good friend rover08 have been swapping games with each other and this has enabled me to play a lot more easy gamerscore games than I was expecting too. We've not even finished the first 2 months of the year yet and I am currently at 137,375 which means I am 12,375 in to my goal of getting 25,000 by the end of the year. Lets say by the end of February I manage to make my total gamerscore currently earned this year up to 13,000, that will then mean that if I keep up the pace of getting 13k every 2 months then by the end of the year I would have accumulated 78,000 gamerscore (over double my aim!).

This is what's gotten me thinking that I could potentially get to 200k before new year. It would be another goal for me, one that I don't want to force myself to go for but one that would make me extremely proud to do. I need to look at how gaming these past couple of months has changed my life and whether I can keep it up for the rest of the year or not. I don't really have any commitments, I go to college 3 days a week and have assignments I need to do at home at times but really it's not too much hassle. A loving girlfriend likes to see me everyday plus I also love to skateboard as much as I can.

Now college is going to maintain the same until May or June and ultimately I am capable of maintaining my gaming lifestyle and still reach the Distinction Diploma I am aiming for. I feel like I could have done a slight bit more of work but screw it, I'll make up for it near my assignment deadlines (I feel like I work better under pressure when my time is nearly up). My girlfriend is the one part of my life that needs to be kept as she means a lot to me. I've still managed to spend hours with her pretty much every day (or other day) and it hasn't been a problem with my gaming ways. She'll leave me at 10 in the evening and I'll then game for a couple of hours before bed so that's no concern. The one commitment I have which I know will cause me to cease my gamerscore whoring ways is my skateboarding. These past couple of months we've had horrible weather here in England, all rain and snow. This weather makes skateboarding not possible to do and therefore I've not spent much time on my board (which I don't like). This is the free time I've had which has enabled me to spend more time on my Xbox. Unfortunately this will change come summer as I do want to get lots of skateboarding done as this could possibly be my last summer before I have a full-time job.

So really I don't think 200,000 Gamerscore is going to happen this year. It definitely is possible if me and rover08 keep up our current trading however I need to really want to push for that goal, something I can't foresee happening as my focus will be on my annual skateboard video instead. I'm thinking of going half way in the middle, aiming for 180,000. This way I can have my time to skate in the summer and then game on the wet days or when I'm injured. Only time will tell.

Am I Really That Bad At Bayonetta?

2010-02-17T16:42:00.000-08:00

Now when I saw Bayonetta was being sold for just £17.99 at Zavvi last week I thought to myself I deserve a treat and bought it. Of course I did this knowing full well that CEX would give me £20 in cash for it so it was a no lose situation (although CEX now offer £16 so it's going down...). You see I am aware of how hard Ninja Gaiden and Devil May Cry are meant to be, I have a little bit of experience and yeah I found them bloody hard. Bayonetta is meant to be different, everyone says it isn't as hard and I was lured in by the crowd. Everyone has played a 2010 game and loved it already, I wanted in on that!

And I kind of am. Bayonetta is a one in a kind game as it is like nothing else I've played. I'm not one for visuals but I am definitely attracted to this game. I've only done the first 2 chapters and so far I am loving the Beloved creatures that have popped up a few times. Any way I'm started to go off track. I find the game good and then I came across the Alfheim challenges. Oh my bloody god!!! I was quite happy with the difficulty up until I started trying these but now I'm close to tears as I officially admit defeat to Bayonetta. See I think it's incredibly hard and no one should be able to do them however that can't be the case as apparently the TA ratio for Bayonetta stands currently at just 1944. Yes that isn't low but I'd expect it to be in the 3000 plus range where only elites manage to conquer.

So what's going on with me and why am I moaning like a girl? Well mainly because I think people like to gloat on the web and make it seem like they can do the game easy without problems. I've got to quote this guy on one of the Alfheim challenges I spent a good amount of time trying.

"This one is super easy. You have no restrictions. You just have to kill all the enemies in the time limit you're given."

Oh..... not going to give me advise then? For gamers reading which haven't played Bayonetta, these Alfheim challenges are portals found during the game which take you to an arena where you need to accomplish a certain task. For the task in mention I needed to "simple" kill all the enemies in the time limit. Thing is your health is only 3 bars long (meaning 3 hits and your dead) and there is at least 4 waves of enemies (probably more but I haven't survived long enough to find out). A wave consists of maybe 6 to 8 enemies all with the intent of making your life hell. I fail to see how anyone can claim this to be super easy! When you have numerous enemies attacking you it's not possible to check who's firing what at you and before you know it an enemy I wasn't tracking as I was busy with the rest just threw a fireball at me. Usually I'd accept that but when you only have 3 bars of health I find it bloody frustrating.

I shall try to plug my way through the game and no longer worry about these Alfheim challenges. They were detracting the enjoyment I was receiving from the game which I won't put up with. Lets hope I can plow my way through on Normal difficulty and continue on having fun with this very unique and great (minus the difficulty) experience of a game.

Name & Shame - Shystie

2010-02-13T03:23:00.000-08:00

You may be wondering what the title of this blog means. Well to help you understand I am going to paste the Xbox Live messages that I received from a gamer with the gamertag of Shystie. Here we go.

"How hard was 1K on P8 for you?"

Nothing wrong with that. Every now and then I do get messages from people I don't know either complimenting me on my gamerscore on the Tony Hawk games or asking me for advice on how to do some goals in the game or whatever. I was in the middle of playing Infernal so I paused and responded with something like "It's hard but possible" as I didn't know what else to say in response. His reply to me though started to get me fuming.....

I've just realised at the time of typing this up that the message he sent to me has disappeared from my inbox! I have no clue as to why because I never delete my messages so it doesn't make sense. What he basically asked in a calm and kind manner was if I would be willing to get the achievements for him with my prize being up to 2100 Microsoft Points. Before I sum up my views and opinions on this matter I will continue with the conversation we had. I replied stating that I wouldn't do it and I was curious to ask how he could put trust in to a complete stranger with his gamertag. I for one would never let anyone account recover my gamertag out of fear of them changing my password. Moving on...

"Yeah I'm aware of that, I'm not trying to get a high gamerscore and I don't go around on forums or anything posting my gamercard for bragging rights, I just want to get a high completion % for personal satisfaction and P8 is 1 game I just can't do :("

I checked TrueAchievements and true to the guys word he wasn't on their system which I was glad to see. But he said he wants a high completion percentage for personal satisfaction?!?!? I fail to see how paying somebody the equivalent of £18 (that could have funded my newest purchase, Bayonetta for £17.99 lol) to do the achievements for you is satisfying. He says he doesn't do it for bragging rights which means he's doing it purely for himself, what is the point? In may be morally wrong but I can understand why he may want a high percentage so that he could brag to his friends but that's not the case is it? I responded to him saying something along the lines of what I just stated in this paragraph, how he isn't going to get the satisfaction I did after spending thousands of attempts doing a combo around the whole city in the last goal of the game to become Rank 1. That feeling of accomplishment for me on that day was priceless.

"Well it's like all the games ive played and completed, P8 is the only game I cannot progress any further on no matter how much I try so instead of just leaving it sticking out like a sore thumb I figured I'd see if I could get it cleared up abit lol"

All the games he's played and completed hey? I decided to look at his card at this point and sure enough he had the full gamerscore on the majority of his games including the likes of Resident Evil 5, Call of Duty WaW, Saint's Row 2, Batman Arkham Asylum and plenty more. I didn't bother to check date stamps and everything but I wouldn't be surprised if this person has gamesaved in the past and/or paid other people money to finish the games off for him. It's a shame as he very well may be an excellent gamer capable of completing the games, the problem is his gamertag loses all of it's integrity once you find out he's been trying to pay me to complete a game for him.

I felt the need to expose this gamer to you all in case you for whatever reason may get in contact with him. I believe he does brag about his gamertag and for this reason I wanted to make sure that if he does ever come across you in the future you are aware of what his mentality is on the achievement system (if the going gets tough pay someone else to do it for you). Finally it makes me think back to my previous blog post when I was moaning about how people enjoy easy achievements such as them on Fable 2. is it because everybody is turning in to completion perfectionists such as Shystie and don't like knowing they may not be able to get the maximum gamerscore on a game because they're not good enough? That's another debate I may dabble in to sometime in to the future.....

What Makes A Good Achievement?

2010-02-09T01:05:00.000-08:00

I just finished reading x360a's Achievement Awards of 2009 (as I always do every year) and I must say I did enjoy reading it. The problem however is that I seem to disagree a lot with the views of Dan Webb and potentially many more gamers.

To me an achievement needs to be what's in the name, an actual achievement. There are of course lots of different types of achievements that have variety but ultimately I believe that the gamer needs to be achieving a feat that they are proud of when they hear their achievement pop. With this in mind I can pick out various points throughout the article that I have a problem with, mainly the choice of Fable 2 as best DLC achievements. So apparently you need to shoot some gamers in the groin, yay? Correct me if I'm wrong but I don't see a challenge there and instead an achievement that is easy to do and anyone can get. I got the original 1000 in Fable 2 and I remember that the getting villagers drunk achievement was not fun. It just didn't work and I found myself getting frustrating, asking myself "why am I actually doing this as there is pretty much no skill involved, just luck".

I also think the article is too critical on generic based achievements. I personally don't see the problem in Terminator Salvation giving you the full 1000 for just completing the game. I won't compliment the developers for the list as I do believe a few more types of achievements could have been added such as completing a mission without dying or only using one weapon throughout, this however doesn't mean the game needs to be ridiculed on. I haven't played the game yet but when I do I'm sure I'll enjoy earning the achievements by using my skill of FPS's to complete the game on Hard, much more of a worthy achievement in my books than punching a horse in the face which requires no skill but nets you 100G, get what I'm saying?

Ultimately I think people are getting too wound up in the easy gamerscore world, wanting all games to be nice and easy so that they can net their 1000 points and move on. A great example of this is in the Guitar Hero and Rock Band games. I personally love the Expert achievements as I am aware that people which can play the instrument on that difficulty will unlock the achievement whilst others don't, the people that did make the achievement pop will now get recognition they deserve instead of those that 1000 Guitar Hero 5 or Band Hero. There's a reason why I played Guitar Hero 2 and 3 the most on my 360, it's because their achievement lists pushed me the most to go and 5 star every song on every difficulty, a feat I one day dream of being able to do.

Don't get me wrong I'm not completely against having a few various random achievements, I just think they should be skill based and not based on awe factor all the time (that must be the reason why people enjoyed punching a horse in Darkest of Days, right?).

Let me know what you think by posting a comment. I hope I haven't sounded critical on Dan from x360a, he's just a good example for me to use right now in order to vent my feelings on this subject.

Is It A Crime to Have Maybe Enjoyed Disney Sing It HSM?

2010-01-28T15:08:00.000-08:00

I don't need to share this with the world, doing so may hinder my online "reputation" but I'm going to go out and say it. All 4 times I played the song Start of Something New on the Disney Sing It HSM version I enjoyed myself. I can be quite a sissy at times and am full well in love with my girlfriend, this is what opens me up (I think) to maybe enjoying some of the romantic songs on the game. A favourite of mine which I enjoyed from the original Sing It was Bet on It whilst What Time Is It has featured on both games (I think) and I enjoyed singing to it both times.

I just felt like getting that off my chest. Don't think for one minute I plan on playing this game now that I've got my 1000G, I most likely won't however when/if another Sing It comes out I won't pass up the chance to give it ago. So bring out the comments of disgust or maybe some others will come forward and admit to enjoying themselves too. You didn't have to enjoy singing all 25 songs (I definitely didn't as my vocal chords started to die half way through) but if you found yourself enjoying singing to just 1 song on the game then man up and let me know in the comments. I want to know if I'm the only one.

End of a Good Scoring Week

2010-01-19T04:46:00.000-08:00

Today marks the end of what has been one of my best weeks of gaming. In the past week (more like 8-9 days) I’ve managed to get over 4000 gamerscore which includes the completion of 3 games from scratch. This is mainly thanks to my Norwegian friend who has been lending me his games and money in return for me buying games which I play and then send to him. Saw, Spiderman Friend or Foe and Where the Wild Things Are have all felt my wrath as they’ve been played to completion. I also picked up PDC Darts for 98p in Gamestation and within 24 hours got all the gamerscore I plan to get for it (minus 2 achievements) which boosted my total by 550.

I’m glad that the “week” is over as I need to get back to focusing on college work and not ignoring my girlfriend so much (haha). I still plan to play games but hopefully I won’t be going near any new games for a while, instead focusing on completing games I already own (Alone in the Dark being one of them which I just completed today minus the Roots of Evil Achievement). FIFA 08 has seen the light of day as me and my friend compete against eachother to see if we can do any of the scenario achievements. They can get quite hard but perseverance should see us through it as a bit of luck can help you out a lot. Not sure whether we will maintain the motivation but for now I am doing it for enjoyment which is a good thing. Last bit of gaming news is that I still have High School Musical’s Disney Sing It to play; this will be the last easy gamerscore game I play, that is until I do some more deals with my friend from Norway.

Mission Accomplished

2009-12-29T10:51:00.001-08:00

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

2009-12-20T15:14:00.000-08:00

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

2009-12-16T23:10:00.000-08:00

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

2009-12-08T03:12:00.001-08:00

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

2009-11-03T16:36:00.000-08:00

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...

2009-10-26T03:24:00.000-07:00

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

2009-10-17T14:36:00.000-07:00

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

2009-10-07T03:04:00.000-07:00

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

2009-09-28T03:31:00.000-07:00

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

2009-09-19T04:28:00.000-07:00

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?

2009-09-08T12:46:00.000-07:00

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

2009-08-29T05:46:00.000-07:00

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

2009-08-28T02:43:00.000-07:00

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

2009-08-09T04:31:00.000-07:00

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

2009-07-30T02:57:00.000-07:00

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

2009-07-25T17:21:00.000-07:00

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

2009-07-18T01:43:00.000-07:00

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

2009-07-09T03:17:00.000-07:00

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

2009-07-07T14:14:00.000-07:00

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

2009-06-29T01:15:00.001-07:00

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

2009-06-23T04:50:00.000-07:00

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!

2009-06-21T09:23:00.000-07:00

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

2009-06-19T15:37:00.000-07:00

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

2009-06-18T11:15:00.000-07:00

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

2009-06-12T16:42:00.001-07:00

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!!!!

2009-06-10T15:17:00.000-07:00

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

2009-06-08T12:56:00.000-07:00

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

2009-06-07T01:31:00.000-07:00

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

2009-06-05T14:57:00.000-07:00

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

2009-05-31T16:09:00.000-07:00

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

2009-05-27T13:26:00.000-07:00

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

2009-05-23T03:03:00.000-07:00

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

2009-05-12T02:17:00.000-07:00

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!

2009-05-05T03:38:00.000-07:00

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

2009-04-30T13:52:00.000-07:00

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

2009-04-27T11:28:00.000-07:00

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

2009-04-26T03:44:00.000-07:00

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

2009-04-19T04:45:00.000-07:00

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!

End of Week 8 of GSL

2009-04-16T15:40:00.000-07:00

I didn't think I would be playing this week, the schedule had me down for being a sub but due to Wadinho going on a holiday and kizwiz not wanting to play I was basically forced (by myself, no one on the team made me) to play as I fought to get the Not So Silent Ninjas to 7th. Check out my mini reviews of the games I played in my last and final week of the GSL.

Now Skate 2 came out late January, just when I happened to get the RROD so I purchased it on PS3 (not wanting to miss out on playing it) and ended up trading it in and getting it on the 360 just when the GSL was about to start. I had already gotten the majority of the trophies on the PS3 version and therefore wasn't fussed about waiting a couple of months for the GSL to end for me to play however I was aware it had easy gamerscore so throughout the 8 weeks I have played it gradually, finally getting to Week 8 and after a bit of pre-playing before the week started got nearly all of the achievements done. The game is really good and it's been great to take a break from whoring crappy games during the GSL to play a bit of something I love and still manage to get gamerscore from. I won't discuss the game anymore as I fancy doing a blog dedicated to the game but wanted to include it in this end of week review as I did play a lot pre-week and finish off the majority of the achievements.

From the previous week I bought PGR4 as a friend of mine wanted me to get it so bad he was willing to spend £5 towards me doing so. I was aware it did have easy gamerscore so I decided to act and buy the game for Week 7. It helped that week (200 QUICK Gamerscore) but I didn't have the time to give the game the attention I wanted to do, that's what I did this week. I have been so hooked on playing this game (up until yesterday, 3 days after GSL when I finally got to Rank 1) as it's so god damn fun and easy for gamerscore, I entertained myself collecting the random puzzle achievements and eventually bored it out in Career mode trying to rank up. Been unable to play online with my friend much as I've been so focused on the Single Player aspect, that will be done soon as I aim to get Gold on everything in Arcade (and maybe Platinum if I'm lucky).

This World War game should have been left in the 20th century with those that had fallen in war as it's a pretty bad game, as I discovered when I finally played the Story Mode after boosting online for weeks. Throughout the week and the days post GSL I have managed to finish off the game, getting a full well deserved 1000 gamerscore from it. Having to go through the majority of the levels 3 times, one for each character (total of three) wasn't as hellish as I had imagined it would be thanks to the levels being rather quick (got longer as the game progressed though!). I was extremely greatful for the simple structure the achievements have which is simply complete every level on the game for the gamerscore. There's no need to collect any crap or play on Veteran difficulty which meant I need not worry about missing out achievements which if you didn't know causes me lots of stress. I can forgive the (at times) dumb AI and the odd glitch where you get stuck in between the door as overall the game is quick and different, meaning you won't get bored as you continue to gain easy gamerscore. I recommend this to all, even completionists (if you can be bothered to boost for 10+ hours online which I'm sure you will).

They are the three games I mainly played during the last and final week of the GSL. I will be writing another blog post shortly writing about the overall experience of participating in a GSL and hopefully throw up some interesting statistics about my performance during the competition. Other games I played this week were:

Golden Compass (oh how crap!, will speak about in the future), Phantasy Star Universe, Prince of Persia and Condemned 2.

End of Week 7 of GSL

2009-04-07T03:03:00.000-07:00

So this is the third time I've done an end of week review, I didn't do one last week as I did not game but this week (well the one just finished) I did and got lots of gamerscore (5,050 to be precise). It was my last week (I don't wish to play in 8, I'm burnt out) so I gamed really hard, staying up until 7:30AM on Sunday in order to help me get the eventual 1000 gamerscore on Kung Fu Panda. I enjoy the style I have taken towards doing these blog posts, meaning I am going to carry on with describing each individual game and using a box shot of the cover to help illustrate it.

Now I've played a Madden game before but this was Madden 06, packed with 10 or so easy achievements which a friend helped me get with ease. I barely played the game and didn't have a clue what was going on. Fortunately this remained the same in Madden 08 with me simply simulating over half of the achievements in just minutes which made life easy for me. However there were some achievements that no matter how many times you simulate will not unlock, therefore I actually needed to bother to learn how to play a Madden game. After a couple of hours of playing I now have a grasp of the concept behind playing what I previous was a game of chess but on a sports field. The 10 or so achievements I got legitimately (without simulating) really were not too hard, instead at a good difficulty for a novice like me who is playing their first Madden game. I got 800+ gamerscore of this with more being possible however for now I'm going to leave it.

The first "kiddy family game" that I played this week out of two (Kung Fu Panda being the other). This game is definitely a lot better than some of the crappy family games I've had to put up with throughout my time of gamerscore whoring. Playing as Bolt (the dog) is a fun experience as he has a wide variety of attacks and special powers which makes for entertaining battles. Penny (the girl you also control) has a unique gadget which allows her to climb walls and slide accross wires which helps add depth to the level variety. I was able to get the full 1000 on this game by using the achievement guide to make sure I collected all the collectibles. Overall it was a good 1000 to get and although not amazing I am pleased to have it on my profile, would probably play it again for another 1000 if there was another copy lol.

Why have I added NBA 2K7 to this post? Well it's not because I spent a lot of time playing it, it's because I finally finished off the majority of the achievements on the game. With just 3 left to get (2 being silly online ones) I have basically completed the game and thought now would be a good idea to talk about it. So what I did this week in GSL was to get all the players I still needed to get the respective achievement with in to one team and then played against a team with who I gave 5 created players at the height of under 5 feet. Thanks to my brothers help it now became a doddle for me to be able to block all the shots he made against me, considering he was so small and my players were generally tall I didn't even need to jump to block. I have found the achievements on this game to have been good fun to get. There should be achievements for actually bothering to play through career mode and such but I'm not complaining as I have been able to play the game properly and still get the achievements (without the need of simulation which I remember doing on NBA Live 06).

With under 24 hours left of the competition to go I knew I should set my sights on playing Kung Fu Panda as it apparently only takes 6 to 8 hours for the thousand. Now I'm not quite sure how long it did take me but it was definitely around the 10 hour mark and I only needed to go through the game twice unlike three times for people who mess up the don't die achievement. This game has been know as being one of the best family games on the market and quite rightly so as the game has a fresh feel thanks to slick looking graphics and combat features galore. It has a lot of fault though, my main one being the too many repetitive fights which go on for too long found on a few levels. Achievement wise it's a good list involving you to need to get 100% through the game twice. It's a right pain in the arse that the achievements wern't stackable but it doesn't matter, I bothered to complete it twice in a day and now I'm reaping the benefits of a 1000 gamerscore more on my gamercard.

There were other games that got played by me this week however they are not near completition (apart from LMA Manager but I already discussed that). It's worth noting that easy gamerscore was gotten on Smackdown vs RAW 08 (350 for GM mode) and 09 as well playing minimal amounts on PGR 4 and UEFA Champions League. I got 100 gamerscore on Phantasy Star Universe but there's plenty more boredom still to come from that game so I will feature it properly in the future. I'm done for now, will do an in-depth post soon giving an overall summary of the GSL.

Week 7 Off to a Flying Start

2009-04-01T23:14:00.000-07:00

With Week 7 being my last one of the competition (due to me most likely sitting out Week 8) I have really put the effort in to ensure I definitely do get to 90,000 gamerscore before the end of the week, hitting my tournament aim.

It's started off really well as I got 100G in minutes on Phantasy Star Universe for spam striking a boss, resulting in it's early grave. Put in Madden afterwards and in 5 minutes or so another few hundred gamerscore had been collected. Unfortunately I got invited to boost in a 6 person Hour of Victory session which I knew I shouldn't turn down due to the probability of never getting a chance to do so if I turned it down now. So a couple of hours there got me 140G and then it was time for an hour of finishing off the simulating the achievements on LMA Manager, netting me the full 1000 gamerscore on the game and another 500 gamerscore to the kitty.

So I've started strong and gotten around 1200 gamerscore already, with so many new games to choose from I have the best chance yet to beat my personal best this week, I'm sure I'll do it this time.

End of Week 5 of GSL

2009-03-22T16:11:00.000-07:00

Okay well I sat out Week 3 and didn't bother doing this for Week 4 so its now time for my end of Week 5 review. It's been a low scoring week, getting 1200+ or so which is bad but I'm not disappointed as I got more than I was expecting. So what have I been playing.....

So my Dad went and bought a new Xbox 360 alongside the games the guy he bought it off had, one of them being Call of Duty 4. Now I loved Call of Duty 2 and bought Call of Duty 3 when it was released to feed my passion for the genre. But Call of Duty 4 came out and went huge, making me not want to play any more. Weird I know but I don't like following the big crowds, add to the fact this version was modern day I thought I would pass it. Now however I was told by my brother (kizwiz) that it has easy gamerscore so I thought I'd play it to boost me some points. Sure enough I've managed to get 200G so far just by completing a few levels on veteran and getting random achievements like 4 headshots in a row. I really enjoyed playing it and the challenge of Veteran difficulty reminds me of the countless hours I spent getting 1000 on Call of Duty 2. It's all good though, I do like a good challenge.

I didn't know what to play this week so I decided to pick one of the games I own but have never truely played and try to get gamerscore from it. I was aware that Stuntman Ignition gave 30G out for the completion of every Movie, that was 150G I knew I could get right there so I decided this would be my game of choice for this week. A great choice it has been as I've found myself playing this the most out of all of my games. I've always liked the game as it's concept is unique and a pleasure so I'm glad I have finally given it the attention it deserves collecting the random "do this 20 times" achievements as well as completing career. I now need to go and 5 star everything which will be tricky but possible (remember I like a challenge) and then find a boosting partner to play online with. I want to stick to giving this game my attention so that I can get the achievements whilst I remember the levels and am good at it, will most likely play a bit next week.

I actually went and played Sega Rally before I even began working on Stuntman which I admit has taken my attention away from this great game. I bought it for £10 waaay back when I went Milton Keynes a few months ago and yet never found time to give it a play. I needed gamerscore so I thought I'd put Sega Rally in and get some easy points, I was wrong. It doesn't give out easy points, it's time consuming and potentially quite hard. I had a shock when in my first race in a Championship rally the flock sprinted ahead of me, spraying dirt in my face. But thankfully I picked up the slick controls quite quickly and have fallen in love with how the game handles driving. It's a lot different to any other racing game I have played and you do truely feel like a master when you drift around a corner with style. I did a few championships and boosted for the online Ranked achievements this morning but that's all I've done so far. I decided that I would be able to pre-play the game outside of the GSL week so I have left it for now.

Easiest game to 1000? No as the developers of Avatar made getting 1000 gamerscore on a game possible for a baby to accomplish, however Codemasters have structured the achievements on LMA Manager 2007 to make them extremely easy to get. As they are all "win this" it means constant simulating and saving before a game so you can load back up and play again if you lose is needed. Make a few tactical decisions such as buying players (Sylvain Wiltord for Rangers got goalscorer of the season for me, oh yeah) and you'll be able to win no problem. I would have gotten 1000 by now if it wasn't such a loooong drag. You need to do 8 seasons which take a couple hours at least each to do which means this is the game I have been pre-playing before the week starts. I have currently done 3 out of the 8 leagues and have started my fourth, with just 3 weeks left of GSL I need to step it up to make sure I make the gamerscore count for the competition.

I played a few more games this week such as boosting online with my brother to get Prizefighter ranked achievements and playing on drums on GH World Tour for a few achievements but only minimal playtime on these games. Of course I got some gamerscore from Skate 2 (putting me at 750 currently) but I can't be bothered to discuss that in-depth right now. Might aim to get the 1000 before the end of GSL so I'll discuss it then.

That's enough from me for now, biggest blog post I've ever wrote? Hmmm, might be....

Vampire Rain Online Achievements = Easy

2009-03-12T17:09:00.000-07:00

After an hour and a half me and Wadinho have walked away from Vampire Rain 650 Gamerscore richer. They are very easy to do and can be combined together to make it less time consuming. It never got boring either really and it was pleasant controlling the Nightwalker and doing crazy ass 50 feet jumps and such, a unique feature not seen in many shooting games.

Other than that I haven't gotten much gamerscore today apart from 1 level of Challenge Mode in Pac-Man Championship Edition and not be hit by a gun and complete a time trial level on Mirror's Edge. Therefore today's gamerscore gain was pretty bad for me as I definitely should have played more games and gotten more. Yesterday was good with LMA Manager and TNA netting me 600G so I'm looking at over 1,000 already on two days of having college and one of them starting at 9PM.

So yeah the future looks good for reaching my 3,000 goal this week but I'm playing all my easy games to do so. Halo 3 and Smackdown vs Raw 2008 will give me 770 Gamerscore for completing on Legendary and doing a year of GM mode. They will help lots in my bid to finally get 3k this week. Whether I can keep it up for next week is another matter.....

Going to 5 Star GH2 on Hard At Last

2009-03-10T10:19:00.000-07:00

It's been a while coming and at least a year of progress but I realised yesterday that I am not good enough to 5 star the set list on Guitar Hero 2 on Hard difficulty. I had 5 songs needed to do (Trooper, Psychobilly Freakout, Institutionalized, Hanger 18 and Carry Me Home) and I did them all in one or two tries apart from The Trooper. I had one go at Trooper and was just a few thousand short therefore I am sure that come GSL week I will past it to get an extra 30GS for my week total.

Been trying Guitar Hero 3 today but no progress made, can't beat Raining Blood on Expert and Knights of Cydonia, One and Raining Blood refuse to get 5 stars on Hard. I will do it, one day.....

Really Wanting To Game Right Now!

2009-03-08T01:25:00.000-08:00

Okay so Week 3 is nearly over but it's still a few days until Week 4 starts. I've enjoyed a few day break but I want to get back into the competition again now as I have loads of gamerscore to get from games I have lying around.

Not got much else to say so I'll make this one short, will try post again on Wednesday for the start of the week plans.