Rambling Time

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.

What Makes A Good Achievement?

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.

Mission Accomplished

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

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

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