Game Completed: LOTR Conquest

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

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

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

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

100,018 Gamerscore

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

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

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

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

Under 1,000 To Go

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

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

Game Completed: Pure

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

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

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

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

Countdown to 100,000 Begins!

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

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

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

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