Game Completed: Tony Hawk's Proving Ground

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

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

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

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

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

Renting From Lovefilm Again + Getting Sick of Top Spin 2

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

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

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

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

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