Game Completed: Top Spin 2

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.

Considering Doing Force Unleashed on Hardest Difficulty

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.

I Showed You Ai Sugiyama!

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

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.