15th May: GS Update

I was going to revise for my exams today, though spend most of it on the 360, racking up that GamerScore!

Stuck to only a few games though - Catan, 3D Ultra Minigolf, TMNT and EA Fight Night 3.

Happily got the medium and hard achievement on Catan. Took about 6 games overall, most of them I quit early as I didnt have a chance of winning. Though my winning strategy for the hard AI consisted of 3 Cleopatra AI, and me as the forth person. Go for quick startup (2nd settlement you place is a city), normal turn order, then start the game. Look at the board, and try and find the 5/6/7/8 spots, preferably near a port. Put your settlement on the port, the city a spot with 3 resources around it, preferably on the 5/6/7/8. With the port, hopefully you'll be able to do 2:1 trades if you cant get 1:1 with the AI. Build as many settlements as quick as you can. After you get boxed in, aim for as many development cards as you can. Hopefully you'll get a lot of soldier cards and longest road, so you could get the 4 points from longest road and largest army. Persevere, and you'll get the achievement.

3D Ultra Minigolf was fun =D The only achievements I need now are the online ones, which I'll do when I get back on XBL Gold (after exams). Most of the medals were easy to find - I used the guide on http://achieve360points.com for the rest. For the 12 under par achievements, if I fouled up a hole, then its a case of quit then reload before it went in the hole. On the way for this achievement, if you go out of the way to get a medal, you can reload the hole and the medal still counts.

TMNT: Now complete! A great game with not great graphics but fun gameplay! Well at least for the first 8-10 levels. The rest were just repetative, until the final boss scene. 45 minutes, and annoyed that I couldnt change turtles mid air. Though a hint from me would be to use Raphael's tag team move - does about 20% damage easily. Overall, TMNT took about 15 levels x 15 minutes, + 1 x 45 = 200 minutes, ~ 3.33 hours. If you can find it cheap, and you like platformers, I would definately suggest this game.

EA Fight Night 3 was a bastard, but now complete! I played through it once, only loosing the fight for the final achievement - which is about 40 fights into the game. In order to get a chance at that achievement again, I had to go all they way back through those 40 fights. On the way, this time round it was a lot harder than the first time. My punches wouldnt connect, and they were doing 5x damage than before. But the fight for the final achievement was probably the easiest of them all. Go figure. Overall time: Should have taken 3 hours, took me about 6 as I went through it twice.

Overall quite a good day - 2 retail games complete, and almost one XBLA complete apart from the online achievements, which should take 10 minutes.

Overall, my GS changed thusly:
22794 -> 23930

Catan:
40 -> 70

3D Ultra Minigolf:
30 -> 160

EA Fight Night 3:
900 -> 1000

TMNT:
139 -> 1000

Retail complete: 14/80 (15 w/Oblivion to 1000)
XBLA complete: 5/17