13th January: GS Update

This week has been somewhat entertaining. On Jan 6th, we had the Microsoft CES Keynote speech, delivered by the one and only Bill Gates (and Robbie Bach). It's Bill's final keynote, and he didnt have much in the way to say about the Xbox 360. No big announcements regarding hardware or packages. All that was said was regards the now 10 million Xbox Live members, and 17 million consoles sold - and they reached that 10 mill target 6 months early. Thinking about it, I dont know one game that has more than 2 million online gamertags associated with it - looking at mygamercard.net, Hexic HD has 1.05 mill, Halo 3 has 1.05 mill (a mere concidence) and I'm a particular world rank X of 1.7 million. Thus a lot of this tags are either SPAM, or just secondary accounts. Currently there are 5 accounts on my system - my main that subscribes, two spares for regional downloads, my girlfriends, and a mates'. Thus it can be clear by '10 million accounts' that maybe 80% of them are SPAM ones. This leads me to another point - 17 million consoles sold, and so few of them go online? Most of the 360 fun is online! Either MS have inflated their figures or just havent got the message out that the 360 is an online console. If they had included wifi as part of the hardware, I could see a lot more 'players' being part of this online community.

As regards the gaming, this week has been so-so. I'm up to my ears in exam revision, thus limited to few games. My 360voice states:

I thought borandi just wanted to listen to music or watch a DVD. Turns out he was there to game. With a gamer score of 66,287, I should have known that was the case. That is an increase of 115 points over last time! He rocked out to Metal Slug 3 acquiring 1 achievement, Omega Five, Hardwood Spades gaining 1 achievement, Scene It? LCA adding 4 achievements, Guitar Hero III, and... hmmm... I forget what else we did...

This weeks XBLA releases were Omega Five and Tron. Omega Five is the side-scrolling blaster (which I bought and think is ok), whereas Tron is the old pre-arcade version of the game (and is crap).

Scene It? LCA	280 -> 445 of 1000 21 of 42 Achievements
Guitar Hero III	275 of 1000 29 of 59 Achievements
Hardwood Spades	10 -> 20 of 200 2 of 12 Achievements
Omega Five	0 -> 40 of 200 3 of 12 Achievements
Metal Slug 3	60 -> 70 of 200 6 of 12 Achievements
Beautiful Katamari	1170 of 1250 39 of 40 Achievements
Marble Blast Ultra	30 -> 70 of 200 5 of 12 Achievements
G.R.A.W.	420 -> 670 of 1000 27 of 43 Achievements

Nellas and I have played about 4 games of Scene It? this week. As a result, we're slowly starting to get the achievements for '25 questions correct about the 80s/90s/Romance/SFX' type of achievement. I also got a couple of 'get all questions correct in this block' and a short game score achievement. When I'm not embroiled in revision, I could go through this for a while making mental notes of the answers (and using some forums) and hopefully try and get 1000GS in this. The hardest achievements (apparently) are getting 60 correct without one wrong, which will take some skill as I'm not a film buff.

I've spent quite a few days on GH3 this week, mainly for one purpose - to get the '200k on Cult of Personality without using star power' achievement. I've been working on it on Hard difficulty - expert contains too many 32nd length notes and I cant press the buttons quick enough. However, I'm getting quite good on Hard, with 940/980 notes hit and getting most of the hammer-on sequences correct. It's just a case of minimising damage - each time you break a 4x streak, you lose at least 5k in points. My best is at 182k, and I can usually get 175k. Thus, I need to just get slightly fewer mistakes on a run through. Hitting all the notes should get me around 199.5k, but as there are quite a few chords and also there's a little trick of using star power at the end which doesnt effect the achievement. More practice needed, though I've probably done it around 30 times this week.

I fired up some Hardwood Spades as a few people on my friends list have the full 200 and I'm stuck with only 10GS. I think I'm getting the hang of it now, randomly getting one achievement, and just need to focus on certain specifics to get the others. More practice methinks.

Omega Five is one of this weeks XBLA releases, which I bought. I've always been a sucker for side scrolling shooters, as long as I can do them. Omega Five is Hard! I've died at the second level boss a few times now, but managed to get all the achievements upto that point. The achievements in this game are more geared towards completing with character XYZ without losing a life/continue. Hard achievements for a hard game.

Another side scrolling shooter, Metal Slug 3, also involves completing level XYZ without dying. After using 71 continues on my playthrough on Hard, I fired up some easy mode and tried that. Several attempts resulted in getting the first level done quick and without dying, however I'll need to grind out the other level achievements. Bleh.

I've done some mild work into getting that 100hr BK achievement. Probably gave around 15hrs while I was revising, though it's hard to tell.

I grinded through some Marble Blast Ultra - successfully completing all the Intermediate levels. I had to redo 4 or 5 to get them under par time, and some of them were frustrating. The Expert levels look impossible, and there's no-one online for the online achievements.

I haven't played GRAW for a while, and I knew I had some easy achievements to do. Last time I played this, I went through Hard getting the story achievements. This is an old game, which if you complete a level on Hard you don't get the 'level complete' achievement for easy at the same time. Thus, this time round, I played the campaign on easy mode for an easy 250GS. Now, the only achievements I'm missing involve serious amounts of multiplayer work. Pah.

GS: 65,762 -> 66,357

GamerScore:	66357
Zone:	Pro

Completed XBLA:	15 / 42
Completed Retail:	29 / 154
GS Completion %:	38.96%
GS % (Non-Demo):	41.16%

Country Rank:	160
World Rank:	1,042
Completion Rank:	2,517