25th November: GS Update

Good week for gaming and releases - Guitar Hero 3, Mass Effect:

Have you ever wondered what it was like to play games with someone who has a gamerscore of 60,082? Well guess what... you will never know, and I do! borandi is mine! All mine! No touchy! That is a profit of 45 points over last time! He made some progress on Mass Effect picking up 2 achievements, Gun, Prey, Open Season, Phantasy Star Universe, Enchanted Arms, Track and Field, TMNT, Oblivion, Boom Boom Rocket, Guitar Hero III finishing 1 achievement, Blue Dragon, Undertow, as well as stared off into space... thinking about the one that got away.

And the gamage:

Guitar Hero III	0 -> 160 of 1000 18 of 59 Achievements
Undertow	0 -> 50 of 200 5 of 12 Achievements
Mass Effect	0 -> 135 of 1000 6 of 45 Achievements
The Outfit	0 -> 15 of 1000 1 of 41 Achievements
Party Animals	0 -> 665 of 1000 37 of 50 Achievements

Guitar Hero III is a great game - much like GH2. Now that I've played GH2 a lot, GH3 is almost second nature. Though they have increased the difficulty somewhat - hard on GH3 is like expert on GH2, thus expert is near impossible. I started on hard, which was quite straightforward to begin with. I'm 80% into it - though stuck on a Slipknot song in tier seven. It's got quite a few doubles in it, and my mind doesnt work in doubles :D. Played a bit online too, all co-op.

Undertow was released on XBLA this week - this is a game I've been waiting for a long time. It's a great game - some easy single player and online modes. Its a shame it'll never get the recognition it deserves - after a few days I was still 70th on the leaderboard for gamerscore, even though I'd only played a couple of hours. The achievements look straightforward - the only difficult ones will be 'do each stage on ultra difficulty' and '10000 kills' - luckily the 10k kills also counts in offline mode against the CPU, so its just a case of finding the best level to do it on.

After playing GH3 for a few hours, I was starting to get hand cramps, so I went out and bought Mass Effect. There's been lots of talk online about this game, how it's an action RPG/FPS mix. Its an awesome game - I've played it seven hours, and you end up looking for clues, talking to people for a couple of hours, then shooting shotgun for the next couple. It's a great mix. You also get to respond positively or negatively - i.e. be the hero or be an ass. Some of the ass comments look hilarous, but for achievements sake I'm going good the first play though, then an arse the second time. To get all the achievements, you have to play through 3 times though! At the minute, my character looks like a Hulk Hogan throwback, but its fun :D

I rented out The Outfit for a friend, but we only played the first level. It looks like a great game - the ability to deploy stuff to destroy other stuff :D I'll get it some other time to play it proper.

Viva Pinata: Party Animals is like Fusion Frenzy 2 - but good. It's a fun mix of racing and minigames - most of them quite easy for kids and grown ups alike. It's a short game, and was easy to get ~700GS. Some of the others require a little grinding, so I'll rent it again.

GS: 58,617 -> 60,107

Completed XBLA:	15 / 38
Completed Retail:	27 / 137
GS Completion %:	39.45%
GS % (Non-Demo):	42.01%

Country Rank:	162
World Rank:	324

w00t! 60k =D