27th May: GS Update (2)

I've now done Bomberman: Act Zero single player =D The trick is to stay alive until level 20, where I got about 15 lives in that level alone. Then keep plugging away, and every 15-20 or so levels you can get another 15 lives. Most of the levels I went through, I had block pass, bomb pass, blast through wall bombs, infinite bombs, line bombs. Get an enemy in a corner by doing a line bomb up and across from the middle of the level, and it gets them every time. I was able to do the 100 levels in 100 minutes, thus got those achievements as well. What annoyed me however, was that after 100 floors, I still did not have the second bomb placement achievement - 10000 bombs set. Note, that one achievement to this game is 1,000,000 bombs placed, and 1,000,000 blocks destroyed. There's a reason why no-one has these achievements =P.

I started Lego Star Wars II this week. Its a fun game, dont get me wrong. But it does get boring after the first two stages. Its just the same thing over and over - run through the level trying to pick up studs (cash) and kill everything you come across. Achievements for this game involve completing each chapter, doing each level without dying, getting all the special pickups and buying everything from the shop. According to online forums, this is about 20 hours work if you're good, but I'm bored after an hour. Bleh.

I rented out Superman Returns this week. I'd played the demo, and thought it was alright for a Superman game. It's what you'd expect - fly around really fast beating the snot out of everything. In the full game, this is fun for about two hours. Then you realise that all you're doing is boring missions until you've enough experience to go up a level, then something story related happens. Each mini mission can take 5 minutes at most, and you have about 7-15 to do to get up a level. Boooorrrriing!!! Also some of the acheivements are annoying - complete all minigames, save 100 kittens, fly for 10,000 miles. According to online forums, a decent play through the main story line nets you 2000 miles, and the only way to get the rest was to use an elastic band on the controller overnight. Bleh!

Pirates of the Caribbean: At Worlds End is another rental. I played the demo, thought it was OK. Saw that Blockbuster had this in stock, so picked up a copy. It's a good, linear game. Easy enough to do the stages, but the achievements require some proper searching around the levels or planning in order to get. Thankfully there are now guides popping up over achievement forums =D I didnt have enough time to play this thoroughly though, so I'll rent it out again at some point.

NBA Street Homecourt - rental. I'd seen a few people from my friends list who were in the US play this, so I thought I'd pick it up. Quite honestly, it's the best NBA game on the market for gameplay. The weird querks, like stylish dunks and so forth, make this game fun. Being able to go up for a dunk after launching off someones back and ending up with a triple dunk after perfectly holding down the button for a given time gives a sense of achievement =D Speaking of achievements, 10 hours netted me the lot. Go through career mode with one player, then half way through with another. In total, about 120 games of basketball. Length of each game depends on your squad and skills and what sort of game it is (dunks only to 7, any shot to 11, gamebreaker to 3, first team to lead by 5 points, etc.). Then find a buddy for the win 10 online in a row. NBA Street Homecourt is a great game if you love basketball. And acheivements.

Helped a friend so a lot of achievements co-op style on Crackdown, and let him see what the extra DLC was like. Got the repo 100 cars in the process. Also found a few orbs, so now I have 450 agility without using a guide =D Also working through the time trial psychotic achievements - done Los Muertos and Volk, now Shai-gen left. The Volk boss took me 15 minutes, so I'm dreading the Shai-gen boss. Co-op anyone?





Initialised these games after playing around with http://my360stats.com - nothing I tried to do worked :S Though I did the online achievements for 3D Ultra Minigolf to get 200/200 on it.

Another rental - Brian Lara's ICC 2007. What a bitch of a game. It's a gret cricket game as cricket games go, but the achievements are wild. 6 4's in an over, 6 6's in an over, 200 runs with one person, 200 runs in a one day international etc. You can't do them in two player. The game gives you cheats to help you play the game, but you cant get achievements with them enabled. I was getting frustrated at the fact that according to all the ingame monitors, I'd timed the stroke right, I was the right distance away, I'd stuck the ball into the emptiest part of the field I could find, and yet it'd just go high and I'll get caught out. Gah.

EA, you are stupid pieces of shite. UEFA Champions League (rental) is a shit game. No tutorial mode to let you get used to the game, and this combined with the fact that the controls to this game are 75% different to every other single football game on the market leaves a lot to be desired. It's a load of shit, and EA needs a big kick up the arse. Stop releasing games early. Stop releasing games with bugs and glitches. Listen to your fanbase, get your head out of your arse. You ARE capable of releasing bug free games (The Sims), and some of them good (Madden). So why do you insist on releasing this horseshit?

/rant over.

So a nice enough week in all.

GS: 26660 -> 29560

ICC Cricket 2007: 0 -> 155
NBA STREET Homecourt: 0 -> 1000
At World’s End: 0 -> 125
Superman Returns: 0 -> 360
LEGO Star Wars II: 0 -> 70
BOMBERMAN Act:Zero: 15 -> 250
Football Manager 2006: 85 -> 320
Full Auto: 235 -> 335
American Wasteland: 0 -> 570
Crackdown: 740 -> 750

Completed XBLA:	7 / 19
Completed Retail:	17 / 55
GS Completion %:	44.82%
GS % (Non-Demo):	49.64%

Country Rank:	798/135815
World Rank:	4450/1137473

18th May: GS Update

Well apart from the Halo 3 Beta, I've been playing some regular games.

Played the Double Dragon demo. Its almost like what I remember from when I played on the Atari, except better graphics, and also the characters don't grapple as often with the enemies. Makes it a lot harder imo. I dont think I'll be buying this off XBLA soon though.

Loaded up 3D Ultra Minigolf to play some online for those achievements. No-one was on!


Robotron is still too hard!



Catan again. Got the one for finishing 10 times with the longest road. By playing on easy against AI, this one was easy as the AI will commonly swap 2 resources for one. I'll get the one for largest army 10 times soon.

Boom Boom Rocket. Still after getting all the firework types. Need about another 4, then I'll probably work on getting those A ranks.


Just some general messing on Crackdown. Did Los Muertos time trial on psychotic. Tried Volk, got a bit difficult =P Also captured some regular vehicles. And H3Beta of course.

Played some online games - got the top player in a map achievement, the 20 ammo achievement, and some single player ones. I was having fun, until some bastard kept running around in a tank! Well averaged 30 points each game, so 40000 only requires 1333 games -_-.

Pulled out BM:Z. Yes, it is a very crap game. No-one online, and only one single player mode. WTF? Took me 5/6 short games to get 1000 bombs, one of the easiest achievements to get, as well as the stage 10 achievement (Total GS: 15). This is bad play from Hudson/Konami. This is an XBLA game only, not worth the $50/25GBP it is currently retailing for. *spit*

Pro Evo was fun. Did the three easiest acheivements for 120 GS, then carried on with the English league I'm doing. Now I've got the hang of the controls, I was winning some games 14-0 in 5 minutes (on easy). As I'm not into football games for the challenge, the rest of the GS should be straight forward, and a bit time consuming.

I died within 5 seconds of starting my ultra-violent single player game, so tried some multiplayer. No-one online, so tried to get the 50 kills achievement locally. After 50 kills and no achievement, I looked online and realised that it does have to be XBL play. D'oh!

Dynasty Warriors 5: Empires wasnt a game I was thinking would be fun. But it was. Before my Xbox went to the dry cleaners, I was 860 odd GS in, with only 10% left of the game to play. In all honesty, it's the better version of Ninety Nine Nights. Well I played this for a couple of hours, to get the full 1000GS. Another game complete =D

Cars is officially my first game rental. I am now the joyous boyfriend to a wonderful girl who works at Blockbusters... which equals free games rentals for me. Or well, each game I rent I can only rent 2 days out of every seven. I picked up Cars as I heard it was an easy GS, and I've never seen a decent price on it. And sure enough, in less than 6 hours I had all 1000GS. I actually think Cars is a great racing game. Some of the big names could learn from this. Yes the story is short, and the achievements could be a lot harder, but for a simple few hours gameplay, I really liked Cars. Thumbs up. Now to drop it off back at Blockbuster!

Day results - 2 retail games complete, and 4 new games tested.

My GS changed thusly: 24835 -> 26145

Catan: 90 -> 110
Call of Duty 3: 105 -> 150
Bomberman: Act Zero: 0 -> 15
Pro Evolution Soccer: 0 -> 120
Dynasty Warriors 5 Empires: 890 -> 1000
Cars: 0 -> 1000

Completed XBLA:	6 / 19
Completed Retail:	16 / 43
GS Completion %:	49.00%
GS % (Non-Demo):	54.77%

Country Rank:	1089/137718
World Rank:	6211/1138611

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

14th May: GS Update... and Xbox returned!

Well it finally arrived today, about 10:30. Didn't come in the packaging I sent it in, but it did come properly packaged back, nice and safe. The report I got back was what I suspected, a DVD drive problem. Though they were kind enough to send me a free month of XBL Gold with it though. <3! MS did definitely get one thing right!

On the otherhand, I was able to start playing the stock pile of games I've amassed! I got straight on XBLA for some Boom Boom Rocket, then Catan, 3D Ultra Golf, Doom, Totemball (I got the XBox Vision Camera last week), Robotron: 2084 (came free with the camera). Also opened out of shrink wrap for EA Fight Night 3, and TMNT.

I loved the two games of Catan I played today =D The only gripe would be if the turns would be quicker. 3D Ultra Golf was great - got a bit annoyed with the power stoke thing... seemed a little too variable. Doom is classic Doom =D Totemball was interesting! Was able to just sit back in my chair, and my shoulders ended up in the middle of the screen, thus resting my arms. Robotron was truly retro, but not worth the 1200 MS points on XBLA though.

I got all but one achievement on EA FN3 in just over 3 hours. For some reason, the final achievement seemed a little off - for the fight, I lost 90% of my health with a little jab, thus lost in about 30 seconds. I dont know how many fights I have to go through to get a shot at that achievement again though.

TMNT was quite fun - your average linear platformer, with specific fighting areas, and lots of wall to wall jumping. I think I'm going to like playing that one.

Overall, my GS changed thusly:

21550 -> 22794

Robotron:
0 -> 50

Totemball:
0 -> 10

3D Ultra Minigolf:
0 -> 30

Catan:
0 -> 40

Boom Boom Rocket:
40 -> 75

Doom:
0 -> 30

EA Fight Night 3:
0 -> 900

TMNT:
0 -> 139