So, I'm writing for Rooster Teeth now. Anyway, my first post is up, which is more introductory than anything. Still, we got some cool ideas for unique content and I hope you enjoy it. Of course, this still means I probably won't update here as much, which is kinda bad, but you know how it is.
Found this yesterday on YouTube..(via a vanity Google search. Sue me.) Kinda scary and funny at the same time. The video is one of those self-promoting gaming videos that Thanks goes out to Whiskey and DjDATZ for the support. On a side note, YouTube's comment system oddly takes a while to thread comment replies, as evidence by my initial screen capture. I apparently am going to need to start playing Gears again.
What is that doing there? Sure, it doesn't show up on my xbox.com profile, but srsly guyz. Why is that there? Why does it show 0 of 0 Achievements with 0 Gamerscore? And why does it have to use the Xbox icon as placeholder. I mean, unless Microsoft is planning to automagically add Achievements to select Backwards compatible/Xbox Originals titles despite saying it won't happen, I know of no reason why that should clutter my Gamercard, only on my Xbox 360, and think it should forever be forgot.
Oh, and BO3:TD? Still frickin' rad.
Yeah, I suppose the Heavy Machine Gun is slight overkill, but it sure looks intimidating. It also tears through psychopaths, so that's useful, but is a pain to lug around when dealing with survivors. I'm digging the outfit, and since it's persistent throughout the cutscenes, it adds extra humor. For example, after dispatching Steven, and saving Isabela, she takes off running. Jessie commented on that by saying "Can't blame her from running from someone with your looks." I personally wouldn't be too keen on entrusting my safety with someone that looks like an iconic mass murderer from a movie series, but maybe that's me.
Oh, and yes, it's early, I know.
My buddies over at Roosterteeth, Burnie and Geoff, are both something of Achievement Whores as well. Anyway, they had an interesting internal contest with CoD4 where they both started playing the game at the same time and raced to be first to get the full 1000 Gamerscore, since the game was A.) new and B.) had Campaign only Achievements. The winner got to choose an Achievement that they've previously unlocked that they can have the loser go and get themselves.
In the end, it was a close match, but Burnie came out ahead, nabbing the "Mile Hile Club" Achievement and sealing the deal. Burnie had his side of the story on his journal, including a runthrough of the Airplane 60 seconds found in that last link as well as serving up his penance Achievement. Geoff gave his outlook, and eventually finished off the game, and now is working on getting hte "7 Day Survivor" Achievement on Dead Rising. Ironically, in order to get that Achievement, he's going to have to get like, 6 others. But, on the bright side, it's a fun game, even if the 14 hours of gaming required is a bit of a chore.
Geoff and I have played through games together for Achievements before, like Fuzion Frenzy 2, and more recently joining in on his conquest of GRAW 2. So, having played Dead Rising before then abruptly stopping for other gaming stuff, I decided his punishment would be a good excuse to pick it up again and finish off the Achievements, as he and I both agreed that since he's playing it, he might as well get the last Gamerscore remaining, and I felt that I should do the same, after all company and misery tend to go hand in hand, right?
Anyway, in the past week, I've unlocked 15 Achievements in it, and only have 7 more to go. Notably, over the weekend I got Frank The Pimp, Tour Guide, PP Collector, Gourmet and Clothes Horse. I also did some other extracurricular Achievements along the way, but those were some of the big ones. I also had to do Zombie Genocider again, and finish the playthrough to unlock arguably the best medium-long range weapon in the game. My next playthrough will focus on getting Saint, Full Set and Transmissionary, and by utilizing either of my memory cards, I can save a branching point to pick up Snuff Shots J and B. Then that'll leave me with just the two Surviving Achievements.
We've been looking over various guides, and finding the path of least resistance for the various objectives. The Frank the Pimp guide over at GameFAQs is pretty tight, and there's a photo album for all the PP Stickers, a nice list for all the pieces of clothing. I recommend going from Paradise Plaza down to Wonderland via the shortcut in the ladies restroom, then down through Al Fresca and finishing off at Entrance Plaza. For Gourmet, don't forget to drink all the mixed drinks, and you can eat 98% of the list in Seon's Food & Stuff anyway. I did all of those in one playthrough too, so it doesn't take much time if you've got the Small Chainsaw+3 books, Real Mega Buster, and a nice supply of wine, milk or OJ.
Anyway, Geoff and I are probably going to do our Survivor run simultaneously, which will most likely happen on a weekend, since it's 14 hours straight and all. I may liveblog my experience, and he's got some ideas cooking for his coverage too.
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Either way, take care, and I've got a new post lined up about my recent gaming down the pipeline, so stay tuned.
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For those of you lazy ones, he said:
My reply was "Merci. Parlez-vous anglais ? Mon Français n'est pas celui bon."
That was my first message that I received that wasn't in English. Kinda random.
Thinking about it, after the impending spring updatethis May, I might switch the twitter IM to MSN, so I can send updates straight from my Xbox 360...Hmm.. We'll see.
Saw 300 a couple weekends back, and thought it was great.
I also have been playing Guitar Hero II, having all 5 stars on Easy and Medium. I'm now just getting started with Hard, still working on 5-starring the first setlist.
Super Paper Mario and Twilight Princess have been getting some playtime over on my Wii, and it's good to finally sink my teeth into some Zelda.
On the PS3, I've been trudging through Resistance: Fall of Man, which feels more like a chore than a game, just because there are such better experiences available on other new gen consoles. I bought flOw on the PS Store, and find it to be very relaxing and...serene.
Day 500 of my Achievement Streak has come and gone, on the 5th, and it feels good to hit such a milestone. Now should I decide to stop, I'll still feel like I accomplished what I set out to do back in November of '05.
So yeah, that should bring you up to speed mostly. I hope to clean up the bots in the forum, maybe get another admin on board to assist in maintenance. Again, We'll see.
Catch you guys on X3F.
Speaking of, our Pod/Fancast is 12 episodes strong, and my audio quality is finally up to snuff. Episode 10 and 11 were sub-par for their own reasons.
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Like Burnie and Geoff, I'm a big Achievement Whore. Some might say the biggest, despite my total Gamerscore being nearly one fifth of the current leader, who's even admitted and is proud of using games saves to artificially inflate his score. Let me give some backstory as to why that might be. I was one of the fortunate 32,100 Canadians to actually get an Xbox 360 on launch day. I played my share of Perfect Dark Zero and Hexic, and acquired a dozen Achievements that day. I was instantly hooked. I continued to play Call of Duty 2, Kameo or Project Gotham Racing 3, and unlock more Achievements. A few days into it I noticed that I'd gotten Achievements each day in PDZ. So, being someone who likes to challenge himself with goals, I posed the question "I wonder how long I can do this in PDZ for?" The answer was only four more days, as the following Monday I couldn't nab 100 Sniper kills, because I tried to in an offline match rather than one on Xbox Live, so the Achievement didn't unlock after I did it. Awesome. I did however, get some Achievements in PGR3 and CoD2, so I switched gears to open up the self-imposed challenge to any Xbox 360 game's Achievements, so long as they were worth Gamerscore, because (believe it or not) there are actually games with 0 point Achievements. I continued getting at least one Achievement each day for nearly two years, putting a stop to my streak on October 5th, 2007. My Gamerscore was 49,900 on that day, netting roughly 1765 Achievements along the way. For the record, I also did a bunch of traveling in 2007, had a steady girlfriend, and got pissed drunk enough to keep my sanity intact. The reason for my stopping, as stated in my original article on it, was because of Microsoft awarding me MVP status on October 1st, 2007, and felt that I had proved my point with the whole endeavor (that point being that good things come from playing video games).
That's still 681 days.
In a row.
For starters, I'll give you an explanation on how Achievements work. Every Xbox 360 game, be it Arcade or Retail, has Achievements, that are worth Gamerscore. When you get an Achievement, it’s tallied up on your Xbox Live Gamercard. It would actually be kind of sad if you had an Xbox 360 and didn't know that. Initially, retail games required a minimum of 5, and maximum of 50 Achievements, totaling up to 1000 Gamerscore (some early games like The Godfather, included less than 1000 points – no one in the world knows why), and Arcade titles had 12 Achievements for a total of 200 Gamerscore. These totals have recently been allowed to increase thanks to Downloadable Content, potentially bumping Retail / Arcade titles to 1250 and 250, respectively. The launch titles tried but didn't always get the idea right, with some games being notorious for having ridiculously easy Achievements, most of which were the first sports titles. Others were ridiculously hard, sometimes even excluding the majority of gamers with Achievements that require you to top a game's leaderboards in multiplayer. Early missteps aside, they do add an extra "something" to Xbox 360 titles, whether you're hooked or not. When properly implemented, they give you incentive to play games uniquely, reward you for playing normally, and sometimes even coerce you to play games you normally wouldn't touch. They can also add friendly competition among peers, be it besting a friend's score, or as you've seen first hand, racing to complete a game the quickest. Community sites have popped up to catalogue them, and even manage to get complete lists for games months before their release. Outside of the Achievement Streak, one thing I did that changed the way I played (that I wouldn't have done otherwise), was to try and hit Gamerscore Milestones. Basically, these are cool numbers that I hit, rather than simply pass over, because you only ever get a chance at it once on any given Gamertag. For example, the first one I got was 2,500, though that wasn't a big deal at the time. The next one, which almost happened by fluke, was 12345. I thought it was cool, and from that point I tried to hit as many as I could, like 22222, 25000, 44444, 54321 to match my first one, and most recently 55555. When I first told Geoff about this, he thought it was a cool concept. He was on the cusp of getting 33333 himself, and this requires taking care of what Achievements you get. We used some odd numbered Achievements in GRAW and Marathon: Durandal to pull it off, and he nailed it this past weekend, which is pretty cool. I was at a Microsoft event in New York City, when I got my 33333, so it was cool having him start with the same one. Fortunately, game developers have become more familiar with implementing Achievements into their games, and we've seen some great examples in the past year of how Achievements can work to enhance gameplay. Titles like Crackdown, Mass Effect, Call of Duty 4 and Halo 3 all have balanced Achievement lists that are fun, challenging, and sometimes downright difficult. That being said, we've seen some missteps as well, with titles like Guitar Hero III's ridiculously difficult Achievements, or Avatar's laughably easy ones. I can only hope that in 2008 we see continued improvement in games as developers get a better grasp on what works and what doesn't. If you’re on this site, it’s probably safe to say you’re at least a Halo fan, which means you probably have a 360 and have hands-on experience with at least Halo 3’s Achievements. Halo 3 has a nearly perfect balance of Single Player to Multiplayer Gamerscore distribution, allowing you to get 90% of it done without even playing online. Sure, the spread of 100/1000G for the multiplayer Achievements looks a little scarce at first, but once you think about, it works out nicely. First off, you can get all of the Achievements online if you want, via co-op or otherwise. There are 13 online-only Achievements, and barring the rank-based ones, all of them are worth 5G and exclusive to Lone Wolves. This means that if someone doesn't play that playlist, they aren't missing out on a bunch of Gamerscore. Plus, given the quality of the campaign, and Bungie's focus on the story, it's good that the majority of the Achievements are devoted to it. So, what do you think? Do Achievements affect the way you've started to play games, make you try new ones, or just enrich the ones you do play? I can say that having all three current gen consoles, it’s definitely made sure the Xbox 360 is my preferred choice, even though it's not the strongest on a strictly hardware level. Let me hear your thoughts.]]>
