Wednesday 29 April 2009

Lists of games

Blog number 8, I'm bored and am going to bed in about 20 minutes so I thought I'd fill the time with a blog.

I'm going to list some games I want to do for different reasons. These are all retail since I'm just writing it by looking at my collection.:

LoveFilm:

  • Lego Indiana Jones - DizzyChaos is beating me in it, but that's to be expected until I have less college work
  • Need For Speed: Most Wanted - I'll start this after Lego Indiana Jones


Games that are in progress but are/will take a while:

  • Sonic the Hedgehog - The 2006 game. Yep, I know it's a bad game but I have this thing for Sonic games and will play them anyway
  • Gears of War 1 - Still trying to get Seriously and it's really annoying that I can't just keep going and going with it because of college work
  • Gears of War 2 - Level 100, Annex now with Execution rules, 10 meatflags, 10 wins as the guardian leader
  • Blue Dragon - I want to continue this game after I'm done with Sonic, which I have a feeling might be a while

Games I own and haven't started:

  • Viva Pinata: Trouble in Paradise
  • Quake 4
  • Eternal Sonata
  • Infinite Undiscovory
  • The Last Remnant
  • Fable II
  • Lost Planet: Extreme Condition Colonies
  • Dark Sector
  • Final Fantasy XI - It was 99p, I don't think I'll ever do this one

Games to finish off:

  • Sega Mega Drive Ultimate Collection
  • Forza Motorsport 2
  • Tetris Evolution

Hmm, I think I'll have to make this list more manageable. Perhaps a game from each category.

Sunday 26 April 2009

Geometry Wars 200/200, 1Million Poinst without dying =D

Blog number 7. YES, FINALLY FINALLY FINALLY FINALLY!!! Today is the day I have been practicing for. For 2 years since I started Geometry Wars Retro Evolved for the Xbox 360's Xbox Live Arcade I have practiced. 2 years! That's how long it took me to finally, FINALLY get all 12 achievements in the game. I have now survived 1Million points without dying. I'm so glad that I kept playing this game trying again and again to get the next achievement that I have been working towards. I'd say that this game is the game that I have spent the most time with overall out of all my games for the Xbox 360. I played Lost Odyssey for over 180 hours and so that's a lot. That's a lot for a shmup which has such a simple concept; you are a ship and you shoot your geometrical shaped enemies. Each enemy acting different, the easiest being the purple pinwheels that just slowly make their way about the grid and the most annoying being the snakes for taking up so much space. In fact, sometimes they spawn over you and unfairly take your life. My favourite enemy is the blue diamonds who simple chase you around the screen until they kill you, unless you shoot them.

When I first started Geometry Wars it was recommended to me by a friend who goes by the name of Siriku. I had no idea what the game was and the name didn't make it sound that exciting. However, I wanted some XBLA games since these would be my first downloads after just getting my Xbox 360. So I went to Siriku's and watched him play it without trying it myself, thinking it looked pretty cool. When I got home I downloaded it and started to play it right away. Up until that point I had never played a duel stick shmup before and I hadn't heard of the concept either so I was a noob. How did I shoot? I tried every button sitting there for about 10 minutes just not knowing. Lol, I laugh at that now but it did seem weird back then. Obviously I found out it was the right analog stick and started playing properly. Although since I wasn't used to this type of shmup I died at 25K which for the first day was my highscore. It felt like such an achievement just to eventually get 100K (with dying). But before I even did that I survived 60 seconds without shooting which was a hard challenge. These days I can do it whenever I want, but when I started that was hard. Eventually I survived 100K which became my general highscore for a while.

By the time I had scored 500K Siriku had already beaten me to surviving 1Million in Geometry Wars. Not that I was racing or anything but it certainly motivated me to keep playing and playing until I got there. Then I finally got 9 lives, I scored 1Million, I survived 500K all in the same day and I believe my score was 1.2Million overall at that point. To do all that in 1 day was a really nice feeling with my new TV which would sometimes deform colours and not work properly. Next it was 10x multiplier which I received 04/05/2008. So that's almost a whole year ago. So really, I was trying this achievement for almost 1 year and nothing else when I played Geometry Wars 1. It was a challenge and I'm so, so glad I beat that game in it's entirety. It was so, so great. In the survive 1 Million points game my heart was beating so fast, it was unbelievable. I was shaking, I couldn't believe how well I was doing, so nervous I was going to lose a life.

I can't stop writing about this without thanking some people, specifically Siriku for making me want to keep playing the game more and more even though I am yet to beat his score. The other people I want to thank of those of you that have congratulated me for my achievement. Thank you.

I give Geometry Wars 1 a 10/10. Go download it, you won't be disappointed if you like retro games. The closest I can compare it to is Asteroids. I am the 6,270th person to ever to get 200/200 :)

So now to change the subject to DizzyChaos of which I am 100% sure I didn't beat him this week. Unfortunately this is the time where college work is coming to an end so until May 15th at the latest I think it is, I'm going to be pretty busy. After that I will still be busy since I will have exams but no coursework left to do. It won't be until June 4th that I am completely free again though so this slump may last a bit. Then again coursework is what takes the time, when I'm revising I'm usually able to play games at the same time a lot easier. For instance, I might do a match of Gears of War and read some stuff in between rounds. Or I might do something like what could likely be Ikaruga since I've finished Geometry wars, go for a game in that and then do some revision. I might even do something that doesn't require gameplay at all, such as in Perfect Dark Zero I could start a match and just leave it idle. There's an achievement for doing 1,000 Deathmatch and Dark Ops games offline so it somewhat makes sense to do. But anyway, this blog is probably one of the longer ones I've written since I'm just in shock with finally beating Geometry Wars, so I shall continue the update:

DizzyChaos: 55,640 - Increase of 3,590 this week
KaibaChaos: 49,558 - Increase of 360 this week

Wow that's a lot from DizzyChaos this week. Once everything's past I'm going to really need to work to beat him. I think the reason partly for such a large increase at once is the fact that he knows about the blog now and knows that I am trying to beat him. Nevertheless he can't win because I don't lose until I quit which I don't plan to do.

Rank update:

Country Rank: 4,274/392,765 - A decrease of 10 ranks.
World Rank: 18,720/2,917,865 - An increase of 21 ranks.

Thanks for reading, bye :)

Sunday 19 April 2009

5 Games 100%, One Week!

Blog number 6, a few hours earlier today but I've got things to do which is why I'm posting it now. Plus, I've got a lot to talk about so I should probably get started. I've 100 percented 5 games this week.

Game 1: Madden 06

Yep, this game really is an easy and quick 1000...providing you know about American Football. I had someone help me with this because otherwise I would not have had a clue what I was playing, even when it was explained to me I still didn't! All these options appear when you are about to try and steal the ball from your opponent or trying to make a touchdown yourself. Well basically I don't know what I just played but pretty much I press X and B over and over when I don't have the ball and I run with it when I do have the ball! Other than not knowing what the game was about really it was an ok experience so I'll give it a 7/10.

Game 2: Soul Calibur

200/200 in Soul Calibur thanks to a friend who let me recover my profile to his memory unit. This game was surprisingly a quick 200 and no real hard achievements. Probably the one that took the longest was completing arcade mode with all characters. This game is a really enjoyable fighter but I am disappointed that it seemed shorter than I remember it. So I'll give it a 7.5/10 which means it's still worth a download.

Game 3: Cloning Clyde

Wow, this game is unique and different from every platformer I've ever played. You basically have to keep cloning yourself or mutate yourself into certain animals and work out puzzles within levels. There's a frog, monkey, chicken and a few others and although short this game is still very fun. I think that if you like platformers and want an easy 200 gamerscore then you should get it. I give this a 6.5/10.

Game 4: Kung Fu Panda

I have to say although I had been told good things about this game I really still wasn't looking forward to getting the full 1000 in it. I changed my mind when I started to play it because providing you can ignore the crappy storyline, characters etc and focus on the gameplay then this is a good game. As long as a game has good gameplay that's pretty much almost all it needs. Kung Fu Panda is a 3D platformer and one of the easiest games you will ever play, I did not notice a single change at any point during the game when I changed the difficulty to the higher setting for the achievements. I thought a higher difficulty setting was supposed to make a game harder, well not this game. Fun 3D platformer and not bad for a movie game. I'll give it a 6.7/10.

Game 5: Fight Night Round 3

Ok, of all of the easy gamerscore games that I've talked about in this blog this on is definetely the easiest. Basically all you need to do is buy some illegal moves, turn illegal moves off, then you can use illegal moves but your opponents can't. Also, as long as the difficulty is set to easy you will probably never lose. Every fight the combo to to is LT+Left Analog Stick Down+B, it's that simple. I'll give this game a 7.2/10.

Now for the DizzyChaos update and I'm sure I've beaten him this week so here are the scores:

DizzyChaos: 52,050 - Increase of 200 this week
KaibaChaos: 49,198 - Increase of 3,095 this week

Wow, I knew I went up a lot but I didn't know it was that much! This score is more than 15 times what he got this week. I'm really pleased with this :)

Rank update:

Country Rank: 4,264/389,264 - An increase of 791 ranks.
World Rank: 18,741/2,894,774 - An increase of 3,565 ranks.

Country Rank %: The top 1.09% an increase of 0.21%
World Rank %: The top 0.006474% an increase of 0.763525%

Thanks for reading, bye :)

Sunday 12 April 2009

X-Men: The Official Game and 1,885GS this week!

It's blog number 5 which is half way to 10 and this has probably been my most successful week so far since I started blogging again. I can't wait to calculate the amount of gamerscore I've gotten this week.

So I finished X-Men: The Official Game this week which I want to say is a bad game and it is but it can also be not that bad. It's good points are that it feels like a great accomplishment when you beat the game since the achievements are almost all at the end of the game and so I got 950GS from it in one day! Now the bad things about it...

1. It's very repetitive since you are always doing the same thing depending which character you are playing as.
2. The upgrading system makes the difficulty system irrelevant. If Super Hero difficulty is supposed to be harder for the experienced gamer then why can I keep upgrading my character to make it easy.
3. The controls suck...well ok, most of the time they aren't that bad. When they are however, they really do suck. When I'm playing as Nightcrawler for instance and am trying to teleport the game will sometimes teleport you to some random other place you don't want to go to!
4. Some of it is just luck. When you are fighting with Wolverine and sometimes Nightcrawler there is no strategy at all. It's just attack, attack, attack and hope you win.

Overall I guess I did have some fun with this game so it isn't all that bad. I'll give it a 3/10 which makes me want to raise the score of Cabela's Big Game Hunter a bit since that is the better game. Ah well, these things happen with a 10 point scale.

Now for the DizzyChaos update:

DizzyChaos: 51,850 - Increase of 1,500 this week
KaibaChaos: 46,103 - Increase of 1,885 this week

Hmm...I did really well this week. But unfortunately so did DizzyChaos. I beat him still though which I think I'm lucky for.

And now a new segment - or the return of a segment. The leaderboard segment which I have decided I will indeed bring back. No comparing this week though since I don't know what rank I was last week. Instead I will post my country and world rank so far:

Country Rank: 5,055/385,662 - This means I'm in the top 1.31% of the UK.
World Rank: 22,306/2,873,623 - This means I'm in the top 0.77% in the world.

Hopefully I'll have 1,000 in Kung Fu Panda by next blog, Lego Indiana Jones and Fight Night Round 3 are also making their way to me from LoveFilm at the moment! I don't know why but they decided to give me an extra rental, oh well I'm not complaining lol.

Thanks for reading, bye :)

Sunday 5 April 2009

Blog number 4 (I think). A short blog today since I haven't actually finished any games 100% this week. I'll go straight to the DizzyChaos update which as of the time of writing I haven't compared the scores. I don't think I've beaten him this week, let's find out.

DizzyChaos: 50,350GS - Increase of 310 this week
KaibaChaos: 44,218GS - Increase of 279 this week

Well, I didn't get that much this week as I thought but neither did DizzyChaos so that is good. Still, if I'm to beat him then I'm going to have to gain more than him every week so it's no good this happening. I believe it was X-Men: The Official Game that did it to me, three achievements for 0 points and it being a really bad game don't help. Oh well, I hope I'll beat it soon and then I can move to Kung Fu Panda which according to what I've heard from some friends isn't that bad.

Thanks for reading, bye :)