Saturday 26 December 2009

Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas dear readers I hope this post finds you all well stuffed following a Christmas dinner and that you presents were what you wanted, nothing too embarrassing. I've been lucky enough to have gotten everything that i asked for, and more besides.


I recently bought myself a present the week leading up to Christmas. A brand new Xbox Elite, with the wireless entertainment pack and two games, PURE and Lego Batman, and then two other games as well, my choices were the saboteur and Left 4 dead 2. Up until I left for my Christmas tour I was really enjoying the saboteur I tried L4D2 but I think that it's more of a game to play with friends rather than on your own, so I'm going to wait and see if any of my friends are playing on it when I get home.


So far I've gotten Dragon Age: Origins and XMen Origins : Wolverine. so I'm going to be spoiled for choice when I get back. So this was just a quick update to say Merry Christmas.

Wednesday 16 December 2009

Catch up! (for want of a better title)

So I never wrote an update last week, and my last update was a review of the Game of the Year Edition of Fallout 3. Since I finished that last week I splashed out and bought two more games to tide me over until the Christmas influx. I bought Ninety-Nine Nights (N3) and Dead Space. I’ve not started Dead Space yet as I’ve been playing N3. I’ll have a review of N3 in the next couple of days, as I’ve almost completed it along with all the achievements.


As I touched on in my last post I’m now top of my friends list with Gamerscore, I’ve managed to overtake my rival. So I’m very happy with myself at the moment. N3 helped a lot as there are only 10 achievements and are fairly easy to pick up, but I’ll talk more about that in my review. Fallout 3 is now whored as well which takes my total games whored up to 12, should reach 13 in the next few days.


I’ve got a few ideas for future updates and I don’t want to over load you with updates. But here is a few of the ideas I’ve got for future posts, My Christmas List, Game Glitches, N3 review, Moral Choices and My 2010 highlights. Feel free to comment and let me know which ones you are more interested in seeing and I’ll make sure I do them sooner rather than later. Also let me know what else you would like me to talk about. I’m new to the blogging scene so any tips would be much appreciated.


So that’s it for now I’m going to try and update again in a few days with one of the above entries, not sure which one yet, but you’ll be the first to know it when I update. 

Monday 14 December 2009

Survivor of the Wasteland

I have now completely whored Fallout 3: GOTY. It was good; I was able to play through the entire story again as well as all the DLC. So here is a brief review of the 5 DLC.


The Pitt was ok, the moral ambivalence given at the climax of the mini story was a little confusing as playing as a good character, which I always do, there was no “good Karmic” ending. Considering the rest of the story had a large grounding in moral decisions I was a little put back by the fact that there was no clear moral path, both sides of the story are on rocky ground when it came to choosing a path to go with my character.


Operation Anchorage was pretty much what I was expecting. It was the FPS DLC that it had been claimed to be. While the story gave you some background into what happened before the Great War, it did seem a little detached from the rest of the game, enjoyable none the less.


Point Lookout, again took you away from the capital wasteland and while I only stayed to do the achievement quests there was still a lot of the place I didn’t look around. It was enjoyable but I was glad to be back in the wasteland with the super mutants and radiation.


Broken Steel was a little disappointing in my opinion. As there didn’t seem to be much difference to the wasteland considering that the water was now free from radiation. However I was a bit focused on the climb to the top of my friends list. So I probably didn’t notice the smaller changes.


Mothership Zeta, this was by far my favourite DLC of the five, new weapons, new people and new stories. ***Spoiler Alert *** and a big Star Trek type battle at the End. *** End of Spoiler*** although I did have some trouble with the Alien Archivist achievement as I missed one and I had to start again going through to get all of the recordings.


So there we go my round up of the DLC that came with the Game of the Year edition of Fallout 3.  It was enjoyable to play through again, and there is still more that I can do that I haven’t finished. So there is still some re-playability left in it.


P.S. To Read the spoiler just select the blank area as the text is in white

Tuesday 1 December 2009

Wasteland Wanderer

Helllllooooooo Capital Wasteland!!


As you may have guessed my plan worked, I managed to get most of the remaining Naruto: Broken Bond achievements which meant I could start playing Fallout 3 again. Saturday afternoon I loaded up a saved game and worked on getting the ‘Mercenary’ and ‘Reaver’ achievements. I then started a new game so that I could go and get the ‘Strictly Business’ quest achievement as in my saved games I wouldn’t have been able to complete it.


I’m really enjoying playing it through again, and getting back into the whole mythos of the game. It’s making get a familiar itch I got the last time in wanting to play to original games. I had a copy of the original but the graphics would go a bit funny, so I didn’t get very far. Hmm I’ll have to Google that one I think.


So I’m working up to the level 14 and level 20  achievements but it’ll take a while to get there as I’m only level 9 at the moment. I’ll have to save it once I’m level 13 and then go on a murder spree before turning in a Quest to get the level up. I have found wiping out the residents of Underworld is quiet effective when trying to lower your karma. However you do need to take out the robot first as he can do some damage.


I’ll update when I have more news, but at the moment I’ve just got to get through the main adventure before the real grinding can be done. 

Thursday 26 November 2009

Fighting Talk

Last night I completed the main story of Naruto: Broken Bond. I enjoyed it alot, I’ve not got to work through the rest of the side quests that I have missed and collect all the gold coins. This isn’t as hard as it may sound as now that I have completed the story all the coins appear on the map making the whole task a lot easier. I’ve also got the ninja card, bounty missions, fishing and tree races to complete. Then it’s onto the online achievements which I may have a go at tonight.


My goal is to have all the N:BB achievements done by the weekend to allow me to have a good start at Fallout 3: GOTY. To start with I’ll work on getting the remaining achievements for the main game, one side quest and 6 Karma/level achievements, and then I will work on the DLC achievements. To get myself in the mood I’ve created a Spotify playlist of songs from Fallout 3. Check it out if you like. Fallout 3


So there isn’t much more to write about at the moment as N:BB went really smoothly, the races and the delivery missions weren’t nearly as hard as the races and ramen deliveries in the first game. The only thing that did take me a while to get my head around was the fighting and inputting combo’s. I’ve always been under the impression that tapping the buttons for combos should be timed with the punches on the screen. For N:BB this wasn’t the case you would have to type in the combo and then watch it play out, which can get annoying when you miss one of the early buttons. I’ve got a copy of Soulcaliber IV, maybe I should get that out and see how the combos work in that game.

Monday 23 November 2009

Crack-done . . . Mostly!

Over the weekend I got the last few achievements for Crackdown, ‘Orb Hunter’, ‘Ring Leader’, ‘Confiscator’, ‘Flippin’ Crazy’ and ‘Body Armor’. I did have some trouble with the orbs, but that’s only because I missed one while ticking them off, but I got there in the end. This leaves me the co-op achievements, ‘Double Team’, ‘Tag Teamer’ and ‘Pack Rat’, as well as ‘Psych Out’ – complete all Time Trial missions at the Psychotic Difficulty. The only reason I’m saving this one is that I’m hoping to do it in conjunction with the co-op achievements, although if I get desperate for 100g I might go back and try for it.


I’ve resumed my Naruto: The Broken Bond game and working through the story mode. I was going to start again and pick up all the coins marking them off on a map, but I’ve read that I don’t need to as once you’ve completed the story it reveals them all on the map, Good News! However there is the ‘Hokage’ Achievement for reaching Hokage Rank online, worth 0g and you have to beat the number of wins of the current Hokage to gain the achievement.


I also picked up the Game of the Year Edition of Fallout 3. I’m going to play this once I’ve completed Naruto: TBB. I’m going to be going through my saved games first to try and find one near the level/alignment achievements, and then try each of the DLC’s. This should take me up until Christmas but in case that doesn’t work I man splash out on Dragon Age: Origins.

Friday 20 November 2009

Street Racer Elite

So last night I completed the Crackdown ‘Street Racer Elite’ achievement for a whopping 150g. That being said the previous night I did have a massive paddy about not being able to do one the street races against the Agency Race car. However I have now worked out that if I play the races through a couple of times first then I get to know the course a bit better.


So what’s next? Well I have three major achievements that will take a while. There are the ‘Orb Collector’ and ‘Ring Leader’ achievements that will take a while. The other big scoring achievement is to complete each of the time trials on Psychotic difficulty. But I’d rather do these when working through the co-op achievements. If anyone wants to help me out with the Co-op achievements then send me a message on Xbox Live and we’ll sort something out.


Other than that there are a few smaller achievements that won’t take me long to get, then once I have Crackdown completed I’ll probably pick up Naruto: The Broken Bond again. I have already started it but due to a mix up with a swap I wasn’t able to play it for ages. So I guess I’ll pick that back up.

Tuesday 17 November 2009

Soul Destroying Achievements

So after a weekend away I decided I would get the DLC for Crackdown and work on the achievements for that. However the ones I’m working on are slow going but will update as and when I get them.


In the meantime I thought I would discuss some of the Achievements that I’ve pretty much given up on. These fall into 2 categories, online achievements and those that would be such a hard slog that your're not sure if they are really worth it


The first category the online achievements, I’m not going to touch on these for very long but these are achievements where you have to play online and either my friends don’t have the games or they are fairly old and the online community is still going strong so any attempt would have me fragged in the first minute. For example we’re talking about Halo and Gears of War. I’ve not tried the online community for either game so I don’t really know for sure if I’m just being sceptical.


The Second category though is the one I wanted to talk about. These are the ones that usually need to you find a certain number of objects, or defeat an impossible monster. My main example is one that really bugs me, Infinite Undiscovery and the Seraphic Gatekeeper achievement. Here is the description ‘Defeated Ethereal Queen in Infinity mode’. This achievement requires a lot of work. First you have to finish the main game on normal so that you can unlock hard. Then you have to finish the game on hard so that you can unlock Infinity mode. Then you have to finish the game on infinity mode to unlock the Seraphic Gate and work through that to defeat the hardest boss in the game. Now it might be that I’m really lazy, or that I found the game really difficult to get into but that’s a lot of work and the icing on the cake? The reward for this achievement is a whooping 1G. That’s it, 1 measly Gamerscore. The Flags on Assassins Creed were fine. The Orbs in Crackdown are not a problem, but this, this is Heart Crushing.


Let me know of your most defeating achievement.

Friday 13 November 2009

Crackdown on Batman Arkham Asylum

So last night I had another go at the Batman:Arkham Asylum challenges. I managed to finish the last of the non-extreme predator challenges with all 3 medals. however I still cant' seem to get more than 2 Medals on the Free Flow challenges. Admittedly I've only been trying the first one and the closest I've got was 400 points away, but that was with not getting hit once so i got the 5k Dark Knight bonus, unlocking the 'Flawless Freeflow Fighter' Achievement worth 10g. Maybe I should try the others and see how far I get with those!


After i got fed up with that I moved back to Pacific City and tried to get the 'Road Warrior' achievement in Crackdown. I had 5 races left to the hardest of which was the 'Alleys of the den' race.  After several attempts and lots of frustrated swearing I finally did it, and finishing the other races netted me a total of 30g. I then went on to getting the 'Master Agent' achievement for another 40g.


So a total of 80g last night, but it could have been worse. I'm not at home this weekend so I won't be playing on the Xbox, but i'll be back on it next week, hunting down the last few solo play achievements for Crackdown. I may even invest in the DLC and try a few of those.


Happy Gaming!

Thursday 12 November 2009

Batman:Arkham Asylum

So last night i finished Batman:Arkham Asylum and as a game goes I really enjoyed it. It looked good and the story was strong as well as the characters. The gadgets were also what we would expect from the worlds greatest detective.


However I still have a few achievements outstanding. mainly the ones for the challenges. A good side line of the game enough to keep interest, but its in these challenges that I start to loose the fan boy glint in my eye. 


There are 2 different modes Predator and Free Flow. In the Predator Challenges you have a range of armed guards you need to take out in specified ways. the Free flow challenges are the complete opposite you have 4 rounds in which to take out an increasing amount of guards, getting more points for better combos to reach specific totals for the medals. 


I prefer the Predator challenges to Free Flow only because i end up getting annoyed when I get hit the once throwing off my 'Flawless Freeflow Fighter' Achievement. And yes I am a sore loser! But the Predator challenges are just as bad the first two are fairly simple and then the game is bar is raised higher and i'm not able to keep up.


The worst thing about this is I know that if I have a break I know i'll loose the "feel" i have for the game and I'll have to start from being really crap again. Which isn't good as i still have the 'Biggest Bang' Achievement to get for completing the story on Hard.


*sigh* Oh well off to the Bat Cave! 

I'm a Bad Gamerscore Whore nice to meet you.

So here is it, the first of hopefully many posts on various topics to do with Gaming, mainly on the Xbox, but who knows it may go beyond that.


A little about me and this blog, well I'm there was a time when i was labelled as a "Gamerscore whore" when I spent the time finishing Assassins Creed and Mass Effect to get the full 1000g. it was a title I was happy with. Since then I've completed over 10 games to the full 1000g.


However i have found i'm getting complacent with the games I've got and not completing them to the full 1000g. Sometimes it's due to pure lack of skill and sometimes out of laziness. hence the title "Bad Gamerscore Whore".


So this blog will discuss various achievements and games on the Xbox 360, so from Achievements I'm finding hard, easy and Stupid to games I'm playing, liking, looking forward to etc. I'll also discuss games I don't like.


Don't be shy to comment on anything you agree/disagree with me on, as it'll make an interesting conversation point.


Well until the next post. Ciao for Niao!