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Bloody hell. My earlier post must have jinxed it, eh? Well, reverse-jinxed it. Positively affected future outcomes.
It did good, anyway. A Royal Flush is mine, after a mere 11,086 hands of Texas Hold'Em on XBLA.
And when I say "mine", I really mean "the power brick which sat atop the A-button for the last 2,000 hands." And before the power brick was a Charles Petzold book.
No matter; I'm now sporting a shiny "Luck of the Draw" Achievement. Yay!
A late entry this week, which I'm blaming on the Australia Day holiday. Staying up late caning my way through the Carcassonne Achievements wasn't responsible, oh no.
A reader (or rather, "My Only Reader") Aureole posted a comment asking...
How the hell do you get the time for this? I'm 1/3 of the way into Bioshock and I've had that since the launch. And I've only completed Portal out of the Orange box in a similar time.The answer is remarkably dull, I'm afraid; I normally work only four days a week (due to a miraculous agreement with my employer; it really is liberating, I recommend it to everyone), so I deem my fifth "workday" a gaming bonanza. In addition, I have no qualms whatsoever about living in an absolute pigsty, so 95% of all housework is ignored. Result: more time for satisfying my O/C Gaming habits.
As I've noted before, the Bioshock demo gave me the heebie jeebies, so I figured it would be too scary(!) for me to comfortably play through; and The Orange Box is just waaaaay too much game for me to commit to. That, and I fucking hated the original Half-Life (which shares the dubious honour - with Metroid Prime 2: Echoes - of being the only games I've ever gotten rid of). But the very best of luck to you, Aureole - may you never be afflicted with an obsession such as mine ;)
This week started with a bit of a run; for five days straight, I'd managed at least one Achievement - mainly due to the battering of Bullet Witch and Astropop. I decided to see how long I could continue this run...
Gears of War: Struggling for reachable Achievements, I decided to use up one of my trump cards... the giveaway for your first online ranked match in GoW. So online I ventured; and, after the lush Halo 3 support, GoW feels positively rustic. Once the game - eventually - began, it was clear I'd stumbled into something akin to a 4v4 turf war - albeit one perforated intermittently with awful lag. Five rounds passed before I scored my first kill - an accidental chainsawing of someone I was trying to melee. That dictated my future strategy, and I began running around like a chainsawing loon. I wound up with five kills, and the team won (mainly due to one exceptional chap), but the whole experience felt horribly clinical - not fun at all. Why was this game so popular online, exactly?
Astropop: I managed to clear a screen five times to snaffle one Achievement - that was Day 7. The GoW Cheevo was Day 8. I tried to stretch into Day 9 with the level-in-25-seconds Astropop Achievement; I failed. 8 days is all I could manage.
Halo 2: finally got past that Drone ambush section I mentioned last week. Imagine my relief when I actually saw the words "Checkpoint" appear onscreen! Imagine my dismay when I subsequently emerged in a room with two Hunters, that I barely scraped through on Normal! Scared, I switched the Xbox off again.
Frogger: Last week I neglected to mention that I'd decided to give the XBLA rendition of Frogger another bash, in an attempt to conquer that bastard Level 5. That carried over to this week, and I've yet to lay eyes on that Level. Bugger. Two weeks of practice for no reward; go me.
Carcassonne: I downloaded for free this back during the "Live is 5" "celebration" a few months back... and left it unplayed. If only I fired this up for the first time on Day 9... Alas. Played this for the first time on Sunday. 100%-ed the game same day. Had a ton of fun, some good giggles playing with mates online contriving spectacular results, and it barely troubled The List. My kind of game, really :)
Texas Hold'Em: it's still churning away next to me, A-button on the Hori Fighting Stick held down by a power brick. Royal Flush, eh? Not bloody likely.
Undertow: I knew I'd play this. Against all good sense. And play it I did, despite 95% of the 360-owning Internet bitching to Microsoft about how shit this game is. And they're wrong - it's not the greatest game ever, but it's very far from the worst. Playing online with mates, attempting the rock-hard Ultra levels, provides some genuine fun - a nice mix of capture-the-flag and blowing the shit out of stuff, with good bits of teamwork and tense, almost nail-biting moments where we - as a team - grimly hung on to our capture points and watched the counters tick down.
Ridge Racer 6: with the Rodent Awards coming up this week, a bunch of us decided to give the departing 2006 Game of the Year a bit of a send off. And bugger me if the old girl still has it... more fun than you can poke a fun-stick at. Glorious.
Finally - Rez HD is due this Wednesday. Which utterly, utterly pisses me off, because I'll be interstate on work until Saturday night. Have fun with your four-controller trance-vibrator rumbles, you lucky buggers - I'll be joining you the moment I get home :)
After last weeks commitment to Achievement whoring, I thought I'd continue and commit one round of Gears of War a day, building up to the release of some more of those shitty online Cheevos... this commitment lasted all of one day.
Stranger's Wrath: completed a second run through, did a lot of the little side-tinkerings that I didn't manage the first play-through... these tinkerings mostly involved Clacker abuse. Knocking them all down into the sewers, knocking them into the water, that sort of thing. Anyhoo, Stranger's Wrath is now crossed off The List.
Halo 3: last week, I felt a sense of dread regarding online Achievements - what happens when players abandon your game-of-interest for the next big thing? So I thought I'd try and knock off my remaining Halo 3 tasklets... only problem being, they were all bloody tricky. Two kills at once with the Spartan Laser? I've been lucky to get one - ever - and I'm pretty sure that was someone on my Team.
So - I gave the much-publicised language-filter trick a try. Bang - the first ranked game that came up had five like-minded chaps who organised Achievement scavenging with ruthless efficiency. Within thirty minutes I had my five remaining ranked Achievements, and my eyes were opened to the seedily-perceived world of Boosting. Bloody funny stuff, though - helping other people get their Achievements when they've not got a headset to communicate through is certainly an amusing exercise in machinimatic mime.
With the ranked tasks out of the way, I went back and finished the rest of my pending Meta-Game runs... bloody hell, that Cortana level shits me up badly. It's no Library, that's for sure. And so came 1000/1000 for Halo 3, but no crossing-off The List yet - my goal is to beat single-player on Legendary. Which has to wait for Halo 2 to be finished on Legendary...
Halo 2: fired this up for the first time in aaaaages to discover that my current checkpoint - Heroic, Gravemind, end of Detention Block - is incredibly badly placed; I'm instantly set upon by those bastard Drones and killed. Try again - dead. Again - dead. Again - and I escape. Tip-toe sniping, I take out the little bastards, then the Elite Guards (who I'd completely forgotten about). Room cleared, I move forward... to be ambushed by more Drones.
Shit.
Start again. 3 more tries to last longer than the opening salvo, take out the Elites, trigger the Drone ambush, run away, snipe, creep into next room. I see some text appear in the top left corner of the screen and, assuming it was the "Checkpoint" text, I save & exit.
It was not the "Checkpoint" text.
Double shit.
Start again. 2 more tries blah blah, take out the Elites blah, go to trigger the Drone ambush... oh poo, where'd this Brute come from? And why is he pummelling me so? And why do my melees, so effective in Halo 3 on Normal, do him no harm? Oh dear, I'm dead. Again.
Sigh. Power down Xbox.
Astropop: two more Achievements. I'll be glad to see the tail end of this bugger.
Bullet Witch: finished Chaos difficulty. HELL is waiting for me, and then the opportunity to write about the heartbreak that is this game.
Texas Hold'Em: I rue the day I downloaded this for "free". It will remain the noose around my neck, even when Astropop has gone. As I type this, my 360 is churning away, trying to randomly conjure a Luck Of The Draw Achievement. Sigh.
In other news - no Rez HD, obviously. And Microsoft has seen fit to offer everyone a copy of Undertow for persevering through the Live "difficulties" over the New Year. In general, the response was unfavourable and, given the "joy" I've had with the last "free" game, I'm not exactly waiting for the chance to download this freebie.
But I know I will.
Sigh.
This week started off like any other - a bit of Stranger's Wrath, a few practice games of Geometry Wars and Lumines - but, after a bit of discussion by the members of the Way of the Rodent Leaderboard, I thought it appropriate that I focus on getting my completion percentage up to 85% - especially since I reckon that Rez HD will get a release this week, and I'd be guessing there'll be some less-than-straightforward tasks in there (something tricky like 100%-ing each level, for example). The 85% target meant that I needed to scrounge up 66 points from my (seemingly) already tapped-out games.
First step: Mutant Storm Empire, with its cheap multiplayer Achievements. I enlist the SO again, who proves to be utterly piss useless and completely unable to process the visual cues of incoming death. We fluke it through to my intended multiplier-whoring spot, only to discover that time-limited levels mean that whoring is not really an option. "Cheap" multiplayer Achievements, indeed.
Next stop: Empire's predecessor, Mutant Storm Reloaded. Surprisingly, I manage to snaffle the Black Belt Achievement at first attempt... 30 points. Impressed with the ease of that task, I figured I'd give the Black Belt Grandmaster a bash: I lasted 3 levels. Of 89.
Given my apparent improvement in Reloaded, I thought I'd give the grand-daddy of twin-stick shooters another bash: Robotron: 2084. And lo, my first three games all saw me bump up my high-score; eventually, the High Score Achievement pops up. A day later, a joyous bit of blasting say the Wave 10 toast appears. 30 more points, woohoo!
Looking down my list of games, Astropop stood out - a mere 60 points from the game. A bit of poking around revealed an glitch which relieves the time-pressure of the game somewhat; exploiting that yielded another couple of Achievements, another 40 points... and the job is done, I've hit 85% completion on the Xbox 360.
So - the next target is, logically, 90%... but I'm hamstrung by the bastardic Gears of War, with 620 points - nearly half - from multiplayer. I've never got on with Gears in multiplayer, and I generally regard ranked Achievements as evil; but then I realise that the "additional content" Achievements are not listed as "ranked". Cue 2-player local games, and another 90 points... with a further 160 points in the wings.
The best thing about this week, however, was the re-exposure to Robotron. It's a fantastic game, and really knocks Geometry Wars into a cocked hat... if only because it doesn't jar when restarting the game. I was also surprised at my apparent improvement in ability - I put this down to the effort I've put into with Geommie Wars. My word, this "practice" stuff really pays off!
Next week: hopefully, we'll see an awesome Rez HD, more Stranger's Wrath, and (hopefully) the return of Killer7...
Wow. Now that was a wacky week.
Killer7 - finished in about 15 hours. What a fantastic headfuck! I loved this; just giving it a little break before attacking the harder skill level (then Killer8, then Hopper7).
Stranger's Wrath - just started a second play-through. Lovely game :)
N2O - a new one this week (as well as Killer7). Ace game, though it still feels a bit loose to control. My recently-obtained PS1 memory card makes all the difference, here, as it means I can save high-scores and forget all those arcane level codes. Level 8, half-a-million points so far.
Phantom Hourglass - ummmm... I found a ship part. And a Courage Gem. Still have six million of each left to find, however.
Lumines Live, Geometry Wars - didn't play either. I still don't trust Live.
Microsoft have announced (probably to avoid a class-action suit... oops, too late) that there'll be some sort of compensation for the Live issues over the New Year period... here's hoping it's points. Rez HD is a-coming... :D
I like to be challenged in the art department. I like my art to be confrontational, emotive, engaging in the headspace. I love my obscurities, my non-mainstream, my fringe. I listen to free jazz, mexican death metal, j-punk, and all the genres in between; Lynch and Cronenberg and Jarman and Kaurismäki and Jeunet are all welcome visitors in my home.
But Killer7 is absolutely, positively, one-hundred-percent, completely batshit insane.
It's also utterly brilliant.
And it's also an incredibly polarising game - more marmite than Space Giraffe, as incredulous as that may seem. Killer7 offers the gamer every opportunity to hate it: from the harsh and occasionally garish cel-shaded graphics, to the minimally-interactive on-rails action, to the deliberately obtuse plot. Having to stop movement, take an attacking stance, scan for the enemy you know is there, then wibble your gunsight around the screen to attack the source of the mocking laughter in your ears. Lift off A, hold R, hit L, move stick, whack A, twiddle C. Not exactly the most overt control scheme.
And yet, it carries its head high. Killer7 is a distilled production, the essence of style. Suda51's brainchild is clearly of greater value than the sum of its parts - the caustic gameplay, glorious anime cutscenes, and eerie aurals meld into a cohesive package that rivals Rez in terms of its completeness.
Yes, the game is pretty short - 15 hours for my first play-through. Yes, the puzzles are pretty basic in nature (necessarily so, given their somewhat eccentric solutions). The inbuilt hint system is a laugh - the idea of having a helpful hint-provider turning into an abusive bastard (with double-deuce action) merely by shooting his lucha libre mask is... well, different. Then again, humour is everywhere - one of the first blood-splatters you see on the wall says "How Soon Is Now"... the Killer7 are all Smiths, geddit? The different psyches of the Killer7 are also a hoot - it's pretty hard to go past Dan "The Hellion" Smith, though each of the Smiths manages to maintain their own love/hate relationship with the player. Boss battles are... odd, ranging from simple to WTF. Killer7 versus the Handsome Men is one of those giggle-fests that makes you reconsider the evilness that usually accompanies boss battles.
But, in the end, it's the plot which carries Killer7 (avoid the Wikipedia article, it's a spoiler-filled funbuster). I came into the game with the understanding that I was controlling seven psyches, but the reality-bending that subsequently occurs almost defies belief. In the end, all the threads presented are kinda pulled together, and I'm pretty sure I figured out what was going on... but in the world of Killer7, it's hard to be absolutely sure.
I will say this, though: the final level of the game (as opposed to the post-credits snippet which is the icing on the cake) is one of the best end-of-game levels I've ever played. No, scratch that - this easily usurps the Halo run home. It's a couple of minutes of the most glorious brainfuckery that I've ever experienced. And it's ironic that, within a rail-based game, the level with the least interaction is the pièce de résistance; but that's the parting shot of Killer7, the last stand of one of the most confrontational interactions I've engaged in.
I like to be challenged by my art, and Killer7 delivers in spades.