Weekly Achievement Report - March 30, 2013

This week's gaming was similar to last week's, where I was primarily focused on a small number of games.

Tuesday's big release, BioShock Infinite (review forthcoming), took up most of my gaming time this week.  I completed the campaign on Hard, earning the related difficulty achievements.  Many of the non-collectible achievements come pretty easily, so long as you take note of them: The weapon-specific achievements aren't bad if you stop using a particular weapon once you've gotten enough kills, and the Vigor achievements are similar.  Getting 20 kills with possessed machines was tough on Hard, but I think that is mainly because the enemies are able to destroy the machines before any of them die; it'll probably be easier to farm on easier difficulties.  I had similar difficulties with the Sky-Line related achievements, so I think those will be easier to farm on easier settings, too.  The collectibles aren't too bad, particularly considering that there are already a number of collectible guides floating around the 'net.

All-in-all, I think the achievements in BioShock Infinite are pretty straightforward with one exception: completing the game on 1999 Mode without purchasing anything from a Dollar Bill machine.  The Dollar Bill machines sell ammo and healing items, and 1999 Mode is quite a bit harder than even Hard; I'm expecting the big battle near the end of the game to be a serious pain to complete.

With some careful planning, you can probably earn all the achievements in BioShock Infinite in a single playthrough (you can apparently unlock 1999 Mode from the main menu, so you'd only need one run to get that), although two is probably a safer, more comfortable bet, and two-and-a-half might be even better, giving you a nice chance to farm kills on lower difficulty settings.  With a campaign that takes somewhere around 15 hours to complete, a full game completion seems reasonable in about 30 hours.

I also picked up Wednesday's new XBLA title, Terraria.  It's an amazingly addictive game, but the achievement list is brutal - defeating all the bosses and collecting all the armor is going to take a lot of time.  As I haven't made a whole lot of progress on the achievements (after about 15 hours), I'll refrain from any more comments, but it's clear at this point that it's definitely worth the purchase and the achievements truly are achievements.

I managed to complete my next Avatar of Jarlsberg ascension in the Kingdom of Loathing, too.  Nabbed that one right before rollover last night (which is part of the reason this post was so delayed), and even with the distraction of Arrrbor Day, it was an 8-day run.  I think that puts me pretty solidly in the under-a-week region, so I should be able to start churning out AoJ ascensions in the coming weeks.  I'm excited for that.

Aside from the above, I haven't done much gaming in the last week.  I played a few multiplayer matches in Tomb Raider and StarCraft II, but there hasn't been anything really noteworthy there.  I don't think there are any really exciting releases on the horizon, so I'm hoping this next few weeks will be pretty epic in terms of both achievement completion (I'm going to keep working on Tomb Raider, BioShock Infinite, and Terraria) and in raw numbers (so I can overcome the deficit that will come with decaying TA Ratios for newly-released games).  Hopefully Team Lazy Eye can keep from getting eliminated this week...