Achievement Report - April 27, 2013

This week was pretty hectic for me, so my gaming was a lot less focused than it usually is.  I ended up starting a bunch of new games without completing any along the way, so there's a lot to mention but not too much to discuss.

GTASC
I took this schizophrenic week as an opportunity to grab a few new XBLA games and start working through my download queue.

The first one I started was Exit.  It's a nice little puzzle game, but it's marred by terribly clunky controls.  The achievements are definitely going to be time-consuming because, even with a guide showing all the solutions, small mistakes can ruin your score due to the really viscous control scheme.  Taken in small bits, it's probably reasonable, but I still expect it to take upwards of 30-40 hours to complete.  Yikes...

The next one is beautiful: Giana Sisters: Twisted Dreams.  A fantastic platformer with gorgeous art direction, this one is a ton of fun.  It'll also be a pretty nasty completion; although the adventure mode is pretty easy (there are checkpoints everywhere), completing the game again on Hardcore mode (no checkpoints) is going to require a lot of practice and patience.  At least I'll be having fun while I'm working on it.

I also started SEGA Superstars Tennis, a game I picked up in a sale last summer.  I've always preferred over-the-top sports games to more realistic ones (I think Mario Strikers Charged is my all-time favorite, followed closely by the original NBA Jam), so I think I'll have some fun with this one.  It's a bit too early to comment on the achievement list, but it seems like it's going to take a pretty hefty investment to complete it.

Kingdom of Loathing
In the Kingdom this week, I had a couple nice accomplishments: I finally earned the Gender Bender trophy (for 30 sex changes in the Sleazy Back Alley) and I managed a 6-day Avatar of Jarlsberg ascension.

The final row of my trophies. From left to right: Scourge of Seals (level 30 Seal Clubber),  The Butler Did It (using Wizard of Ego reward 30 times), Melon Baller, Shot Caller (discovering 100 cooking recipes), Fantastic Voyager (all microplushies in Display Case), and Gender Bender.

The trophy isn't really too impressive, except that I've been slowly working on it for a while now, so it's nice to be done.

I'm a bit more excited about the 6-day run.  Since I've been able to get Lunch Like a King on day one and fill up on Omega Sundaes, I've basically hit my limit of turngen (Nightcap on day one will add a little bit, but it won't be too significant); the next big jump will happen when I'm able to eat the EPIC foods and run Gristlesphere from day one.  At that point, I don't think there are any other major improvements available, just minor optimization tweaks here and there.  That should happen in one of my next couple runs, so I'm quickly approaching my best AoJ ascensions.

StarCraft II
As tends to be the case, I played a few StarCraft matches this week, too, but nothing terribly noteworthy happened there.  Chipping away at Team Random and vs. AI achievements as always.

Guild Wars
And finally, I played about an hour of Guild Wars, too (the VODs are available on twitch).  I completed the bonus objective in the Great Northern Wall mission and completed a few quests.  I'll try to pick up the pace a bit so I can finish the campaigns sometime in the next decade, so hopefully we'll see a couple more installments in the next week.

I'm also thinking about working towards filling my Hall of Monuments with my main character (a Dervish) so I can burst into Guild Wars 2 at some point.  I may start working on that this week, too, which might be cool.

Anyway, this week wasn't as extensive as some, but I still made a fair amount of progress; I'm rather satisfied with my performance this week.  I hope I can keep this train rolling into next week.  Until then, tschüss.