Weekly Achievement Report - April 6, 2013

Coming up on the last 24 hours of this week's scoring period for the GTASC, our team was in dead last - by over 1,300 points.  That deficit was largely my fault, as TA Ratios tend to be terribly inflated immediately after a game's release (most people haven't had enough time to play through the game, so it takes a while for the ratios to equilibrate).  In a desperate attempt to avoid elimination and placing 79th in the contest, I whipped out some of my big boosters.  It was a Gamerscore blitz, and it helped save Team Lazy Eye from eliimination this week.  Here's what I played (as well as everything else I played this week):

I finally finished PowerUp Heroes.  It's a surprisingly decent game, and most of the achievements can be earned in a couple of hours.  The last one for reaching level 10, however, takes several hours of grinding.  The game can still probably be finished in 7 or 8 hours, but those last few hours are painfully tedious.  It was worth a whopping 788 TA Score, though, so that did a lot to pull us out of the hole.

I also worked on X-Blades, getting all but the achievement for 10,000 kills.  Some of the in-game cheats don't disable achievements, which makes this otherwise clunky game a lot more manageable.  At some point I'd like to go back and play through it all legitimately, just to see how it plays out, but it gave a nice 1,400 TA Score in a rather short time, so it was a huge success in saving Team Lazy Eye.

I started Fruit Ninja Kinect, which, while simple, is both surprisingly fun and an impressive workout.  I'll definitely be coming back to this one soon.  And the achievements come pretty easily, without needing to do much more than just play the game and get high scores.  They're not really "achievements" because they're so easy, but it was a big help in avoiding elimination.

As in the last few weeks, I've been slowly chipping away at some of the other time-consuming achievements.  Tomb Raider multiplayer matches and working towards defeating Terraria bosses (by slowing mining and forging better items) have therefore taken up some of my time.

I completed another Avatar of Jarlsberg ascension in KoL, too.  That one clocked in at 7 days, 1,053 turns. I think that the next few runs will be comparable; the next quantum leap will happen when I'm able to get Lunch Like a King early in the run.

My last few ascensions, including my lifetime stats.

As it stands, my skill-path strategy is to start with Breakfast, getting The Most Important Meal (turn gen), Egg Man (+item), and up to Fry (food and combat skills), then jumping to Dinner, going up to Grill (that lets me make Perfect Breakfasts for a good diet) and grabbing Never Late for Dinner along the way.  I then work my way down Dessert so I can get Chocolatesphere (-combat is pretty darned useful).  With the extra few skill points I get, I've been investing in Coffeesphere (helps with the lighthouse war quest), Best Served Cold (bonus damage is always nice), and Food Coma (rests that recover all MP allow me to summon several extra resolutions each day).

In a couple more runs, I'll ignore Best Served Cold and Food Coma in favor of the Path of Lunch for the extra stomach capacity. I'll approach my limit when I can get both Lunch Like a King and Nightcap on day 1; hopefully that'll put me in the 5-day ascension range.  It's just a couple more weeks to find out.

And, of course, I've been playing some StarCraft II throughout the week.  I still haven't gone back to the Swarm campaign to mop up the Mastery achievements, but I've been inching ever closer to the achievements for 1,000 wins with each race.  Plus I'm increasing my Swarm race levels: I'm up to 13 Terran, 17 Zerg, and 14 Protoss.  You can tell which is my best and which is my worst...

Hopefully next week will be a bit smoother...  See you then!