Achievement Report - May 25, 2013

Oh boy, this has been an exciting week for gaming.

GTASC
This week started a bit slowly for me, only nabbing a few achievements in Kinect Sports last weekend.  Slow and steady on that one...

As the week progressed, Team Lazy Eye was near the back of the pack, so I went into an unorganized rush to earn achievements.

For some quick Gamerscore, I grabbed a couple of downloadable games that were discounted this week: Matt Hazard: Blood Bath and Beyond and Rhythm Party.  Neither really blew me away, but they both allowed me to get several achievements pretty quickly, so I was happy to get a few extra points for the team.  I'll comment on these games in a bit more detail after I've spent more time on them.

I also revisited Microsoft's microtransation behemoth - Game Room.  I mostly worked on earning some additional Time Spender medals while trying to improve my Point Buster and Survivalist medals on a couple tricky games.  In the process, I reached level 11 and a total of 48 medals, adding a few hundred TA Score to my total.

I screwed around in Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City, too, starting to work towards the S+ ranks on each stage.  I have been running through the campaign on Professional getting that high rank, earning the achievement for getting an S rank in the process.

My collection contains a few games I've never played, so I took our team's perilous position as an excuse to delve into a few new titles for a few minutes.  The XBLA games All Zombies Must Die! and Home Run Stars and the retail Tomb Raider: Legend all seem like they'll be a lot of fun, while Zombie Wranglers seems like it'll just be tedious.  The real highlight was Pid, which seems like it'll be a charming, beautiful game.  I'll definitely be coming back to that one soon.

And, in desperation, I went back to a game that is covered in years of dust: Zuma (I don't know why I decided it was worth paying for that game...), although I was only able to pop one very easy achievement before I got too frustrated with it to continue.

Still, we survived another week.  Here's hoping we can keep that momentum going!

Kingdom of Loathing
As mentioned last week, my adventures through the Kingdom are going to be much more casual, at least until I hit level 30 with Avatar of Jarlsberg and descend into the Basement for another telescope piece.

That said, I am pretty disappointed with a big discovery this week.  I didn't realize that an Avatar of Jarlsberg is prohibited from adventuring in the Sea, where I thought I'd be exploring some new content while slowly leveling my character.  So instead of diving to the Sea Floor, I have focused my efforts on collecting filthy lucre and fat loot tokens, as well as little time-consuming trophies.  I've already knocked out two of those trophies (for adventuring in the bathroom with the autoplunger and for killing Dungeons of Doom monsters a bunch of times), so I'm well on my way.

Mmm, trophies...

It's very slow going, but that's the point.  KoL isn't taking up nearly as much of my time these days, but I'm still pushing forward, so it's all good.

StarCraft II
My StarCrafting this week was limited to a few vs. AI matches.  While I didn't earn any achievements in the process (working slowly towards 250 wins vs. Elite AI), I did finally hit level 30 with Terran.

About time!

I guess there's really not much more to say there.

Guild Wars
Unfortunately, I never got around to progressing my new roleplaying mesmer this week, so there aren't any new VODs.

I did, however, do a lot of work towards earning titles on my main character.  I primarily focused on the Guardian titles (completing all missions on Hard Mode), and have very nearly finished the Cantha guardian - all I have left to do are the Kurzik missions, which are easily my least favorite missions in the Factions campaign.

Also pictured: My Party Animal track. Woo-Hoo!

For this next week, I have some specific goals:

In Guild Wars, I want to complete those Factions missions and move my roleplaying character a bit further into the Prophecies campaign.

In StarCraft, I just want to get the achievement for 100 wins vs. Elite AI (less than 10 wins to go), and I might go after some of the remaining Mastery achievements in the Heart of the Swarm campaign.

In the Kingdom of Loathing, I hope to be able to hit level 30, but I probably won't be able to get a telescope piece before the end of the week.

As for my achievement hunting, I hope to be able to contribute at least 1,500 TA Score to the team (I gave a little over 1,200 this week), possibly more depending on our ranking as the week wears on.

There's a lot to do, so here's hoping I can get it all done.  Until then, tschüss.