Achievement Report - June 22, 2013

Oh boy.  I've been rather busy this week, so I haven't had as much time for gaming, and our team faced elimination going into the final hours of the GTASC.  Fortunately, a couple of us were able to snag several hundred points in the last few hours, so we managed to survive, putting us in the top 50 overall.  Here's what happened:

GTASC
Most of my gaming this week has been focused on DarkStar One: Broken Alliance.  While the basic setup isn't too bad, the game itself is terribly, terribly tedious and repetitive.  The achievement list adds further pain by requiring you to visit several hundred locations (about half of which will great you with a small group of hostile pirates), and you'll engage in the same little skirmish every time an enemy shows up.  It's also setup so that you can't easily run from battles, so you have to go through with every one of the mind-numbing fights.

I've spent a total of about 20 hours on the game, and I'm still probably 5 hours or so away from finishing it up.  It's not hard, just terrible.

In the last couple hours of this week's scoring period, I switched over to Home Run Stars in an effort to maximize my TA Score to time ratio.  A little over half this game's Gamerscore isn't too bad, as you'll get a bunch of it just for completing the game (which can admittedly be pretty challenging near the end).  Earning gold medals and completing all the game's FameStar challenges seem like they'll require some dedication, though, so the second half will be a bit more demanding.  Still, I estimate that a full completion will take fewer than 6-8 hours, so it doesn't seem too bad overall.

Kingdom of Loathing
My original plan was to complete a quick Way of the Surprising Fist run to grab the Good Will Punching trophy, but I overestimated the total value of random crap I'd accumulated for that purpose.  After dumping 300 dense meat stacks, nearly 100 massive gemstones, and a ton of other stuff, I still hadn't earned the trophy.  I ended up spending a couple extra days farming GameInformPowerDailyPro magazines to get it done, but I've now officially earned all the trophies associated with Surprising Fist runs - I probably won't ever do another one.

My six most recent additions.

Given that the next few weeks will likely be hectic for me, I opted to transition into another Bad Moon run (this time as a Turtle Tamer) so that I'm not hurt nearly as much if I miss adventuring for a day or two.  I may use my schedule for the upcoming weeks as an excuse to do a couple of these Bad Moon runs, depending on how things go.

Aside from the above, I haven't done much gaming.  I played a few StarCraft II matches, but no more than five, so they're not really worth describing in any detail.

Like last week, I may not have a whole lot of gaming time this next week, but I've already made a good dent in serving my team for the GTASC by continuing DarkStar One.  Still, I hope I'll be able to make significant progress in some of my gaming goals by this time next week.  Until then, tschüss.