Achievement Report - June 29, 2013

This week was not nearly as frightening as last week.  Our team pulled out of the gate pretty strongly, securing a safe position early on.  Still, I had a respectable showing throughout the week.

On another note, I started writing a review for DarkStar One, and I discovered something interesting: I actually have a hard time talking about games I don't like.  I know a lot of people find it easy to rant about bad games and rave about good ones, but it seems like I'm a little lacking the ranting skill. I'll see if I can work on that one.

GTASC
Following last week's progress, my first accomplishment this week was completing DarkStar One.  As I mentioned last week, the achievements are incredibly tedious and generally very boring, so this wasn't a hugely entertaining process.  Now it's done, though, so I'm thankful for that...

The only other game I really played this week was Wednesday's new XBLA release, Magic: The Gathering: Duels of the Planeswalkers 2014.  Being a Magic veteran, I had no problem blowing through the campaigns on the highest difficulty setting, spending only about 10 hours in-game to earn all the achievements.  For players new to the game, I imagine that the learning curve could be pretty high, but I would still think that it wouldn't take more than 15 hours to complete.  Plus it's pretty fun, so I highly recommend it for achievement hunters.

Kingdom of Loathing
I'm chugging through my latest Bad Moon run.  It's going pretty slowly (as expected and by design), but it may start speeding up a bit in the next week, as I've spent a fair amount of time leveling.  Either way, it'll probably be a couple more weeks before I move on to something else.

A leisurely BM run gives a great opportunity to grind some things out.  I spent a bunch of extra turns in A Large Chamber to earn the Evil's Okay in My Book trophy (although I haven't purchased it yet), and I'm using this run to do a 100% Blood-Faced Volleyball run (which I screwed up the last time I tried it).

A trophy quite a bit out of the way of a normal ascension run.

An intentionally slow run is great for accomplishing secondary KoL goals, like tedious trophies or earning swagger for usually non-PvP players (Hardcore runs are great for that - break your Hippy Stone early in the run, then stockpile fights until you hit the limit or approach the end of your run; that way you'll minimize the effect on your play, and because you're in Hardcore, you don't stand to lose anything in defensive fights).

StarCraft II
I played a bunch of StarCraft matches this week, working primarily on two particular achievements:

So. Close.

I've worked towards the 250 Terran wins vs. AI, bringing myself within 30 wins of earning that achievement.  Once that one's done, finishing the wins vs. Elite AI achievement (I need 106 wins for that one) won't be quite as annoying, as I don't hate playing the other races as much as I hate playing Terran...

Chug-chug-chugging away!

When I play big team games (3v3 and 4v4), I tend to play random to make progress on this achievement.  I find that the big games are a little less strategic and a little more cheesy, so I don't think I have nearly the disadvantage that I'd have when off-racing in 2s or 1s.

I'm making good achievement progress in SC2, currently sitting at 5520 achievement points overall.  Of course, there's still a lot to do (I have barely touched 1v1, for example), so I wonder if I'll be able to earn all the achievements, even after Legacy of the Void...

I also signed up for ggtracker to get some detailed analysis of my play over time.  The site requires you to manually upload replays (I haven't seen any obvious options for automatic uploads), but it spits out a number of cool stats and it's prettier than sc2gears (plus more easily shared).  I don't see any point in uploading vs. AI replays, so my profile is a little sparse right now, but it could be a pretty cool tool in the future.  I'm excited about it.

And that does it.  This coming week will be interesting for gaming, as there's a holiday and TrueAchievement's annual Bean Dive phenomenon.  The Bean Dive is an incentive for players to pop an achievement in every game they own but haven't played.  Named for the resulting dip in completion percentage, it's a great opportunity to find really exciting games that might otherwise stay on the shelf for a few more months.  I like it, and it probably means that I'll be playing a wide variety of games before next Saturday.  Until then, tschüss.