Tuesday, January 20, 2009

I Miss School...

After my big breakthrough in Warriors Orochi 2 (read the post below), I have hardly been able to stop playing the game. Where before it was a total slog to get anything done, I suddenly find myself motivated to ruthlessly hunt down and finish that final achievement. I'm pretty sure this sudden surge of enthusiasm won't last me all the way to completion, so I'm going to ride it as hard as I can now and try to get as close as I can to wrapping things up before I start totally hating the game again. I now have 2 of the 5 factions completely done (all 8 levels on all 4 difficulties), and have just started on my third. I have 7 Almighty abilities saved up for when the Dream Mode insanity starts again.

In other achievement news, I've been feeling rather burned out on scoring points lately... mostly because, aside form working on the really boring segments of my grant research, it's the only thing I've been doing for the last month. I picked up The Orange Box again last night, and had some fun in Portal, picking up the Fruitcake achievement for 4/6 advanced maps completed. I'm now at 5, but I didn't want to start on that last one at midnight last night. I don't work well with puzzles at night. I've resumed a pit of work on Marvel again, banging out a few arcade wins... I am so bored with Marvel. I've really played it to death, but my desire to totally complete it keeps me coming back for more. Once February rolls around, it'll probably fall back in the stack for a while as I switch to other projects.

Rant incoming....

I really, really miss school. Spending nearly every day at home, alternating between internet research and achievement scoring, gets boring very fast. Every day is the same, and the lack of variety and no social life (all my friends in town left for school/work two weeks ago) has been driving me slowly insane. My parents are fantastic, but I can't stand them as the ONLY people I really interact with for two weeks. I also tire of political commentary from my dad, who is most certainly NOT a fan of Obama. I'm not going to get into a political argument here, but it amazes me that two people with such similar values and belief systems can differ so much on how those values should be applied to society.

It'll be good to move back to UWEC, with my roommate, who is pretty much my best friend on Earth. I miss the stupid jokes, local co-op in any hack-'n-slash game, and a million other things. It'll be nice to have fun classes, a social life, and more variety in my days. I'm going crazy right now. Thankfully, I'm moving back on Saturday, so I only have to endure the January monotony for 3 more days (not counting today).

/end rant.

If I'm looking through my blogs correctly, it looks like it's been over a week since I dropped official Operation Jedi statistics, so I shall do so now:

Completion Percentage: 60.57% (I crossed 60%! That's about 6% improvement in the last month)

Distance from goal: 17,233 points (more than a 1k pickup from my last report)

Lead over x Ducky Dan x in race to 100k: 6,471 (record high)

Points needed for 1% badge on 360voice: 4,880 (590 points closer than last time)

Gotta love the progress. That will do it for now. See y'all later.

4 comments:

  1. Your mention of The Orange Box reminds me that I still need to get my hands on that, no wait, those games. I have never had the pleasure of playing the Half Life games so those alone justify the purchase, Team Fortress looks to be an absolute blast to play (although none of my friends play it unfortunately) and of course another run through Portal wouldn't hurt despite having finished the XBLA version. Thanks for reminding me about it, then.

    Congratulations on your progress with both Operation Jedi and also with Orochi, the sense of relief felt when your progress in a grind like that is finally seen is definitely a feeling that I cherish and by the sounds of it, one you do too. While nowhere near a grind-fest, my time with Fallout 3 so far has seen little in the way of Achievement progress despite the 90 or so hours I have played. I had some success with it earlier in the evening though, grabbing about 4 Achievements. Just for clarification, Fallout is taking longer for me because I'm one of those gamers who explores every inch. Thank god The Wastelands are actually interesting, then.

    One last thing to close another long comment from yours truly, as someone who is working on increasing their completion percentage at the moment and therefore acting like a completionist (of sorts), how do you feel about all of the DLC that is due to release in the near future and the new Achievements that come along with it? I appreciate the idea of having new content to play with and am looking forward to playing it all, but I really do wish it wasn't so soon after the release of the various games. Fable, Fallout, Mirror's Edge, Gears of War 2 - it doesn't matter which game, to me the DLC is coming perhaps a bit soon. Perhaps that is my fault for being too slow though?

    Yeah anyway, what do you think about it?

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  2. Fallout 3 came out in October, so the 3 month delay before seeing DLC is just fine with me. I think that's about the right amount of time before things start coming out.

    Mirror's Edge and Gears have been out for only about 2 months, but with EA pushing for every ounce of cash from a game that underperformed (in terms of sales) and EPIC always wanting more cash, do either of these come as a surprise? Publishers will keep putting out anything they thing people will pay for.

    If you've already put 90 hours into Fallout, I don't see how the DLC for that could POSSIBLY be too soon lol =)

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  3. It is too soon when you consider that we are talking about more than one game though. I mean, all these games basically hit at once last year and now their respective DLC is as well, so yeah it is too soon when I'm trying to finish off everything still. ;)

    As I said before though, I am looking forward to the content as it means continuing these awesome games as well as returning to some older ones as well, so it isn't bad as such, it's just hurting my completion progress. All in good time though right?

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  4. It hurts completion in the short term, but you'll eventually have the joy of completing the game multiple times. First to 1000, then to 1100, and so on =)

    I'm looking forward to saying "I completed Fallout 3 four times" due to maxing it out after each piece of DLC ^-^

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