Operation Excellence Chugging Along

Lately, I've been doing my best to eliminate all the things that are stressing me out our depressing me in general. To that end, I'm happy to say that my massive research project on MMORPGs is complete at last. I'll post a link to the file once I can find some free file hosting;you can can download it, read it, and ask me questions, if you so choose. (That'll happen some time next week, I have other things I need to do today) All that remains now is to finish my English Capstone (this week's goal), finish a religions paper (next week), and shed some unwanted emotional baggage (ASAP!). I've hinted at the last one to Silva, though probably nobody else. My roommate has the patience of a saint. I've been one angry/bitter S.O.B. these last couple weeks.

On the gaming front, Operation Jedi remains sidelined, as I'm too burned out to care about completion ATM, so I've been working on Operation Excellence instead. If I hear people say "Those achievements take too long," or "I can't be bothered to..." and I think I could get them, those are many of the achievements that fall into this goal. I've spent most of my week playing online in Gears 2, where I've now reached level 30. I'm obviously a long way from lvl 100 yet. It would be nice if Epic did some double XP weekends, 'cause those achievements WILL take forever. I think I need to take my first of many breaks from the game for a while, as I can only play so much MP without changing gears.

I decided to pick up Perfect Dark Zero, as that's another of those games most people "can't be bothered with" anymore. As I proved from 1k-ing Orochi 2, I'm not afraid of grinds, and I actually enjoy bot matches, so I doubt the 1k in this is going to be as terrible as I've been led to believe. So far, I've barely touched the storyline, and just worked on getting some of the MP done, and have 130 points for my efforts. Silva has picked up a copy of the game, as well, so I shall be co-oping it with him.

I'd like to also get back into Eternal Sonata soon, though I dread the grinding that will be necessary to level up enough to beat the first Dolce fight. She's tough, and I have to fight her with most of the characters I never use... Awesome. I love that game, but I had having my progress so completely blocked as I work through the 2nd playthrough.

Silent Hill is coming in from Gamefly, so I'll use that as a break from the 3 games listed above, each of which involve a lot of grinding in some form or another. The points should get me close to 100k (at last!) and earn me the 3-star horror badge on 360 voice.

That's the achievement progress for today. Tomorrow I'll try to post up some house-rules game variants for Horde in Gears 2. They might be fun if you're looking to mess around. I haven't tried any of them yet, but I'd love to when I get the chance.