Back in Stride

I think I'm finally shrugging off my gaming funk and getting back into the swing of things and enjoying gaming more fully again. The casual pace and devoting more time to reading has certainly helped. Actually scoring some achievement points certainly hasn't hurt either.

The general trend has been to simply bounce between whatever games strike my fancy, which I'm going to continue to do during weekdays, while I devote my weekends to trying to attack a single game a much as possible. Right now, the major weekend project is Lost Odyssey, which I've restarted from the beginning after is sat unplayed for over a year. The game is truly a first-class JRPG. At this point, I'm about 12 hours into my playthrough, and I'm in the early stages of Disc 2.

Silva talked me into playing some Gears 2, and after a few good matches I got to level 15, with about 30,000 XP. And to think once upon a time I was level 44 with 445,000 XP... My goal with Gears is to try to get to level 50, and get the Dark Corners achievements, but that's probably it. Forget level 100. If I played the game 2 nights a week, gaining 10,000 XP a night (ten games of 1,000 XP is probably all I could handle without getting tired of the game), it would take me SIX AND A HALF YEARS to get to level 100. No thank you.

Crackdown took a brief turn out from the backlog, as my brother and I cooped all 21 time trials on the hardest difficulty in a single day. With infinite respawns, it wasn't nearly as challenging as I had expected it to be. After also eliminating all the gangs in my campaign, I was up over 300 achievement points in Crackdown. The game will now probably sit for a while again until I feel like making it a weekend project or trying to hunt down the achievements one at a time, but it really felt good to bag some points, and cross the 105,000 mark.

I'm in the early stages with Mirrors Edge, which was totally worth the $20 (yes Silva, I know you found it cheaper...). Sonic Unleashed has also been much more fun than the reviews led me to expect, though I'm less than 2 hours into it so we'll have to wait and see if my enthusiasm endures.

My casual play game, for when I want to put my feet up and not even think about looking at a guide, has remained Magic: The Gathering. I'm got about 75% of the cards unlocked, and I've been playing online, though it's hard to say how many matches I've won, as most people are jerks and quit when they know they've lost, so its hard to know how many of my wins actually counted toward the achievement. Seriously, why do people quit, when the only think on the leaderboards is a stupid Truskill rating? It's not like people see your W-L record (I wish they did, because I should rightfully be about 7-3 right now, yet I still don't have the 5 wins achievement due to quitters). As soon as I have the ranked achievements, I'm never playing a ranked match again. It'll be player matches or I'm not playing online.

Thus concludes the recount of my recent gaming exploits. I currently have no known reviews on the horizon, except for Mothership Zeta in Fallout 3. Off the top of my head, I don't remember when that comes out, but I'll be on it when it does. I'm hoping to do Wolfenstein or Batman when those release in August. We'll see what happens.