Boosting parties

You know how it is - you arrange for eight people to get together one night, with the goal of getting some tricky multiplayer achievements done and someone fails to turn up. It's an annoying issue and one that plagues us all, though I'd be hard pressed to hold a grudge as I know that things can crop up at the last minute that take priority over merely playing games.

With that thought in mind though you can imagine the level of scepticism that some people had when another attempt at the 1,000 people online achievement was announced. If it is hard to get eight people in one place then imagine the issues with a thousand! Still I have to say that I was awesomely optimistic (for once) as x360a had arranged the last successful attempt and they also did a good job of tapping up all the Live big hitters so that it was blogged, reported and tweeted all over the place.

The event itself was smooth sailing (barring the awful menu system which meant people struggled to get into official lobbies) and the achievement popped an hour before the due start time, and for another good couple of hours after that too. Happy days.

My only gripe is the sheer number of people that got their achievement and then promptly disappeared. Seriously - the level of selfishness involved in that action pisses me off. Sure there were over 1500 people on at one point, but if a lot of them had shared that arrogant attitude then plenty of people would have missed out. Grrrrr!

Anywho - it is yet another game to throw on my completion list after nearly three years of waiting. So now my sights are set on adding some easy arcade completions to that tally.

I've had a bunch of cheap arcade games kicking around my profile for some time, things like Gauntlet, Comix Zone, Altered Beast, Cloning Clyde, Golden Axe etc. All of them are cheap and easy enough to blitz through in a couple of hours.

Gauntlet is the only one that I'd actually started, and some time ago at that, but still needed all of the online achievements and to get to level 100 solo. This week we got a party of four together and ran through to level 20 (or sat through - if you know the cheat to make things easy, ha ha) which snagged me all bar the level 100 achievement. That bad boy needs a few hours of time so I may well wait until the weekend to give it my full attention.

My good friend Rich also gave me a hand to get the online achievements on Golden Axe and Altered Beast. So I just need to clean them up which should be no real trauma thanks to the save system and ability to alter lives/energy. After that I'll probably go for Comix Zone and then maybe Cloning Clyde. As people may well be aware, I am no real fan of most Arcade games, but as I had a ton of points it made sense for me to buy a load of cheap ass titles for a bunch of easy 200 points. Oh - and I finally finished up 30 Battleship wins and 50 Yahtzee wins to finish Family Game Night (barring the stupid 'US only' Scrabble) as well.

In Gears watch I have hit 3,300 which puts me at about a third of the way there. I suppose compared to the hundred and odd kills I had a month ago it is a lot but the mountain still seems as tall as ever. I'm also pretty sure that at least 200 of those kills will not count, as they were acquired in games that ended with less than six players or I lost connection to. Ugh. By the end of the week I am hoping to be at about 3.8k or so.......

My Vancouver review should be up this week too if you want to check that out - the game is mindless fun for a while but, like all such titles, gets dull once you've played all ofthe events a couple of times. I'm looking forward to my next two projects though - which consist of Dante's Inferno and Bioshock 2. I can't even think of a year with such a strong line up this early on. Though it will eat into the time I want to spend finishing off COD and Bayonetta as well - so many games, so little time.

My completion, for anyone that cares, is still around the 87% mark and I really need to polish off some games to push it up. I'd like to get to a situation where I was finishing off one old game for every new one I add, but it is never as simple as that. My plan is to get to 90% by the time I break 200k though I've no idea if I can make that possible.