Back from my break

Not a break as such, more like a week of solid gaming (with some housework and ironing thrown in for good measure) that has seen me make a bit of progress on any number of games.

First and foremost I managed to review and complete the game with the worlds longest title. Yes - Sonic and Sega Allstars Racing featuring Banjo and Kazooie - fell before my might. It was a pretty fun arcade style racer and the mission mode alone was worth the price of admission as some of the challenges were pretty awesome - though a few were also mind numbingly unfair in terms of rubber banding and AI cheapness. On the whole a fun enough game and one that can probably be polished off in about ten to fifteen hours depending on your level of skill and ability to keep track of the various special moves and music you've played to (which I didn't, ha ha!).

Next on my hit list was NHL 09 - a game that has been kicking around my card since I reviewed it over a year and a half ago. Earlier this year I finally got the 5v5 online achievement done and dusted so figured a major assault on the title was needed. Over the course of two days I managed to play through 180 online games. By play through I mean that I probably played about ten full games and then had the second player quit out of the rest - but even that meant you had to stay in a match for five minutes so was no easy task. I managed to get through the ordeal and maintain an A- rating for my player. Along the way I also played 30 Versus games, a full (victorious) match as a goalie and snagged my Russian league win too. With all of my online stuff now out of the way I need to get through the single player Legend card to finally complete the game. Woo hoo!

I then spent some time making a start on the laborious Annex achievements in Gears. I figured I would just play 100 Annex games, of three rounds each, spread over the various new maps - as that way I would work towards the individual map achievements and also the big challenge at hand. I managed to struggle through 30 matches to get me almost a third of the way to my goal, snagging me a few achievements along the way. I'll probably try and do ten or fifteen more matches a week from now on - so that I should get it in the bag before I'm done with Seriously. In terms of Seriously I'm now at about 5.5k so the halfway mark has been well and truly breached. I would like to say the end was in sight but who am I kidding?

As I got NHL 09 out of the way so quickly I sent my second copy back to the rental company and got HAWX in return, yet another game that has languished on my shelf half finished. With two copies in hand I set about the online achievements with gusto and managed to wrap pretty much everything up barring 100 matches played. The only other things I'm missing require at least two more players - for Deflection Ace, Sitting Ducks and General. So I'll put the word out and hopefully get this game in the bag at some point soon.

My other brief project was Lips: Party Classics - which resulted in me belting out some rather tuneless renditions with the aid of my better half. Sadly the developers have completely nerfed the star power system meaning that you seem to get half as many per song as you used to. On a couple of songs we barely managed 200 stars - which is nowhere near enough considering the fact I need to get to 200k.

With all of the other new achievements out of the way I decided to go back to the original Lips game (where stars from both players count towards your total and you can build up power by shaking the mic) to grind out some more points. I racked up about 30k worth (not including 5k that just vanished after I did a song in co-op) before packing it in. Leaving me at 140k overall, hopefully I'll get up to the 150k mark to get the second to last achievement I need and then try to work my way to about 190k after that. Then I can finish that last 10k off when the final add on disc lands at some point this year - as I'll need to play 40 songs on that bad boy no matter what so it makes sense to leave some wiggle room.

So a very busy week really and a fruitful one at that as I am very close to hitting 89% completion at the moment - which means my overall goal of 90% before 200k is well in sight. Boo yah!