POST 100!!!!!!!

I think that many exclamation marks may well be the sign of an unhinged mind, but I'll soldier on regardless.

If I wasn't such a slacker I could have planned ahead abit and maybe tied Seriously in with this post, or done some kind of in depth report/discussion or maybe even some kind of epic competition. Instead I'm just going to do what I always do and ramble on in an incoherent fashion - assuming that someone reads this nonsense and all of that jazz.

I've actually been on holiday (though not in the 'going away' sense) for the last week and a bit so it has meant plenty of time for gaming, plus quite a bit of time for planning my upcoming wedding but let's not get into that. As ever I never quite manage to get everything I wanted to play on the list but at least some good progress was made which is all I can ask for really.

First of all, I commited myself to finishing off the Ultimate Team DLC on FIFA 09 - I wasn't going to bother but then found out it was already on my hard drive so I must have downloaded it at some point and then forgot about it. Considering I can pick a copy of the game up for about £1.99 it was no big outlay. I also rented a copy so I could boost through all of the online tournaments, which still took the better part of two days. Then it came down to slogging through all of the offline tournaments which totalled up to 72 matches at eight minutes a match - fun stuff. I also had to trawl the online card trading system to get 14 cards for one team, a tough process but one I managed to accomplish with some shrewd trading.

I do hate DLC generally and this one was a total grind fest BUT at least it did offer value for money, considering I probably sunk about twenty hours into getting the 250 points then I can hardly complain I was short changed. Still it feels good to get it done with.

Next up was a review title, Iron Man 2, and I can easily say that it is one of the worst games I've played in a long time. Everything about it feels rushed and broken, so much so that it is a wonder the game was released at all. It is no wonder movie tie in games get such a bad reputation when things like this continue to surface, I'll post a link up to my review and you can see what I'm talking about.

On the plus side I managed to get the full 1k in about six hours or so - which included two full playthroughs of the game. It really is that short. Though I would only ever recommend it to die hard achievement junkies and anyone else should steer well clear.

I also saw the film this week, which was thankfully a lot more entertaining if a touch predictable. I always find Robert Downey Jr pretty funny and he delivered once again - it was the perfect popcorn style film really, one you don't have to pay too much attention to but can get a few cheap kicks out of watching. It actually made me go home and rewatch Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, which is an absoluely awesome film if you've never seen it, full of great dialogue and pretty overlooked. Val Kilmer is great in it too which is just an added surprise as he gets a pretty rough time critic wise.

I played through Dead to Rights on a back up account too (as I didn't want to slap it on my tag and mess up my completion, but I did end up breaking that plan anyway *sigh*) and it is a fairly average game. Nothing too terrible about it, but nothing too great either. Though it was fun watching a dog rip someones nuts off, ha ha! Again I'll slap up a link to the review fairly soon. It has to be said that I probably liked the game more just because it WASN'T Iron Man 2 - anything would seem better after that nightmare.

Anywho........

Next up I finished off Castle Crashers by grinding out the two online achievements which only took a couple of hours thanks to the pretty dead community there - I think I only ran into two other people the whole time I was playing it, so it made things mercifully easy.

I also messed around doing some more Annex on Gears, as I really wanted to get that done with but I only ended up getting to around seventy five matches won. Only three quarters of the way there but at least I can polish it off at my leisure.

What distracted me more was starting the Versus DLC on Resident Evil 5. I've done the two player stuff already so now we are grinding through the team games. We got Slayers mode done in a couple of nights and have moved onto the longer Survivors mode (5 minutes minimum a match), but we only managed to crank out 21 or the required 60 games so far. Which means another four hours of play time. A few months ago this would have seemed like a lot for one thirty point achievement but after Seriously everything else seems short and simple, ha ha! Hopefully we'll finish that bad boy off this week.

Next up I slogged through Desperate Escape on Pro difficulty with Rich (more Resi 5). Trust me when I say that it is a total bitch in terms of difficulty. Mainly due to annoying spiders and Reapers which often take you out in one hit while your back is turned. Still we struggled through it all and finally made it through the finale by running around like headless chickens for the last thirty seconds. Anything to make it through. Hell, we even got an S rank which was a miracle considering how much we died.

I then ended up started Star Wars Republic Heroes - as my lady wanted to play a game with me and that was her choice. It may well put paid to my 90% completion ratio being hit before I get to 200k but what the hell, at least we had some fun with it and the game is fairly straight forward so I'll enjoy running through it with her.

After slapping a game on my card that I hadn't intended to I figured that it would make sense to try and finish off some older stuff. Never one to shy away from a challenge I went after Operation Flashpoint. I had to finish up the last three missions on Hardcore mode SOLO, as I'd started it with Webb months ago but he was always too busy to go back and finish it up.

It took me hours to get through those levels, as even one bullet can end a mission and there are no checkpoints so it is back to square one. It doesn't help that your A.I team are so dumb or that the opposition are seemingly crack shots. Still I did myself proud and got through it OK, I then went back and got the few achievements I'd missed - like blowing up a vehicle with a mine or killing someone by dropping a helicopter on them. Nothing too taxing but it's a nice completion to have.

After getting through that game solo I figured I could do the same with Damnation - I'd use my second box to get the co-op achievement as your partner just spawns with you at checkpoints so I wouldn't even have to move them. I'll start that this week and hopefully get it chalked off my list as well. Though my real focus will be getting Expert done (finally) on L4D, assuming I can find enough partners to assist me. Fingers crossed.

Well, I think I've rambled enough for now. I've got to get back to reviewing NIER and generally wasting my life on games.