Post January clean up

Well after a very hectic month of gaming I've emerged out the other side with a ton more gamerscore, a load of completed games and far too many annoying 50g titles littering my tag. Anyone that had never looked at my account before might just assume that I play nothing but arcade games, but it had to be done.

The overall goal, of course, was to do well in the Staff/Subscriber completion contest over on x360a and after weeks of gaming trauma I ended up with a haul of 61 completed games. Pretty awesome - but only good enough for third place. The two people above me (with 78 and 72 completions) both had access to a Windows phone and cranked out 25+ games each on that bad boy. Foolishly I'd never really thought of phone games having so much easy fodder but, in hindsight, that is exactly the type of games that are popular on phones. So without access to that bastion of simple games and, having completed a lot of easy stuff in the past, I wasted probably too much time on certain retail/arcade games than I should have.

Still I got a nice forum award regardless which was my main aim and I managed to chalk off a whole host of arcade games that I'd bought years ago and never gotten around to playing for one reason or another. It was especially nice to blitz through all four of the original 2D Sonic titles which, in my view, have not aged that well. I was actually glad to get them out of the way as they were more annoying than entertaining.

I did also find a few gems along the way too. I recommend Trine 2, which was a fun little action/adventure/platformer, plus Haunt was a good Kinect title and well worth a few hours of your time. I also had fun with the Wallace and Gromit games too, as well as revisiting Monkey Island 2 which is one of my all time favourites.

I finally finished Ghost Recon Future Soldier as well, and was probably one of the few people that actually really enjoyed it - I did pretty much all of the online (bar some challenges with friends and the DLC maps that NO ONE plays) without boosting as well. Plus, I chalked off Condemned 2 and Black Ops which had both been on my to do list for a long time. I've almost finished CoD: World at War too, with just the Prestige achievements left, so we shall see how that goes.

Since the competition ended I blitzed through Battleship and also mopped up the Family Game Night achievements I had left to do (can't touch Scrabble as it is US only). I'm now back to playing games because I want to, and have picked up Borderlands 2 again in a bid to blast my way through it in double quick time. Though at some point I'll need some co-op buddies to tackle some of the harder bosses and such, but I'll tackle that issue when I come to it.

I'm now looking to finish off a few of my easier titles and get them shifted out of the house, along with starting some of this generations gems that I may well have missed out on. Titles like Assassins Creed, Mass Effect and Dead Space, and all of their sequels, are awaiting my attention and I'm hoping this year is the time to get back to them.

By the end of the year I hope to be pushing onto 96% completion, as I'm on my way to 95% at the moment, with 20 or less games on my tag that are incomplete. Considering I have 8-9 games that I've written off already that goal would suit me wonderfully. It would be great to finally get things in order and squared away - to the point that I don't have ANY old, incomplete games to go back to and can just focus on new stuff.

Here's hoping.