Games night and other tall tales

Every month or so, I invite a bunch of chums over to my house so that we can indulge in some gaming. Obviously everyone can get their kicks out of beating up/shooting others via Xbox Live, but there is nothing quite as satisfying as getting one over on close friends.

Basically I hook up my two Xbox consoles, set up the TV's and then we play Halo and Gears until the sun goes down. This time around there were seven of us and we pretty much played Halo from about 7pm until 2am. Good times. Most of the games were pretty close and there is always a good level of banter and ridiculousness. Not to mention enough cool moments to fill a highlight reel for life. Not to mention some dark times too - like when my idiot teammate managed to kill off one of our own team and then himself in the last second of a match, turning a victory into a draw. Nice.

We also order copious amounts of pizza, eat dubious nachos and drink far too many fizzy beverages than is good for us. Surprising then that pretty much every attendee is either married or engaged to be, which just goes to show that having a social life and having a gaming life do not have to be seperate entities.

I also managed to play some Horde with some of the early arrivals, finishing off the Blood on the Snad achievement in the process, and pimp the whole of Harm's Way on the Arcade. A fun night on the whole, plus the joy of pizza and a few achievements. What could be better?

After that I just kind of cruised through the rest of the weekend. I managed to finish off all of the single player tasks on Virtua Tennis 2009, though the last few minigames were a nightmare to max out, so now I just need four more Gold medals to get the full 1k. All of them are online tasks and two of them are tied to online tournaments specifically. Hopefully I will have the Ranked and Player matches done with by the end of this week - which will leave me needing 102 more Online tournaments wins to get that elusive completion. With a max of 16 tournaments a week, that means another seven weeks of toil (though the actual playing of the events only takes an hour). So roll on the end of April!

I also went back to de Blob 2 in a bid to continue my quest for collectibles. The game has far too many of them to be honest, and with no real way to save the game it can become a real chore if you die - I ended up having to redo a bunch of challenges three times due to constant deaths at one point which was hardly fun times. Despite that, I have fully completed eight of the twelve levels at this point so hopefully the end is in sight.

After that I will be turning my attention to Gray Matter and Two Worlds 2 - hopefully they can prove to be an interesting diversion, and a nice stream of points too of course.