On The First Day Of Gearsmas Epic Gave To Me

All together now!

1. "On the first day of Gearsmas Epic gave to me, a concussion from a smoke grenade." Bringing the concuss back for day - Dec 22
2. 2 Flaming Bloodmounts (2 Bloodmounts with Flamethrowers every wave) - Dec 23
3. 3 Extra Clips (3 extra clips of ammo in every weapon) - Dec 24
4. 4 Frag grenades (Frag grenade pickups have 4) - Dec 25
5. 5 Torque Bow Tags (Many rifle creatures carry Torque Bows in Horde) - Dec 26
6. 6 Melee Monsters (All melee creatures Horde) - Dec 27
7. 7 Sires a storming - Dec 28
8. 8 Old School Gears Heads (4 v 4 MP) - Dec 29
9. 9 Boomers Booming (Boomer squads on every wave) - Dec 30
10. 10 Waves of Tickers (all Ticker Horde) - Dec 31
11. 11 Wretches Wretching (Wretches with Shotguns) - Jan 1
12. Some of the above (1, 3, 4, 8, 10) - Jan

That's 12 days of epic epicness from Epic starting tomorrow! This list was posted on the official forums, so it's not some random guesswork. On top of all this, everyone gets Golden Lancers and Hammerbursts for the duration of the event, which would matter to Claire and I if we didn't already have Gold Lancers thanks to the awesome Stacey (@iFlak) on Twitter. What does interest me is the XP bonus. Starting at 12x and going up one every day to 23x on day 12. Sweet. The last two Achievements I have left to bag in Gears of War 2 are Seriously 2.0 which requires me to kill 100,000 enemies and Veteran Gear, which requires me to hit Level 100. Seriously can be boosted in single player, so I'll get it eventually regardless. But Levels only count in Multiplayer, so XP events are a big thing to me at the moment.

I'm on somewhere around the 30,000 kill mark, but only at Level 77. Hopefully the coming days will boost that a bit closer to the magical 100, and I can earn my wings!

I'm going to be clocking in a lot of time online over the holiday season. Surely the best way to spent the cold winter nights.

20,000G

In just ten months my Xbox GamerScore has double in size, from 10,000G last May to 20,000G today, just a few moments ago. It was reached while playing the astonishingly fun Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, more specifically, the Spec Ops missions that encourage co-operative play. I admit, I worked to get the nice even number, ending in 000, picking three easy Achievements that brought me up from 19,970 in increments of 10. I'd have been annoyed if I had accidentally overshot it and failed to get the image that accompanies this post.

As well as CoD:MW2, new games such as Lego Rock Band and Left 4 Dead 2 have helped push my GamerScore toward this new milestone. Apart from new releases, I recently went back to Rainbow Six: Vegas 2, the sequel to the game that got me Xboxing in the first place! I had loads of fun getting back into the co-operative terrorist killing with my good friend Rubber Cookie, who himself recently hit the 10,000G milestone. We found ourselves running the Terrorist Hunt missions on Realistic difficulty and having great fun dieing and dieing again. All that planning, all that running variations, learning where the enemies spawn, where to hide, when to run. All leading to eventually taking that number in the top corner of the screen down to the last five, then three, then one. At which point, the tension reaches fever pitch, the movements become erratic, someone rounds a corner, there is a burst of fire, "Mission Failed" comes up on screen and we start all over again. Every time we finally cracked a level, we roared and shouted in joy, sharing in the mutual success!

While the sequel to Rainbow Six: Vegas has taken up the bulk of my multiplayer experiences recently, my single player time has been almost exclusively spent on the sequel to the other game that made me need an Xbox 360, Mass Effect. Mass Effect 2 has fixed most of the problems associated with the first game, while introducing a few new ones. Thankfully, the fixes outweigh the new issues. The story feels much more epic and galactic in scale, the support characters are fantastic, the Achievements don't restrict your gameplay experience, and they thankfully removed the Mako. On that final subject, ME2 has a wonderful ongoing support through DLC, primarily through the Cerberus Network which has given us a new support character, armour, weapons, and most recently, a hover tank to replace the Mako, the Firewalker. All in all, a highly recommended game.

And thus concludes my post about my GamerScore milestones that rambled off onto a short game review. More to come!

Achievement Unlocked!

In case any of my readers missed it, in my last post I included a link to a nifty, fun toy I found online, but put it on an image, so not everyone might catch it.

Technology Ninja's Achievement Unlocked Generator provides hours of entertainment as you create hilarious Xbox Gamerscore styled images to send to friends and family.

What Achievements would you unlock?

1,000 Going Once! 1,000 Going Twice!

As you may know, I have become rather addicted to Burnout Paradise since getting my Gold Xbox Membership and discovering a whole new world of fun with thousands of potential players.

What you may not know is that I have clocked up an incredible 137 hours of play on the game! 137! That is easily the most time I've ever spent on any one game. In the process, I inched my way forward through the Achievements that Paradise has to offer to increase my Gamertag status. And last night, while racing seven others drivers, I reached the magical 1,000 Gamerscore. Paradise is the first game I've ever gotten to the 1,000G mark in. The next highest is Mass Effect with 510. I'm certain that the Gamerscore for Gears of War 2 will beat that once I get through the campaign, but for now, that's how the ranking stands.

Basking in the glory of my 1,000G, I wandered into town today and found Avatar: The Legend of Aang: The Burning Earth. A:TLA:TBE is infamous among Xbox 360 fans as having the easiest 1,000G in any game ever! A video on YouTube shows someone starting up the game, flashing past the menu screens and cutscenes and getting 1,000G in under two and a half minutes! I managed it in less than five minutes, first time out! I can't say I'm not ashamed for bumping up my Gamerscore in such a low fashion. I am ashamed. It was cheap, and completely unsatisfying. But then, so was the game! Ha!

Before going Gold, I never had any interest in Gamerscore. I played games to play games, not to earn Achievements. Sure, if I realised a particular Achievement was easy to get, or close to completion, I might take actions towards the requirements, but I never went back to play a game just for the Achievements. I never considered the possibility of the 1,000G mark, as many of the games I enjoyed had online only Achievements. Earning the 1,000G in Burnout was incredibly satisfying, though. I managed it all by just playing and enjoying the game. I never went out of my way to earn any, and I never sacrificed my enjoyment of the game in order to gain Achievements. I glad that this was the game I earned my first 1,000G in. It was always fun, never a chore, and I'll remembered it fondly, even when they eventually replace it with a sequel.

Not that I'm anywhere near finished playing Paradise. I still love to just jump online and run races, or get in some challenges. I've only done around 285 of the 490 available challenges, so I have a while to go yet. I've made a bunch of friends through the game, and recently despaired that there is a 100 Friend limit on the 360. I'm quickly approaching that, and I've been online for less than 6 months. Soon I'll have to start weeding out the people I don't game with just to free up space.

Based on the fact that I am using it as a social experience and making a lot of new friends, I don't feel I quite deserve this t-shirt just yet. That said, I could post it to one of the people on my Friends List. He has a Gamerscore of over 68,000G! Crazy!