Monday Gossip

Good morning folks,
Thought it was time to catch you all up with my weekend, so I've got my cup of tea ready and just need a biscuit and we can start. I had a wonderful start to my weekend by going out for a few meals and having a day trip with the girlfriend. Of course you not here to hear about that are you, I'm guessing you are here to find out what gaming I've been up to and how the challenge is going.

So let's start with that shall we, all week I've kept away from working out the stats and instead just enjoy my gaming. I did start Harry Potter like I said I would and it was ... was... hmmm... well it was just ok, nothing special at all to be fair.

The game is called a spell shooter and it's truly is that, think third person shooter with just a wand instead and Harry shouting the incantations rarely (think they forgot about it). You can take cover the same as any other games, zoom in to get the better accuracy etc. 

Luckily the zoom also does a mini lock on to enemy targets because the aim system is terrible, even if you spend time making careful adjustments the enemy A.I are all over the place (then again I guess that's good in way since no moron would stand still in a battle). Part from that though its ok and it's not that bad, spent about an hour on it and got quite far but just ran into my first set of  side missions. You get side missions where you go protect muggleborns on the run or attack death eater camps etc, basically game filler but it works ... so no complaints there (not yet anyway).

Anyway back to the story so where was I, oh yeah I've not looked at my stats all week until Sunday morning when I finally caved. It was my day off and had plans to pretty much game all day so I thought I would check out the score and see where I stand with it. As of Sunday morning I was on roughly 750 gamer score for the week so was just about half way there and with just one day to go. Now as I said at the start of the challenge I would not let it control my life, I wanted to still enjoy my games and not keep thinking "achievements".

And that is what I did, Sunday was amazing and one of the best gaming days I've had in a long time. I played everything and I do mean everything, I didn't work on just one game instead I just let myself play what ever I was in the mood for. Started off with uDraw which I just picked up in the week since it had dropped to £40 finally (plus get my staff discount). Spent all morning just doodling and having laughing, in fact I've only got five achievements left to get on it which will take abit of time. From it I must had clocked roughly 600-700 on top of the 100-200 in the week.

Tried out Damnation as well (another game I bought, will talk about that later) and did the first act which was several levels long. Not a bad game at all, a lot of platform jumping with a steam punk civil war era. At first I was a bit annoyed with the controls since you have to hold down the left trigger to stay in combat mode for shooting but after a while you just get use to it. Soon as the first act was completed I decided to take a break for lunch.

Then was the awesome part in which I just went through my library of arcade games, decided I was going to finally finish that level on Toy Soldiers with the Rail Gun boss which turned out to be the last level of the campaign so clocked that game. Then Found a old demo for Sealife Safari which is pretty much Pokemon Snap with sea life, so decided to buy it since I was enjoying it and did three of the five levels (not bad for 400 Microsoft points).

After that found two games I had picked up and not touched, first up the free game Harm's Way which is basically a racing game like Mario kart except there are turrets around the course that other players can control to blast you apart. After a couple of games I clocked 190 out of 200 with the last achievement only needing to play one game online, so should have that cleaned up by the end of the week. The other game was Undertow back when Xbox Live went down for several days and they gave out for free to say sorry, it's not a great game but can be a little fun if you got some spare minutes. Did the first story act and gave up on the next level since my allies where, well to put it politely rubbish.

Finally I finished the night by completing the second restaurant on Diner Dash which took me several attempts and then ended with Dead Space Ignition which is an interactive comic with puzzles. There is no combat just three different type of hacking puzzle games that you come across through the story, you have several options on paths through the story and I have heard it takes four play through to do it all. But the game is really short and I had the story finished in 55 minutes, would had been a lot quicker if I knew what I was doing and did not keep pausing.

Anyway so that's my Sunday in a nut shell, a huge gaming marathon that was brilliant and to top it off I hit my goal in the end. I was able to score a total of 1,740 so in just one day I hit 1,000 gamer score and I'm very happy to say I enjoyed every minute of it. So week two as brought me back on course for my challenge and hopefully week three will be just as good.

Week 1 -
Starting Total: 126,279
To Earn: 848
Achieved: 480
Difference: -368

Week 2 -
Starting Total: 126,759
To Earn: 1,498
Achieved: 1,740
Difference:+242

Total So Far -
To Earn: 2,346
Achieved: 2,220
Difference: -126



Week 3 - This week
Starting Total:  128,499
To Earn: 1,491
Achieved: 0
Difference: -1491

This week according to TrueAchievements I need to earn 212.8 a day still so round that up to 213, going to take a few weeks before I start to see that number any less. Happy to see I pulled back some of week one and now only 126 beyond the total target. Anyway with that thought I'm going to shoot, took a while to write this and I want to get some gaming on before work. So take care and I will catch you all later
~Iznic