• 20Apr 07

  Five Most Satisfying Achievements

  Now that I've had the 360 for a few months, I started thinking about the achievements I've unlocked that have been the most personally satisfying.  Here are five moments in gaming that remind me just how much fun it really is.

  #5) Perfection - Time Pilot : Make it to level five without dying.  This one was so nice because there were many times I died on level four.  To take down the boss and realize you're still soaring is a great feeling.  What is also cool is that the world's #1 GamerScorer does not have this achievement.

  #4) War Hardened - Call of Duty 2 : Completed the game on Veteran difficulty.  This achievement was so great because it was the culmination of several months of gameplay.  I would play a level at a time and because of the difficulty of some of the levels, I had to creep through them, praying to get to the next checkpoint, taking at times over an hour to finish the level.  After about 20 levels of this, it was great to finally see the 1000/1000.

  #3) Complete Level 5 - Frogger : Similar to the Perfection achievement, it takes a while to get to levels 4 and 5, and once there the difficulty is very high until you've practiced enough to learn the patterns needed to survive.

  #2) Bulletproof - Contra : Beat Contra without continuing.  I was soooo close so many times that I got hooked on getting this achievement.  If I just avoid that one mistake here or that one mistake there is the attitude I had.  Finally at 1:30 AM on a weeknight I took down the heart while seemingly holding my breath hanging on to my last life for what seemed like eternity.  The explosions added to the satisfaction.

  #1) Survived 1,000,000 - Geometry Wars Evolved : This was my first completed game and so that added to the splendor.  All good Geometry Wars players know their the ones who evolve from not being able to score 250K to being able to score 1 MIL without breaking a sweat.  As I reached the 800K mark and hadn't yet died, I entered the zone and entered survival mode.  Seing the score roll over to 7 digits was oh so sweet.

  Hopefully many more satisfying achievements to come  

  • Posted Apr 20, 2007 10:42 am PT
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• 27Mar 07

  Paperboy High Score

  Along with Time Pilot an excellent score in this game didn't take too much work.  I managed a perfect Monday thru Wednesday on Hard difficulty and ended up with over 80,000 points and a world ranking of 73rd out of about 72,000.  Oh how I love XBox Live Arcade.
  • Posted Mar 27, 2007 4:49 pm PT
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• 2Mar 07

  Time Pilot Thrills

  Over the last couple weeks I have been playing Time Pilot, the $5 XBox 360 Live Arcade game.

  In order to unlock the Perfection achievement, a player must beat the first four levels without dying (getting hit once).

  When I first started I would pretty much die once per level.  As for level 4, however, I would die multiple times.

  Then I developed some strategies.  By continually flying Northeast and shooting, you are pretty much guaranteed to only have to worry about your tail.  This works for the first two levels.  For level 3, I employed the same strategy, but since this level has homing missiles, I wait for them to get about three lengths behind me, then loop in a circle to throw it off, and I continue northeast.  For level 4, which I still kept dying on despite being able to get there flawlessly, I figured out that I needed to loop more often.  Because the fighter jets on level 4 travel the same speed as I do, they will fly beside me and when I need to loop to avoid a homing missile, I will hit the jet and die.  So I started looping more often so that the jets can't fly beside me.

  By the time I was able to get the Perfection achievement, I noticed that my score was ranked about 300th in the world out of about 44,000.  So I continued practicing.  What's interesting is that after you beat level 5 (the final level), level 6 is simply level 1 again with the difficulty turned up a little.  Since levels 4 and 5 are the difficult ones, after beating level 5 I am pretty much guaranteed to make it to level 9.

  When I made it to level 10 my world ranking was 187th.  Well I knew if I could get past level 10 I would have a good shot of getting to level 14.  So I played a nearly flawless beginning and ended up making it to level 13, racking up a score of about 460K, good for 63rd in the world!

  • Posted Mar 2, 2007 10:17 am PT
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