Catch Up

It occurred to me rather suddenly that, for a guy with a gaming blog, I don’t touch it nearly enough.

SO! Here’s what we do: start blogging more often.

Now is the perfect time to do so, as I recently purchased, oh, I don’t know, eighteen new games? Yeah, eighteen seems like the correct number. Let’s count them, shall we?

XBOX 360:
Blue Dragon
Dragon Age: Origins
Fallout: New Vegas
Iron Man 2
Kingdom Under Fire: Circle of Doom
LEGO Rock Band
Lost Odyssey

GameCube:
X-Men Legends II: Rise of Apocalypse

3DS:
Super Mario Bros.
The Legend of Zelda
Metroid
Balloon Fight
Donkey Kong Jr.
Ice Climber
The Legend of Zelda II: Adventure of Link
Yoshi
Wrecking Crew

Let’s break this down, shall we? Nine free games for the 3DS (thanks to my being a 3DS Ambassador), seven games for my Xbox (of which five are RPGs) and one for my GameCube. That’s right. My GameCube.

But I have to say the stupidest thing has to be the five RPGs that I purchased. These games alone will keep me busy for months, what with all the side questing and level grinding and multiple play-throughs that accompany games with branching story lines (I love you, Dragon Age!) that come with them. Granted, I won’t be playing Fallout: New Vegas until my wife plays it (as, technically, it’s her game, not mine) and she won’t be playing it until she finishes (my copy of) Fallout 3, so I have time to reach that elusive 80% completion rate for Xbox games that I have been trying for (and quite spectacularly failing at) since August.

The failing part comes from starting new games. At first, it wasn’t that big of a challenge. All I needed was roughly 100 Achievements won over five months. That’s a little more than one Achievement every two days. But then I bought Castlevania: Lords of Shadow (great game!). So that sent my completion percentage down quite a bit, adding 53 Achievements, of which I would need to get ~40 to attain 80% completion and even out my score. And then I purchased and started playing six more games over the course of about two weeks and completely shot any chance I had of completing this goal: 80% by the end of 2011.

Okay, so there IS still a chance. If I can manage to get 1.33 Achievements every day, I’ll get blast this goal to kingdom come right on schedule. Now, obviously, I don’t want to run any risks that I won’t get this, so here’s the plan:

Play just enough in something like Iron Man 2 or LEGO Rock Band to get an Achievement, and then switch to something like Dragon Age, Lost Odyssey, or Kingdom Under Fire, games which require a length of time to get one little Achievement. In this way, I will eventually start getting multiple Achievements per day, which will whittle away at that percentage goal a little bit faster.

Right now, as I’m writing this, my current completion percentage is 75.25%. I need to get a total of 152 Achievements in the next 114 days. (For those playing along at home, some simple math gives you that 1.33 number I used earlier.) Can it be done?

Realistically, yes. With LEGO Rock Band, I can conceivably get half a dozen Achievements in about an hour if I blow through playing just enough songs to unlock vehicles and Rock Power Challenges. The same thing goes for Iron Man 2. If I play long enough, I can complete a few missions, getting the Achievements for that as well as unlocking various different suit variants for use in-game.

Of course, none of this takes into account the fact that Gears of War 3 is coming out later this month, Batman: Arkham City comes out in October, November is host to Dragon Ball Z: Ultimate Tenkaichi, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, and The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword.

Sometimes, I think my gaming hobby is getting the better of me.