John Zeitler

At 7:58p, I defeated the Joker, the final boss of Batman: Arkham Asylum for the Xbox 360. This is the twenty-third game cleared in 2011. Twelve games remain for the 2011 challenge.

At 9:47p, I completed “Dust to Dust”, the final mission of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 for the Xbox 360. This is the twenty-second game cleared in 2011. Thirteen games remain for the 2011 challenge.

This evening, my Xbox/Games For Windows Live Gamerscore exceeded 21000 points. The achievement that put me over this plateau was “Home Sweet Home (10G)” from Skylanders: Spyro’s Adventure. My current count for achievements, according to the Xbox 360 dashboard, is 1244 individual achievements across 139 games, totaling 21005 points. The average value of each achievement is 16.89 points, with an average count of 151.12 points per game (the Xbox Dashboard reports 21.16% gamerscore completion and 27.16% achievement completion, with seven fully-completed games). It took 121 days to reach this point from the previous plateau of 20305 on July 24th, 2011. 56 achievements were collected in this time, totaling 700 points, with an average value of 12.5 points, and a collection rate of one achievement approximately every 2 days, 3 hours, 51 minutes, and 26 seconds.

At 10:43p, I defeated Bowser, final boss of Super Mario 3D Land for the 3DS. This is the twenty-first game cleared in 2011. Fourteen games remain for the 2011 challenge.

So, I know this is a little short notice, but one of the things I’m doing this weekend is helping out with the Kurokiiro Maid Cafe’s Child’s Play Gaming Marathon. Basically, starting in less than four hours, you can watch cute maids play video games for 25 hours straight, and if that sight moves you– which it should– we’d appreciate some donations to the annual charity fund.

And before anyone asks, no, I am not wearing a maid outfit. Yes, I know what that paragraph sounds like, but just trust me, petticoats aren’t my thing. Well, they are, just not wearing them. Not wearing them myself. This paragraph has just gone somewhere dark and horrible.

……y’know what, just go watch the maids, OK?

I have a rather interesting question about human behavior. Why is it that people will approach a meetup for a sale made via Craigslist like a hostage situation, replete with a wingman and needing to be in broad daylight at a public place, but then at the same time turn around and hand over their address and bank account information to a complete and total stranger via the Internet without the slightest regard for who may obtain this information?

For the record, I was a good person and deleted the accounts off of the hard drive once I got the Xbox home. It’s just very strange how people can be so bloody stupid at times.

NaNoWriMo starts tomorrow, and instead of doing writing over lunch, I have an errand to run…. And then the evening is shot with some minor Tekkoshocon work. But! After that, I should be clear to code more for Point of Descent.

….writing is somewhere in there, I’m sure of it.

Anyway, today I ran into both the bad and good side of digital distribution. The bad side was that I’ve pretty much exhausted everything I’d want to buy off of the Playstation Network’s PS One Classics line, at least until a few more of the actual classics show up on there instead of random crap that nobody even bought on disc (I’m looking at you, XS Sports Series). Ironically, it’s often easier and cheaper to seek out the actual disc, and in some cases the ease is even greater than initially expected. Case in point, today I randomly came across about a dozen or so import games, and managed to pick up a decent number of them. These are ones that there is no way in hell that they will ever come over via PS One Classics, especially considering they’re all RPGs and half of them are by Namco Bandai, who hates North America anyway.

Of course, my faith in digital distribution was restored in that I managed to download a copy of the riotously funny Z.H.P. for PSP. Any game where the final boss is named, in what passes for “all absolute sincerity” in a Nippon Ichi game, “Demon General Darkdeath Evilman”…. That’s a game that you just have to play.

Wednesday’s unpleasantness aside, I suppose I needed that time to relax. I did manage to reinstall my FIOS box, meaning I had access to both regular TV and a usable DVR… but no content recorded on it. I eventually went to bed at 7:30p after watching Jeopardy.

But anyway, there’s been a little bit going on in terms of games, both the video and tabletop persuasion. I picked up Blood Bowl Team Manager a week or so ago and have yet to give it a proper play through, but I’m hoping that if things progress the way I expect, that will change very soon. Beyond that, I’ve been involved in a couple of campaigns in various role playing games, ranging from Star Wars d20 to the indie and quirky Inspectres. That one came about from an online campaign I’ve been trying to get started, and the only reason it hasn’t started is because I’ve been too lazy/busy to send out the character creation rules. So, mark that as something I have to do tonight (yesterday by the time this post goes up).

As for video games… Well, money has been tight lately. Really, the Blood Bowl game was about the only real extravagance I allowed myself in October, and that was just on a lark. I want to eventually pick up the new Professor Layton game, and after playing the demo, Ace Combat may be my big purchase for November. Ultimately, though, I took a serious look at my backlog for the first time: I have over two hundred games that I have not completed, and only about a dozen of those are ones I’ve even started. Granted, I’m a collector, and having the games is just as important as playing them; at the same time, though, every game I’ve picked up, I’ve done so with the intent of playing it at some point. I took some time on Monday and compiled the list into a prioritized queue, giving me some amount of direction with it. First up on the list are a handful of games that are trivially easy to finish, namely Starfy, Prinny (I halted progress literally at the final boss about a year ago), and a run through Space Hulk on the PS1.

I may wind up taking a year or so off of buying games; there are a few things going on behind the scenes that will take up a fair amount of money, but really there’s just not that much coming out in the immediate future that really gets me going. There’s a bunch of games I’d like to have handy, but not in a compelling enough way to get me to pay full price for them– I can wait until they hit the bargain bin. That’s something that’s burned me badly in the past; a handful of games that I bought on launch day sat on my shelf collecting dust, getting marked down to greatest-hits prices or lower before I got around to firing them up. Granted, there are still some “political” purchases that I’ll want to make, to support a developer or series; and some games still get criminally small print runs, so buying on day one may be the only way to snag those titles. Even then, though, those titles are few and far between in the projected future, so I feel relatively comfortable not being on the bleeding edge for a while.

Besides, I’m having a hard time being home enough to play the games I do have.

At 9:24a, I defeated Ganon, final boss of The Legend of Zelda for the NES (via 3DS Virtual Console). This is the twentieth game cleared in 2011. Fifteen games remain for the 2011 challenge.

At 6:17p, I completed the WakuWaku Course (Adventure Mode Normal) in Puyo Pop Fever for the GameCube. This is the nineteenth game cleared in 2011. Sixteen games remain for the 2011 challenge.