Bulldog360UK - UK Xbox Ambassador

Last night saw me jumping back onto Half Life 2 and after a night of gaming walking away with another 13 achievements from ‘The Orange Box’… which now gives me 32 obtained of the 99 available achievements in the game package and those 32 achievements = 255GS out of the 1000 available.  So, and as such “yip yip yip” thus the title for the thread as I have never hidden from the fact that I love my gamerscore and I am aiming for 50k before the end of Dec.  (Currently just over 48k, well 48,101 to be exact).

The Orange Box package of games are superb albeit with Half Life, sometimes quite frustrating as you can very easily get lost… and I left the game last night at a point where I was utterly lost (In the Prison), having flipped a second switch which “I think” has opened a blocked door - yet I cannot find the door and ran around in circles for half n hour before giving up at midnight to go get some sleep.

The other annoyance last night is that I played the part where you need to cross the sands without actually stepping on the sand to avoid the Antlions and therefore you have to pick up things like wooden palets with your grav gun and constantly move them to form a path.  My annoyance after the hour it took me to get it right is that I never got the achievement, and that was with constant saving and reloads of said saves when I did screw it up - and while I can *shrug* and say it’s only 20GS…  It is now one that is missing from the natural order you can unlock them in the game, and if I will replay the game to that point to clear up later is *shrugs once more*.

If I jump back on HL tonight then ?  Or I may simply just use my quiet LIVE Wed to try and finish Spider-Man: Friend or Foe and/or to carry on with CSI: Hard Evidence so I can get those done and as such trade them in ready for the Nov rush of games.  Plus if I can finish SM and CSI I am looking at another 1,250GS and as such will have me really knocking on the door of 50k.

Told ya I was an achievement whore - albeit a very methodical one at that ^_^  It’s not that I usually play games for achievements, but when you get to certain milestones - i.e. knocking on the door of 50k - any normal person would naturally plan where they can obtain the points needed to hit the target!!!

On other news I am still trying to find out what the hell has happened to Clive Barker’s Jericho as it has disappeared off websites like GAME and Gameplay… HMV have it listed and Codemasters have confirmed that the game will still be released on Friday… so I have cancelled my pre-order, from Gameplay and will be mooching around Manchester to see if certain stores have it in stock… and as such another reason to get my games done so I can offset the price as my pre-order would have saved me a few quid… where as now I will end up having to pay the full retail price.

I have been dabbling with Half Life 2 for a couple of days now… but restarted my entire game yesterday, partly because I had missed out on achievements ( a lot of them - and yep I know - I am a gamerscore whore ) and secondly so that I could play to reserve my ammo and what not as my first attempt had been a bit frantic.

So started the whole game again, cleared up on 10 achievements that I had missed out on and managed to get myself to the part where you are first given the buggy.  So not bad for around 3hrs work to play through quite a few levels without stopping for breath.  Of course it helped knowing where I was going this time and the boat level seemed to last no time at all where my previous excursion on the boat had been well over an hours work.

I also checked out Team Fortress for the first time and managed to get an achievement for one of the CTF maps with a shutout win… so thats cool too.

Will be back to it tonight and Wed night as these nights are my usual gaming sessions and… well… will be looking forward to some more HL fun before ‘X360 Clive Barkers Jericho’ arrives later this week !!!

Games, games, games eh !!!