I finished up working recently so I could go back to college and study various aspects of computing. As part of my little summer holiday of sorts, I can decompress and play video games and whatnot. I will then be prepared for 18 months of self-imposed somewhat rigorous studying.
LA Noire
I only had 5 achievements left to do here but what I ended up doing was playing the whole game again anyway and just sort of winging my way through interviews. Was entertaining as always but the magic was gone. I would love to play Heavy Rain or some other game I feel might match the vibe.
I had great fun making the second main character a putz, failing almost all his questions.
There were 2-3 achievements left in the actual missions, mainly in the DLCs. One involved shooting a particular gas tank over someones’ head.
The gold film reels was painful, I had attempted it before with a print out map back in 2020-2021 and just said fuck this I’ll come back later. Mid-2022 I arrived back and in a few hours’ session I went from one side of the map to the other with a somewhat handy Steam overlay map and got them all. I elected to do this first instead of driving every car as it was just repugnant on paper but fine in the end. Just put on a podcast and follow the map to all 50 reels placed in innocuous locations. Rockstar.
The ‘drive every car’ achievement was not too annoying, I hopped into what I could while doing the game again and after all that just did free play. There was one that just would not spawn until I finally found it by chance. They all spawn in particular areas. I had unlocked all the ‘secret’ car garages before, so mopping them up and whatever I could during the main game netted over 60 cars I’d say, leaving 20 of the 80 to find.
100% completion achievement was tied to the vehicles ending so once that was clear, all was done. The last one actually spawns at a particular street crime mission so was easy to nab after all the chaos.
Fable: Anniversary
I played this already but I had a bunch of achievements left to get on Steam, 7 but most of them were the worst ones:
Flirt in front of your spouse, summon a powerful creature, mind control an enemy; get all books, all silver keys, all hero dolls, balls of fire (beat game on hard mode).
Receiving gifts from spouse or flirting in front of them: easy in the end, I married some random girl in Oakvale and simply flirted in front of her with someone else. Instant pop of achievement. I was playing an evil character this time around!
Summon powerful creature - actually grand in the end, just took my time and started with the usual wasp but I think I fed a bandit to him after weakening him then eventually got a Balverine in Darkwood and was done. Never used it again but kind of cool to think maybe I could get a giant or something eventually.
Mind control - also super easy, just levelled up Mind Control and was eventually able to turn someone.
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All books - somewhat tedious but very doable, I just checked for books here and there as I played through and when I had the full map unlocked a few minutes of fast travel and buying some missing books and voila. Was tedious enough having to feed the books to the teacher and half watch or skip the scenes that followed.
All silver keys - I usually collect 20+ from a natural playthrough but this was handy enough to get once the entire map was unlocked. Was kind of cool unlocking some of the high level chests as usual.
Great Balls of Fire - actually fine, the whole playthrough was grand I never really relied on resurrection vials in a standard playthrough, not to say I don’t use them in a standard playthrough but they are very forgettable. I think in all my playthroughs dating back to pre-2010 I only died once and had to reload, ever. I always had just enough resurrection vials to stay alive. I was simply more conscientious and would hotkey healing potions and cast cure wounds when appropriate.
Hero dolls - this was the hardest one. Simply because I had to play the heretofore never played before minigames to get them all. One or two dolls you get handed to you or whatever but there were half a dozen pub minigames to beat. Looking back this was actually quite fun but some of them were terribly hard to get into, namely coin golf. Again there was probably some way of eventually getting it down but life is too short so the guides gave me the optimal way.
Mount & Blade: Warband
I had picked this up at various points and could never quite get into it over the years. One of the many, MANY games I picked up due to outside internet influences claiming it was the greatest thing ever and it always seemed just OK to me. After many failed attempts at starting and vague memories of the first person mode being fun, I got stuck in again.
I had maybe 5 of the 80 achievements when I started, a few days later I had all 80.
I read that you could go in and edit your stats so naturally I made myself a god and slaughtered everyone I fought. The 1 man versus 300 in sieges situations became one of my faves. Or I had a retinue of maybe 12 maximum and we would slaughter 100+ dudes in the field of battle.
After maybe a week of on-off but intense hours-long sessions of Mount and Blade I could see the appeal of having spent hundreds of hours in an alternate universe grinding my character up to being Lord of all of Calradia. But once again life is short and even with godlike abilities my guys and gals couldn’t be everywhere at once. Though faster than a horse on the battlefield, I was just one person and on the overworld you can only move so fast with a retinue.
Auto-battling would often result in draws or not being able to finish off the enemy. My character literally turned red with blood. Sometimes you just got to do things yourself. It took several hours (mainly due to battles and sieges) but I conquered all of Calradia. Then I did it all again to help one side conquer Calradia. Excruciating at times as this took easily 8x4 hours. I listened to a lot of podcasts this time.
After all that, random other achievements awaited me. Not marriage but elopement was required and this took me way too long. Like, numerous playthrough attempts where I tried to speedrun it. When I finally figured out how to just win a tournament, befriend a nice noble lady and read her a few poems then ask her to elope… Christ.
‘Multiplayer’ (MP) achievements were the last things to do and on the surface were tedious but actually ended up being quite fun; I just set up private lobbies me and a few hundred bots and it was so chaotic and fun - my experience of fighting as a god in the singleplayer loosely translated over to playing as a regular dude in the MP matches. I would amuse myself by insta-killing defenders of castles by throwing rocks at them in singleplayer now and then and sure enough it helped me throwing javelins at enemies and killing 50 guys with throwing axes and so on. Even killing however many mounted dudes while on foot sounded daunting but I managed to do it eventually.
Borderlands GOTY
I had played through this twice already on Steam, maybe once or twice on the old disc I had back in 2009-2011 and of course a few times on the 360.
Instead of starting all over again, with 40 achievements in hand I booted up an old finished Lilith file (I had also cleared as Mordecai last year) and started my first ever playthrough 2.
So I ended up playing through again as Lilith but was somewhat refreshed by all the enemies being my level and so on. All the loot was levelled up too. I found a lot of the bosses somewhat underwhelming while certain basic enemies like badasses were terrifying.
Luckily I was playing as the best character and could optimise her even further as it became very easy to level up - I was worried it would take forever to level up but no, getting from maybe ~40 to 69 was easier than I thought.
I find Borderlands quite fun for the length of a playthrough then absolutely draining; here was grand as I flew through the main quest and every side quest quicker than usual and with plenty of gas left in the tank - thus it was time to take apart all the DLCs.
Ned’s Zombie Island was grand and the achievements were not too obnoxious.
Claptrap’s Robolution or whatever was also grand enough to play through but the achievements were truly gross. I had to leave my PC on overnight TWICE to get all the random drops from Claptraps. Also three other times I went for a walk or an appointment and come back 3 hours later and gather what I can. Obnoxious.
I had played the Secret Armoury before, I remember the tedious driving sections. This was quite neat to go back and forward and a few terrible grinds but not atrocious. Crawmerax was very difficult until he finally died took maybe 10 attempts give or take.
Mad Moxxi Underdome was the worst one, the Arenas were reasonable enough to clear and I recall this is where I stopped playing as Mordecai in June 2021. He had no great healing mechanism other than using the Bloodwing, I think while Lilith can heal in a phasewalk, which is amazing.
I did the first three arenas which are 5 rounds of 5 waves each so maybe 75 rounds easily enough as optimised Lilith but then struggled horribly on the 20 round arenas (300 rounds). When its round 15-20 and you have potentially 4 debuffs on you at a time, just terrible.
Conclusion
This was a fun spasm of activity for me, managed to 100% 3 more games in a few weeks. I got my average completion back up to 50%; while it is tempting to continue grinding out old games maybe I’ll add a few more new ones to the mix.
Borderlands killed my desire to run and gun FPS style for a while so I played a few games of Civ 4 to wash that out of my brain.
New ones to ruin the 50% average: The Forest beckons.
Old ones I could probably clear: Final Fantasy X-2, I’ve never played before ever but apparently the 35 achievements in that are doable in one go. My few missing ones from X, not so much. Looking at you, blitzball. Civ 5 has a few standard grinds left and then the way tougher scenarios. Of like 280 I have 40 left to go and most of those are random scenario achievements that I could probably pick up most of each of those, leaving a handful of ultra-hard deity level scenario achievements to clear.
Some failed attempts: Europa Universalis 4 and Crusader Kings - again, games the internet made me think would be amazing and I can’t get into them. Maybe some other time. I gave them a shake but nothing clicked and its not what I want right now.
Maybe one day: Total Wars. I played one good, fun game as Sweden back in like 2008 in an internet café where I managed to conquer Scandinavia and large parts of Russia. Must have been an easy difficulty.
Historic and semi-doable: Various Call of Duty games. Blops 1 and 2, Cod Mod 1 and 2. Once they’re out of the way crack into the third iterations of each. Age of Empires 3 I played again a year ago or so and got a load of them but apparently there are new DLCs I picked up with more. Mainly scenario/campaign ones I have no interest in doing right now, same as my various Age of Empires 2 copies.
