Wednesday, August 13, 2008

The Best Achievement / Release Calendar

Up until last night, the Achievement I was most proud of was finding the last of 500 Agility Orbs in Crackdown; last night, however, I got the Wax Off Achievement in Geometry Wars 2, and even though it's a substantially less Point increase, it was a HUGE monkey off my back. I like GeoWars2 a lot, even though I'm near the bottom of almost every leaderboard in the game, and Pacifism is my favorite of the game modes. The problem was, I was so obsessed with getting the Wax Off achievement that I wasn't actually playing the mode - I was simply trying to get the achievement, and that led to lots and lots of frustration, and I often wondered how I would ever get back to the sheer joy of the actual mode without getting the Achievement. After another 10-15 tries, somehow everything lined up and I was able to unlock it, and now (1) I don't have to worry about it anymore, and (2) I can go back to playing the mode the way it was meant to be played. That said, Wax Off - and a lot of the other Achievements in GeoWars2, for that matter - does a great job of teaching you how to avoid the enemies and how to strategically steer through gates.

The Olympics are killing my CivRev buzz; my wife keeps wanting to watch the Olympics on our HDTV. Good thing, then, that the upcoming release calendar is somewhat bland and uninspired; I'll probably still have a lot of open hours with it before the Next Big Thing hits.

I was going to do a Release Calendar, but there's really no need; there's no week-to-week insanity like there was last year. Some big titles are coming out, to be sure, though...

MUST HAVE / ALREADY PRE-ORDERED
  • Mercenaries 2
  • Star Wars: Force Unleashed
  • Little Big Planet
  • Fable 2
  • Fallout 3
  • Saints Row 2
  • Gears of War 2
  • Resistance 2
not a lot of original IP in there.

RENTING / MILD-to-VERY CURIOUS
  • Too Human
  • Tales of Vesperia
  • Infinite Undiscovery
  • Viva Pinata
  • Harvest Moon (DS)
  • Harvest Moon (Wii)
  • Rise of the Argonauts
  • Silent Hill: Homecoming
  • Far Cry 2
  • Midnight Club: LA
  • Dead Space
  • Motorstorm: Pacific Rift
  • Mirror's Edge
  • Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts
  • Left 4 Dead
  • Prince of Persia
  • Tomb Raider Underworld
  • Last Remnant
STILL HOPEFUL IT WILL BE RELEASED IN 2008
  • Brutal Legend

No comments: