Day Twenty-six

Aaaaaaaaaaaaand I'm back. Had some stuff come up that made this endeavor more difficult than I wanted to put up with, so I took a break for a few days. I still played games, but didn't feel much like writing about it afterwards.

I purchased an Xbox 360 controller today with some Best Buy gift cards I had sitting around. I own several games that play well with a controller, but the old Microsoft Sidewinder game pad I own hooks up to a game port. Yes, kids, a game port. Look it up on your fancy digital encyclopedia.

I played Shatter for a bit with the controller and while it was different than playing on the keyboard, I don't think it was necessarily any better. Then I switched over to Beat Hazard. This game takes your music and dynamically generates levels based on it. And by dynamically generates, I mean rapes your eyelids off with a thousand rainbows of pure fusion power. The game starts with a warning for epileptics and it's clear after about .037 seconds why that is. Good times on the Xbox controller though. If you're in the mood for mindless, shoot the living bejesus out of everything on the screen before it kills you sort of arcade action, you should pick it up.

Games Played: 
Shatter
Beat Hazard

Achievements:
Perfect
1st Track Cleared
Tug of War
Boss Dance
Boss Slayer
Brutal Boss Kill.

Day Eight

Ah, achievements - for the most part meaningless, but oh so much fun to obtain. Today's gaming offered an interesting spectrum of achievement philosophy.

SpaceChem takes a pretty hard core, you will earn this approach. SpaceChem has 17 available achievements with the top achievement, which happens to be the one I got today, only has a 27.7% global earn rate.

Shatter takes a mix of difficult achievements and game progress achivements, like the one I got today for simply beating level 8. Shatter has 30 achievements with the soft-toss top achievement for Shatter at whopping 94.5% global earn rate.

While today was my first experience with AI War, I'm would have guessed that a game with 234 achievements hands them out like candy on Halloween. I only got one today, but I only played three training levels. It turns out, nothing could be further from the truth. 192 (82%) of the 234 achievements available have less than a 1% global earn rate and only 10 of them have a global earn rate of greater than 10%.

Perhaps one day I'll do a master's thesis on video game achievement analysis.

Games Played: 
SpaceChem
AI War: Fleet Command
Shatter

Achievements: 

SpaceChem - Moustache Research Assistant

AI War: Fleet Command - Rainy Day Savings: 50,000 Energy

Shatter: Neon Mines