The Final Table

So after finally getting my head around the fact that I can't play normal poker hands in the last pro-takedown tournament in Full House Poker, I got the Final Table achievement to pop last night on my fifth attempt. Just a little tip that I found helped me, as soon as the game starts pause the game and select sit-out. Walk away for about 15-20 minutes. You will post blinds and fold out of every hand. This helps you let the AI take each other out, and when you come back you should have 3 or 4 open seats. This is a good time to come in and start playing "poker". You will want to call basically every hand. By doing this you should be able to use a few other strategies against the AI and walk away with the victory pretty easy. The AI will hang play Ace-rag hands a lot, and they seriously overvalue any pair they get. You can tell what they have if they bet anything over half of the pot, they have a strong hand. If they are betting minimums, they have nothing and if you have any sort of hand keep playing them. You will have to re-raise them continually to get any sort of decent pot, and sometimes they will even fold out at this point. One other thing to keep in mind, if they ever check on the turn or river card (and a straight draw is on the table) pop out a small minimum bet. If they come back with a re-raise get out of there as they have a huge hand. I won lots of hands with low pairs and low two pair hands, and once I started using these strategies instead of regular poker strategies I cam out a winner. If you haven't unlocked it previously, you will also unlock Rollin' as the pay-out for winning this tournament is 500,000 credits.

Sandlot Slugging

So I completed as much of Backyard Sports: Sandlot Sluggers as I felt like. I'm missing three achievements that I just didn't feel like holding onto the game another day to get. I got 915 out of 1,000 on that game, so I feel like it was a worth-while rental for a couple of nights of play. The story is stupid easy after the first game and you have a couple of power hitters on your team. You basically end up finishing every game by the 2nd or 3rd inning if you turn on the Mercy rule (which you should for a miss-able story achievement). I probably could have gotten the other two achievements and just missed Decked Out, but I honestly just did not feel the desire to play this for a third night. I've got enough other things on my shelf to dive into, so I just got this one back in the mail. I hope to finish up Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazzard this weekend, and also get a little deeper into Singularity.

Reason #243 I'm not a Completionist

Achievements that are more about luck and replaying a mini-game than skill. Much like the hot-potato mini-game win that is required for the Decked Out achievement in Backyard Sports: Sandlot Sluggers. I'm all for some easy achievement games, but when there is one achievement in there that is particularly difficult, or relies on luck more than skill, I will skip it. It's not worth my time to grind on that mini-game for hours just to get the stars to align where my guy gets 3 rounds won before the three other CPU players. Heck, I thought it was going to happen once, I got up 2-0-0-0 and then lost SEVEN STRAIGHT ROUNDS and ended up having to retry all over again.

Other than that once specific mini-game win, this game is not that difficult, and is pretty decent for an arcade baseball game. The Bigs 2 it is not, but it is not horrible either. I can assure you this will not be #50 on my completed games list. No chance I'm going back to replay 2+ hours of story mode to get to the point to spend who knows how long playing that blasted mini-game again. No sir, I'll take my 980 points and send this one back to Gamefly.

110,000 Gamerscore

While it is no where in the realm of accomplishment that is Stallion83's, I broke the 110,000 Gamerscore barrier last night while playing Blood Bowl and popping the Solid-gold Thrower achievement. I don't know why, but this was a milestone I had hoped to break at the end of March, but I just hadn't been scoring enough points regularly enough to break it then.

I also got some matches in the Gears of War 3 multi-player beta, and I will have to say that multi-player feels more like Gears of War than Gears of War 2 did. The sawed-off shotgun is going to be a famous (or infamous) weapon depending on which end of it you are on. I also liked the retro-lancer, but I feel the inaccuracy of the gun needs some tweaking. I do think they hit the leveling on the head this time with lots of skin unlocks, and other various reasons besides just pure XP to keep you playing. I know I'm working towards unlocking Thrashball Cole permanently, and possibly the Gold retro-lancer skin depending on how I feel after getting Cole unlocked for the retail game.

Kill with Glitches!

Bulletstorm should not still have game breaking bugs in it two months after release. I'm sorry, but this is down right ridiculous. So, I popped my Bulletstorm disc back in this weekend and decided to head on into Act 2 (yea, I only played Act 1 when I got the game, then got sidetracked with some other titles). I had held off on progressing because I had heard of game-breaking "Ishi-walking-on-air" glitches, and figured if I waited a month or so those should be ironed out. Wrong. I guess @therealcliffyb and gang are not worried about this game since the Gears 3 beta launches today. So, yea, I was greeted with this same exact bug in Act 2 that LtMkilla encountered.

Back Taxes

So I finished up the main disc based achievements of You Don't Know Jack except for the Turncoat achievement last night. I'm not to worried about using the off-line date adjustment method just yet, because the game can't be 100% completed until JACK PACK 3 DLC is released. I'm actually planning on reminding myself to play this game on July 4th, just to unlock that "legit", I just would like to have the 7/4/11 time-stamp on my achievement. (Not that I'm looking down my nose at anyone who already did the date adjustment method, I just don't really care since I can't 100% the game at this point either way.) I really do not understand why they added all of the DLC pack achievements to the game when all of the DLC was not even available. All it did was keep the game from being completed right out of the box. However, I have enjoyed the franchise's glorious return so much that I even bought the game again when the iOS version came out. I'll have to say I'm a little disappointed that wasn't a universal app for both iPad and iPod/Phones, but you could still have both versions for under $10 so I guess there is not that much of a reason to complain. Overall, I'd rate this game as GREAT, and I really hope they keep pushing out DLC and keeping the game fresh. I could even stand to buy a yearly edition of this with some basic changes to the gameplay for the budget price they released this one at. They do need to fix the JACK ATTACK issues over Xbox Live though, that is really the only issue I've had with this otherwise fantastic game.

Another Ambush!

Movie tie-in games, what to say? However, Megamind: Ultimate Showdown happens to be one of the better ones I have played. While the game is clearly geared toward the younger generation of gamers, it actually is a pretty decent platformer. While the boss fights seem to get easier as the game goes on, it is constantly throwing achievements at you for simply playing the game. The only tricky achievements are the boss fight ones that require you to not die during the encounter, and even these are not that difficult. In fact, I managed to get through almost all of the last boss without taking ANY damage.

The game is relatively short (approximately 5 hours to complete the game), so it is definitely a rental over a purchase in my opinion. There is essentially no replay value (unless you have little ones) and there are several noticeable areas where the game could have used a little more polish. Overall I would rate this game as GOOD (borrowing from Stallion83's scale).

OMG

What have I done? I guess this space might be used to talk about some games I've played, and what I'm currently up to. I have no idea. This idea very well might fizzle out before I do anything useful here. However, I think it's time to find an outlet that is a bit bigger than 140 characters for some of my gaming exploits.