9000G / Grinding Guitar Hero

I've been using trueachievements.com a hell of a lot lately, and especially their 'gaming sessions'. You create one, tell people what achievements you're going for, and they can join. I took part in almost a dozen over the past week and a bit, and won 40 achievements, all in Guitar Heros. Some being quite easy (band v band, win x matches, complete a song as a band...) and some being slightly harder (Heavy Metall... in GHWT, for getting 444,444 in Trapped Under Ice as a band, Free as a Band in GHSH for getting 2,000,000 in Free Bird as a band, and most notably Battery in GHM for getting 1,000,000 in Battery as a band. That one is ridiculously hard, it took us 6 tries to get it, and even then we only just scraped it: we got 1,007,000... Ouch.) Annoyingly, Sampler Plate in GH5 is glitched - I've met the conditions (playing at least song in every single game mode there is), but it hasn't unlocked... Guess I'd better persevere until it unlocks. 

So yeah, I've made about 1000G on those (I'm now on 9610G), and that's obviously made my TA score rocket up: those are hard achievements, therefore they have a high TA ratio (2.00+) 

Many thanks must go to MCoreBE, who has helped me a lot with various achievements in all GHs, but also to everyone else who I've gamed with. Thank youuuu :)

Got FFXII International

It's no secret, FFXII is one of my favourite games (with ToS and Zelda TWW). I've been looking for FFXII International: Zodiac Job System for quite a while now, but oh how surprised I was when I found it on eBay... Back then the bid was €1.50, and it was described as 'very good condition'. I bookmarked it, and came back one hour before the auction ended, the bid was still €1.50. I put a bid in, then got outbid, and so on and so forth. I ended up winning the auction, got the game for just under €20. Brilliant! And that's not the end of the good news. The game turned up a few days later, but it was brand new! Absolutely delighted, excellent value for money! 

And I was lucky too, it happened to be the limited edition in the cardboard sleeve and with the limited FFXII Archives DVD. 

So now that game has joined my ever-growing FFXII collection:

Top Row: Jap FFXII, 2x French FFXII, Platinum French FFXII

Bottom Row: FFXII: RW (DS), FFXII Limited Edition (North America), FFXII International

And just for comparison purposes, the Jap FFXII and Jap FFXII International discs: 

Both are shiny and have a matte Judge on them. They look lush :)

Playing Portal 2

Got Portal 2, for very many reasons, but mostly because a friend of mine recommended it, and because french gaming website jeuxvideo.com gave it 19/20 and had some brilliant videos up, so I thought I'd give it a go.

I'm now on Chapter 6 (there are 9 in total) and it's absolute genius. This game is brilliant, enjoyable, hard, mind-boggling, impossible, frustrating, but once you do get it, it's brilliant. Soooo satisfying knowing you've solved it! [A bit like puzzles in Zelda, but these are generally harder]

Since this is a Steam game, you can check out my progress with this Steam card:

Guitar Hero Van Halen

Van Halen is a brilliant band (gotta love Jump, Panama, Hot for Teacher, Little Guitars, etc.) and as such I thought I'd get their GH game. It's pretty good, uses the same engine (my favourite) as World Tour, Metallica and Smash Hits. Feels nice, handles well, and thank God for the tapping notes! I just completed career on Expert Guitar, not too hard except for the tapping section at the beginning of Hot for Teacher, the awkward rhythm throughout I'm the One and Eruption and Spanish Fly: in those two, it all either goes well or terribly badly if you're not band on with the tapping notes. If you're slightly off, it's really hard to get back with it and you usually end up failing, but if you're doing well, there's no reason your Rock Meter should ever go into orange, never mind red.
Quite happy with my purchase :)

Avatar:TLA:TBE Completed / 8000G reached

This really was a walk in the park - Avatar: TLA: TBE is almost universally deemed to be the easiest 1000G out there, and not without good cause! Took me less than 5 minutes. Have a look yourselves: (Not my video) 

So yeah, game completed, 8000G reached. :)

Enter Sandman: New Record

After a couple of days' practice, I finally made it, got 330,000 on Enter Sandman Expert Guitar in Guitar Hero Metallica. Never has 30G felt so good before :)

Final Score: 334,170

Lucky shopping!

Got really lucky when I went game shopping today. Found Tales of Hearts (So now Tales of Innocence is the only Tales of I'm missing) and F-Zero GP Legend, an incredible game which I'd completed in 2003 but then traded it in due to a lack of cash back then. Oh well. I wanted to buy it, and I found it going cheap. Sadly it's not in very good condition (you can probably tell from the picture) but the game and the booklet are in pristine condition, and that's all that matters :)

7000G on Xbox Live :)

About time I actually got there. I swear I've slowed down! So this thousand was made up of ~450G on Sega MegaDrive UC, ~250G on various Guitar Heros, ~100G on Hydro Thunder Hurricane and 170G on Majin and the Forsaken Kingdom. It's been good. :)

Joined TrueAchievements

I joined TrueAchievements today - you can find my profile here. It's an incredible website with an active community and endless possibilities, such as creating ToDo lists, Gamer Goals, Gaming Sessions, have specific leaderboards (for instance, today, I'm #115 in France in the "Music and Rhythm" category. And I love the idea of TrueAchievement points rather than GamerScore, it's so much fairer! If you're serious about your achievements, I seriously recommend you go check out that website. :)

Guitar Hero Warriors of Rock: Quest completely completed!

It wasn't exactly hard, as it can be done on any difficulty mode, but I thought it was worth mentioning. I've 100%ed Quest mode in Guitar Hero WoR, that is to say, gotten 40 stars in every song. Plus I hit a cumulative total of 150000 gems - I had to grind the last few out playing Dragonforce's Fury of the Storm on Expert Bass, ~2700 notes in 6 minutes - I had to play it six times for that 30G achievement to pop. All that's left for me to do in this game is to get 2000 stars in Quickplay+ and to do some of the online / band challenges. Great game :)