Happy 20th Anniversary to Wallace and Gromit

Title says it all. Wallace & Gromit have existed in 20 years. Man, I remember seeing their shows when I was younger. Not long ago I saw TellTaleGames had made an episodic game with the two loveable characters, namely, Wallace & Gromit's Grand Adventures. I got the first episode for free when I bought the Tales of Monkey Island and I enjoyed it much seeing it kept the style from the old shows.
To celebrate the anniversary TellTale put the adventures on sale for only 15€, 34.99€ being the normal asking price.

100% on Left 4 Dead (again)

The Crash Course DLC added 10 new achievements for the two map long campaign. All of them were pretty simpel, some of them just required some luck. A few of them are also well overdue, like the 25 hunter jump, and the hit people with cars achievements. There are just a few problems with these two achievements.
1. The Crash Course campaign is not very hunter friendly - seriously, why did they lock the roofs?
2. I have yet to see a tank before the final. Luckely they did add a car and a container (which also counts) in the final.

The only achievement I had a problem with was the Smash Hit (Win a Versus campaign of Crash Course). That doesn't make much sense, right? No matter how many times I won that campaign I couldn't unlock it. In the end, while I was doing a few of the achievements with a friend (Bart Simpson), it popped up after I got all the others. He got his after I won over him (try to make sense of that).

Why you hate the Internet

50 most annoying things about the internet
This is just a funny article telling you what you hate about the Internet. To name some:

1) Godwin's Law: As a [online] discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.
4) CAPTCHAs
6) The next big thing(s)
7) Blogs =)
8) Pop-up adverts
11) YouTube speech bubbles
12) Rickrolling (I blame you, YouTube!)
14) Comment pedantry (Shut up already!)
22) Viruses, scams and spam
27) WrItInG In A MiXtUrE Of UpPEr CaSe AnD LoWeR CaSe (Or just spamming 1337 sp34k!)
28) Patently absurd abbreviations (OMFGWTFBBQ!!1)
30) Filth, everywhere (I don't know about this one; the more filth there is, the less filthy the filth becomes...)
31) Websites that don't support a browser's back and forward features
34) Compulsory fields on forms (I don't want to fill out all those damn forms!)
35) National restrictions (Yeah, what's that about? Also, release things at the same time!)
42) The gradual erosion of your moral boundaries (That's what I said in #30)
43) Buffering (Fix mah Internet already!)
45) Hostility to 'newbies' (Yes, you! Mr. Anonymous.)

Big games with achievements

More and more games with achievements get released. Most of these are various indie games, but it looks like that is changing. First of all, the publisher MumboJumbo has started putting in achievements (Zombie Bowl-o-Rama and Everyday Genius: SquareLogic). Then we have SEGA's Football Manager 2010, Konami's SAW, and one of the most expected games this year, Activision's Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2.

Game #200 on Steam

I can't believe it's only three month since I bought my game number 150 on Steam (as I blogged HERE), but here we are. I wanted it to be something special so I could blog about it, but I couldn't really decide. At the time I reached #198 I knew what I wanted my #200 to be. I decided it would be Nation Red (for 8,99€) for a few reasons

1. It was announced that the game would get achievements (22 be be precise).
2. The support for this game is awesome, just look at the forums - they listen to every idea, and implement what people want (achievements, leaderboard, new playmodes, coop, etc).

I haven't really had time to play it yet, so I can't say much about it yet. Also, I will probably wait until the achievements are in place.
As I said, I decided when I were at #198. That meant I actually had to buy some other game first. After looking through the list of achievement games I decided on Spectraball, because I already had been looking at that game (it has achievements too!), and I just noticed that the game had been lowered to only 4,49€.

And the price for the game with the most stupid achievements go to...

Let's first look at the nominated games:

Team Fortress 2:
For having a lot of achievements, where many are just farming, and keep adding new. Because of all these achievements there exists a lot of achievement servers.

Day of Defeat: Source:
Almost all the achievements for this game require you to kill a specific amount of enemies using a specific weapon. In this multiplayer game you can get all the achievement without ever playing against others.

Garry's Mod:
A lot of the achievements require you to spawn a lot of objects and then destroy them. There's also achievements for just being active for a very long time.

Unreal Tournament 3 Black:
Many of the achievements is about winning a certain playing style a lot of times. Basicly, you have to play hundreds of battles to get the achievements in this game.

Defense Grid: The Awakening:
This game more or less throws achievements in your face. For a long time this game had some of the easiest achievements out there.

Champions Online:
Basicly for being an MMO that forces you to pay for the game each month. The game has 640 achievements, so you get achievements for almost everything.

D.I.P.R.I.P. Warm Up:
All the achievements in this game you get for killing a specific number of enemies with a specific weapon.


And now to reveal the winner.
...
Let me just open this envelope...
...
...and the winner is

Wtf is wrong with Garry? Sure there's a lot of grinding and farming in the other games, but this takes it to the extreme. There's a lot of those "kill 1000 something", but you can only spawn like 10 at the time if you don't wish to crash the game. And "open the spawnmenu 100,000 times" - that's a lot of button pressing. "Play with 10 friends" - what casual player can find 10 players at the same time? "Say the secret phrase" - find a word on the internet and type it. "Experience 500 Lua programming errors" - find some addon that half-brakes the game. Play the game for a day/week/month/year - wtf? Who plays a game for a year... and I feel sorry for the people that already did this. Start the game 1000 times - what a silly amout of times, and on top of that, it's broken!
And the most stupid achievement is... "Yes, I am the real garry!" (Play on the same server as garry) - and Garry doesn't even play his own game. In the last two weeks he played 0.3 hours, and that was probably for bugfixes.

All that said, I managed to get most of the achievements - the rest will take about 11 month and a bugfix.

100% on Droplitz

Immerse yourself in this addictive puzzler that's all about strategically twisting and connecting mismatched dials to save precious droplitz. Just making a single junction is child's play; can you master the art of the combo or will you let your pipes runneth over? Be warned: losing too many droplitz can be hazardous to your ability to win. With four unique play modes, a variety of board sizes, and infinite replayability, Droplitz promises to drain all your time away.

I got this game for only a few bucks, 80% off, on a very decent sale. The game includes 12 achievements, but over half of these were bugged at release. A patch to fix these were released a couple of weeks later, and after playing some more hours I got all of them (again!). Let me give a few hints:

Adventurer (Survive for 2 hours): This one is pretty easy. Just play Zen mode for more than 2 hours. I played for four hours withour problems before I got too bored and ended the game. While doing this one you'll probably get most of the others.


Zen Master 50 (Create a multiplier of 50 or more): This was the only one I was missing after my four hours of Zen. I found that it was pretty easy to get it in level 1-3. The level is big, and the droplitz move slow. Just work on the side at the time. Make a patch on one side, and start to create one on the other (without closing it!). When the large droplitz(s) has passed throught the path, and the path disappears, quickly close the patch you created on the other side. Keep going like this until you reach your goal.