Cheevers: Assassin’s Creed II Tips

I finished Assassin’s Creed II yesterday, racking up 940/1000 achievement points. Here are a few tips I figured out along the way:

Kleptomaniac (pickpocket 1000 florins, 10G):
You know those heralds, the guys you can bribe in order to decrease your notoriety? It costs 500 florins to bribe them, and then you can pickpocket them immediately after. It’s like GTA‘s prostitute trick all over again. Do it twice and you’re good to go.

Sweeper (sweep 5 guards at once by using a long weapon, 10G):
First, you need to go to the practice arena in Monteriggioni and learn how to sweep by purchasing Special Moves->Long Weapon. After that, go to the San Marco building in Venice (the constantly-restricted area) and assassinate a guard that has a spear. Take his spear and run around until you get a bunch of people surrounding you. Then just hold the ‘X’ button and sweet until you get five guys at once. You can actually sweep a few guys and sweep some more while the others are still on the ground and the achievement will pop up. You’re going to get hit a lot before you pull it off, so make sure you have lots of health. Takes about two minutes.

Messer Sandman (stun 4 guards at once by throwing sand in their face, 10G):
Like the achievement above, you’ll need to learn how to throw sand at Monteriggioni through Special Moves->Unarmed Combat (this one’s free). Again, at the San Marco building in Venice, get surrounded by a bunch of people, and just throw sand until you get four people at once. Another trick is to throw a smoke bomb first to stun them, giving you time to gather a bunch of sand.

Gaming Without Rewards

Now that we’re finally settling in to our new place, I sat down this morning for my first real session with the PS3. I played through the first mission of Resistance: Fall of Man and was left feeling a little underwhelmed. It wasn’t the game itself – which runs well, has a fairly interesting storyline and looks great on my TV – it was the system’s lack of achievement points.

First, let me diffuse the blog flamers by saying that I personally don’t care (yet) about PS3′s upcoming trophy system; I’ve earned 26k in Xbox 360 achievement points and would like to continue working on my investment thank you very much. If a game comes out on both systems, I’ll be getting the Xbox 360 version of the title. Basically, the PS3 will be for PS3-exclusive titles, which I’ll play for the experience alone.

But that’s the thing, if I’m going to play a game for the experience alone, it better be one hell of an experience or I’m going to get bored. I can already see myself blowing through Resistance as fast as I can just to get to the next storyline element. On the other hand, I’ll play a mediocre-to-pretty-good Xbox 360 title just for the cheevers and the sense of completion/reward that they give.

So what’s to keep all eleven ten of my little fingers on the PS3 controller (which feels much better and heavier with the rumble back, btw)?? I guess exclusive titles, and now that we have internet set up I’ll probably play around with the PSN side of things tonight. I’ll let you know how that goes.

Achieve 720

Two things:

While searching for a picture that accurately reflected Xbox 360 Achievements, I ran across this site that generates achievements for you (like the one you see above). Pretty sweet.

The other thing is that Joystiq is reporting that Game Informer is reporting that there is a rumor that Xbox 360 achievements will be transferred over to the next Xbox (720 or whatever it will be). I hadn’t thought that far ahead, but that makes sense, and I would like to not start over from scratch again, because I think that would fill me with an unmistakeable bitterness, knowing that years of hard “work” amounted to nothing. Well, it still amounts to nothing, but at least they aren’t going away anytime soon.

Cheevers: Gutterball Theft Auto

Last night I spent a good hour and a half just bowling in GTA4, trying to get the “Gobble Gobble” cheever where you have to get three strikes in a row. I must have bowled at least ten complete games, and I can’t even tell you how many times I had two strikes, and got nine on the third one. It was absolutely maddening. Finally, right after I declared the current game my last one before bed, I got it (plus a fourth consecutive strike to boot), finishing with a 199 for the game (my best game of the night was 212). Immediately after getting it, I executed the unlucky bowler on the lane next to me with a shotgun.

So, was staying up late repeating a boring, monotonous task over and over again to the point of wanting to pull my hair out worth 10 achievement points? You bet your sweet ass it was.

Crackdown Corrupted

So, you may have already read that I have been playing Crackdown lately to get some of the achievements I didn’t have the patience for during my first playthrough last year.

I was playing the game for a few minutes yesterday when all of a sudden my 360 Elite froze up on me. No big deal, I was kinda in the mood to pop in Rock Band anyway. So I rebooted and popped in Rock Band and it happened again, but then when I tried one more time it worked fine.

Today I pop in my Crackdown and lo and behold, my savegame has been corrupted. I can’t recover it or anything, so I have to create a whole new one, and lose all the progress I’ve made in it. Which basically means I can’t get those achievements I wanted, unless I want to start completely over.

I’m pissed, this is the first stability issue I’ve had with my 360. I mean, once I scratched up my Guitar Hero II disc by lifting my 360 while it was turned on, but that was my own stupid fault. This was just mean.

So, it was fun while it lasted, but I will probably never play Crackdown again.

Cheevers: Cracking Down

All I’ve been playing on my big black Xbox360 these past few days (aside from a level or two of Doom, which is becoming unfun in its unfairness) is Crackdown. I played through it last year but I’m borrowing it again to get some of the achievements that I didn’t have the patience for during my first playthrough.

Crackdown was one of the first Xbox360 games that I beat, and looking back at it now I’m really impressed with its achievement system. It truly is a game built around achievements; if it weren’t for those little “bloop” sounds I probably wouldn’t explore even 25% of the whole city. But the game is a great balance of work and play, and much like Assassin’s Creed, it is polished enough that I don’t mind its repetitiveness.

Cheevers: Assassin’s Creed “50 Leaps of Faith”

I played a bit of Assassin’s Creed today (I’ve assassinated four out of the nine baddies so far), and while in the city of Acre I found an easy place to climb and jump off of in order to perform the 10-point achievement for “50 leaps of faith”.

Here’s a quick video that I made of me doing it a couple times:

Basically, you climb up the ladder that leads to the Assassin’s Bureau, and then jump off into a nearby haystack, and repeat. Anyone who’s played this game knows that most places you jump off of in order to perform a “leap of faith” takes a bit of climbing to get to. Hopefully this is a lot easier.

Cheevers: 100 “Easy” Rock Band Gold

I like achievement points, or “gold” as I like to incorrectly call them. I also like to get them in the easiest way possible, just shy of blatant cheating. I may make this an ongoing section, we’ll see.

Yesterday, I found out that in order to get 100 points in Rock Band for becoming a “Hall of Fame Inductee”, all you really have to do is participate in the 8-song set that the Rock Band band has to complete in order to be inducted. In other words, I went to a friend’s house yesterday and piggy-backed on his Rock Band band’s career, playing the guitar part for 8 songs while he played bass and his wife sang. And bam, we all three got 100 gold each.

Cheevers: 19,995 (updated)

Update: I reached the elusive 20k today, by doing a 5-point achievement in Assassin’s Creed (use scholar blending 20x). Now that I’ve hit it exactly, I plan on plowing through some other achievements, to reach that elusive 25k.

As you can see from my gamercard (or should see, if Xbox.com wasn’t so messed up), my gamerscore is currently at 19,995. Any suggestions for a quick 5-point achievement? I want to hit exactly 20k.

Cheevers: Scene It

So far I’ve only played two rounds of the new Xbox 360 game Scene It: Lights, Camera, Action but I’m really liking it. That and I’ve already unlocked 485 gamerpoints. But I earned those points, darn it, I’m that good.

Cheevers: Thank Bejeezus For Inclusive Achievements

I have a statement and a confession to make.

Statement: I beat the Rock Band solo tour on the Hard difficulty today.
Confession: Mark beat two songs for me that I couldn’t finish myself.

Now that I’ve got that off my chest, I am also happy to announce that the Rock Band achievements are inclusive – meaning that when I/we/he beat the game on Hard, it unlocked the achievements for the Easy and Medium difficulties as well (unlike Guitar Hero). So bam, 90 achievement points all at once.

I can’t wait to get my hands on a drum set.

Cheevers: It’s More Satisfying Than You’d Think.

I’ve spent days – nay, weeks – trudging through some games for achievement points. A good example is The Darkness, which came out this year. I didn’t really enjoy it. It had a lot more to it than I initially thought, and it took me a couple weeks (with a one-month break in the middle of it, too) to get through it. And after I had gone through and finished as much of the game as I could stand, I walked away with only 540 of its possible 1000 achievement points.

So imagine my immense delight and satisfaction when I pop in the latest Avatar: The Last Airbender game into my Xbox 360, and one minute later I have 1000 achievement points. It’s a beacon of reward for all those other games I work so hard at and come away with peanuts.

Cheevers: 1000 gamerpoints in three minutes

It has officially knocked Assassin’s Creed down to #2 on my Gamefly queue.

Cheevers: Would you pay $30 for 3000 gamerpoints?

Aside from TMNT, there are three Xbox 360 games that are geared for younger audiences and are known for being easy achievement points: Open Season, Cars, and Fusion Frenzy 2. Microsoft announced today that they are releasing all three of these games in a pack for $30. I wonder how much of these sales will actually go towards people legitimately wanting to play these games? At least most of its proceeds go to charity.

Cheevers: Call Of Duty 2

I’ve decided to play through Call of Duty 2 on Veteran difficulty. COD2 was one of the Xbox 360′s launch titles, and its best-selling game until Gears of War came out a year later (which was also the system’s best selling title for a year, until Halo 3 decimated everything in September). COD2 was one of the first titles I bought when I purchased an Xbox 360 Elite this past May. Unfortunately, being a launch title has one dramatic setback – unoriginal and unfair achievement points.