Sunday, February 24, 2013

The journey of 100,000 points starts with the first bleep-bloop

I unlocked my first achievement on the Xbox 360 way back on April 7th, 2006. Since then, I have earned a total of 89,950 Gamerscore from over 4,600 achievements across 258 games. That averages out to about 35 points per day. It also puts me pretty close to the six-digit level. While it is certainly not going to win me any awards, as there are people far beyond my number, I would still consider it something of an accomplishment.

I've therefore decided to set myself a goal. I want to reach 100,000 Gamerscore by the end of this year.

When I first decided on this goal a few days ago, I thought I was pretty close to 90,000, and with 10 months left after this one, 1,000 points a month seemed like a pretty attainable goal. So, today, I decided to make sure I started March off at 90,000, to give myself a nice, round number to track against.

Imagine my dismay when I noticed that I was over 500 points away from my starting line.

I decided to play a lot of Sonic and Sega All Stars Racing Transformed, since I hadn't earned anything from that one yet, and I hoped it would be liberal with giving out some of the early achievements. After playing most of the afternoon, I did manage to unlock half of the achievements, but my haul was only 345 points.

Worn out from hours of racing, I decided to slow things down a bit by picking up my Skylanders Giants campaign. I unlocked a few more story-related achievements along with a couple random objective achievements I stumbled upon here and there, and that's what got me to within 50 points before it was time to put the kids to bed.

I do have one potential stumbling block to my quest. Most of my prime game time comes after the little kids are in bed, when I claim the Xbox to myself and make the older boys find something else to do. However, I've committed to playing through the entire Halo campaign with my oldest son (about to turn thirteen), in chronological order according to the story. We've only just tonight started Halo 2, so we still have almost all of that plus ODST and Halos 3 and 4. Since I already have all of the achievements from all Halo games, I won't be making any achievement progress while we're on our campaign run.

It won't be a cakewalk, and I'm sure it will involve scheduling more than one achievement-hunting session via TrueAchievements, but the goal is set. The wheels are in motion. Let's see how well I do.