Achieving: Pattern Recognition

One of the things that I find most insightful about the always-on, status-tweeting digital lifestyle is seeing trends in my own life. The timestamps on tweets, posts, and even Achievements makes it easier than ever to see when things come back around.

Having been to my parents over the weekend for Easter I finally grabbed my tub of plastic instruments to bring back home. I fired up Rock Band 3 last night and before I could even start strumming an Achievement popped up; the ‘Well Connected’ Achievement for connecting my Rock Band 3 band to rockband.com. Apparently I’d started the game, made the connection and never come back. I dug through my Achievements to see when I’d started Rock Band 3 for the first time and found it was almost exactly two years ago, April 8th, 2011.

I said I found this stuff insightful but maybe it’s just more interesting than introspective. I suppose it shows that there are more patterns in the way I live than I’d like to admit but I can’t think up a life lesson beyond that. If nothing else it’ll be interesting if I have some similar music game itch in another two years and find myself rigging up the “old” Xbox to play Rock Band… or if I’ll even remember making this very post.

 Achieving: Tales of Pointless Self Reward in Games retold in brief posts whenever we feel like it.

Achieving: A Rogue’s Tale from Spelunky

This is why I love roguelikes and especially Spelunky! I start a fresh game in the Mines, find the Udjat Eye which guides me to the Black Market once I make it to the Jungle where I could buy the Ankh which grants an unheard of second life! I’m a few thousand bucks short for the $50,000 Ankh so I carefully bomb my way around the numerous shopkeepers to get some extra jewels and gold nuggets out of the terrain. The last nugget I need is all the way on the far side of the level and my final bomb sends the shopkeepers on a rampage.

Jumping and blasting like maniacs, branding me a terrorist, they all either kill themselves on the Tiki Trap spikes or bound themselves into a small alcove… where the Ankh is. I carefully run around to the shops to loot the abandoned items and see if the coast is clear and that’s about the time a chill runs up my spine. Oh no, the Ghost is coming! I head back towards the Ankh as he appears right there on the edge of the screen and chuck four bombs into the Enraged Shopkeeper hole. It’s somehow enough to kill them all and I drop in to touch the Ankh as the ghost closes in just pixels away.

I book it back around to the exit, taking a hit from a shopkeeper but somehow avoiding certain death from another. I duck inside the exit and check to make sure “stealing” the Ankh counted for the Achievement. It did! Splendid, now I’ve got two lives and — as soon as my mind starts reeling with the possibilities I’m hit at the next exit by a patrolling shopkeeper which wastes my extra life and killed in a totally forgettable fashion shortly after. That’s how these games go; dizzying, miraculous highs followed almost immediately by crushing lows. But man, I gotta get that high again!

Achieving: Tales of Pointless Self Reward in Games retold in brief posts whenever we feel like it.

Of 2012: The Compliments of Bing Award

I have been shouting the praises of the Bing Rewards program pretty much all year. It replaced the horrid Club Bing which had you play word games to earn points to cash in towards really old Xbox games and kitchen appliances. Now all you have to do is sign into Bing with your Live account, do a few clicks each day and almost every month you’ll have 400 free Microsoft Points. It doesn’t sound like much but here’s everything that Bing has fully fronted the cost of in 2012:

• World Gone Sour
• Bejeweled Blitz Live
• Trine 2
• Pinball FX2: Vengeance & Virtue
• Puzzle Arcade
• a Rhythm Party DLC pack
• Wreckateer
• Pid
• Spelunky
• HELL YEAH! Wrath of the Dead Rabbit

Now Playing: Karaoke (Xbox 360)

I’m no Pavoratti but I’ve been known to belt out a decent ‘New York, New York’ without much hesitation and as a fan of video games I’ve enjoyed watching karaoke games evolve. I got into Karaoke Revolution on PlayStation 2, dueted alongside Katy in SingStar and loved tambourine tapping while singing in Lips. Those games were fun but we always got tired of singing the same handful of favorites and never getting into the unfamiliar songs. Downloadable tracks are nice but they never seem to come out frequently enough to bother loading up the games again.

That’s one of the reasons I was excited to try out Microsoft’s latest stab at karaoke, the free app simply called, Karaoke. Developer iNiS has teamed up with The Karaoke Channel to offer a library of over 8,000 songs to sing with new additions and even free tracks rotated in daily. There’s no marketplace to fumble through or downloads to queue up because all the songs are streamed as you choose them. That leads to the other interesting aspect of Karaoke: how you pay.

Rather than charging per song or for “track packs” in Karaoke you pay for hourly chunks of time like you might at an actual karaoke bar. The cheapest is a two-hour block that costs 240 Microsoft Points ($3.00) with stops at 6 ($5) and 24 hours ($10). This gives you immediate access to every song in the catalog and even on our mid-range consumer internet it never felt like we were wasting our time waiting for things to load.

The tablet interface takes up more space to accommodate big meaty fingers

The search function works well with a snappy auto-complete that starts showing you songs and artists right away. The catalog is also pretty easy to browse through with categories for genres, latest additions and Top 100. Even better, all of this can be accessed on-screen while someone is singing and all songs get plopped into a queue that you can jump into from almost anywhere. Using a controller works fine but Karaoke is one place where Xbox SmartGlass really shines.

It’s a little clunky on our first gen iPad but the whole catalog can be navigated and songs added to the queue with a couple of taps. You can also view the lyrics to brush up on ‘It’s the End of the World as We know it’ before it starts. There aren’t as many sub-categories on the app as in the game but being able to dig into the catalog while one of us was singing maximized our time and money.

A few things we discovered worth pointing out. The time you buy is always counting down so be ready to sing for at least two hours or lose some minutes. Also, you can’t slide in one more five minute ballad if you don’t have five minutes of time left. Fortunately the catalog contains several TV theme songs perfect to keep in your queue for those last few minutes.

The game interface’s auto-complete in action

Playing the game is just as easy as finding a song to sing. Any of the fancy voice analysis the game might be scoring you on has been hidden leaving you to focus on the big, bold lyrics on screen. There are no pitch-matching cursors or fancy interface stuff here. There also aren’t HD music videos or peculiar karaoke stock footage which may be a bummer to some. Instead, the background is filled with a lively Avatar performance that grows as you continue performing. Keeping things simple has also ruled out multi-user support so only the paying player’s Avatar will put on a show or earn progress.

That’s right, Karaoke has a leveling system (and Achievements and Leaderboards) to keep you coming back. Each song you finish awards you with both Fans and Moola which unlock random new items to spruce up your stage and boost your level progress. You’re never playing roadie and placing individual items on a stage, it’s just to keep things looking different as you continue playing. Karaoke also uses Kinect for mid-song pose matching but we didn’t try that.

Paying for play time may seem gross but consider that a modern, disc-based karaoke game costs around $20 and only packs a couple dozen songs. For a fraction of that Karaoke offers hundreds of times the music with nothing to go out and buy unless you don’t already own a pile of Xbox headsets or mics. We wound up having a lot of fun combing through the catalog and singing ourselves hoarse. For $3 it’s probably the most value and instant satisfaction I’ve ever gotten from a music game.

Kinect demo reveals the horrible secret of NBA Baller Beats

Oh cool, there’s a demo of NBA Baller Beats for Kinect. That’s nice, so now people can see for themselves how the game — hey, wait! How can I play the demo without a basketball? Turns out that while the game comes with its own Spalding brand ball designed for the game “NBA Baller Beats is so advanced that it can detect just about any similar sized ball.”

Well the cat’s out of the bag now Majesco, you just deflated (eh, eh?) your own market. Now all I need is a used copy of the game disc and the Baller Beats world is mine to exploit. I’m thinkin’ inflatable globe, Spongebob hi-bounce playground ball, maybe even a regulation dodge ball. Game getting too easy? Hell, I’ll try bouncing a rugby ball. I’ll become the NBA Baller Beats equivalent of Drago from Rocky IV.

Of 2012: Best Motion Gaming

For a few months there I was trying not to use a controller as I went through therapy for my arms and wrists. I couldn’t just stop playing games though and with the Wii all but retired I turned to Kinect and PlayStation Move. Here’s my Top Five Motion Game Experiences of 2012:

• Rhythm Party
• Kung Fu Rider
• Datura
• Wreckateer
• Haunt

Rhythm Party is by far the best motion game of the year for me. It ditches the precise movements of Dance Central and simply gives you markers to hit on the screen in time with the music. How you hit them (or with which body part) is entirely up to you and your proficiency with terrible dance moves. Kung Fu Rider is kind of a cop out as it wasn’t released in 2012 but it provided the next best motion controlled fun… even though it doesn’t play so great.

Datura provided some legitimate thought provoking motion gaming which hasn’t happened since Silent Hill: Shattered Memories. In starkest of contrast is Wreckateer which is basically dumb, explodey fun that happens to play extremely well with Kinect. And then there’s Haunt… which was free. It had a couple of genuinely immersive moments but most of the time I wound up sliding along the walls or missing my targets.

And that’s motion gaming in 2012 folks: it still kinda works, is sometimes fun, is a total shocker when it succeeds, and is only a good value when it’s cheap or free.

Intel Discovered is a bewildering FMV adver-game for Kinect

Intel Discovered is proof positive that the bottom has totally fallen out of both Xbox 360 Achievements and Kinect. A free “game” released yesterday on Xbox Live, it requires a minimum of player input and doles out up to 400 Achievement points in about 30 minutes. It’s a slickly produced FMV experience that smacks of adver-gaming but — I swear — I can’t tell what it’s an ad for.

It’s produced by Intel and there are a few HP laptops featured within but they’re not a focal point. So, is it to remind people that Chris Evans is still an action movie star? That LMFAO is still making music, sort of? That Chanel Iman reminds me way too much of a young Thandie Newton? That you can quickly link your Xbox to Facebook and spam it with pictures (pictured)?

Surely it’s not to remind people about how much fun Kinect is because it’s barely required to take part in Intel Discovered. Most of the time I stood still, flabbergasted at what I was seeing and then realizing that it was my turn to duck, jump, fist pump, or strike a pose. I’m not sure if this is designed for kids or what but if you want a great example of how Kinect can be fun Wreckateer is on sale this week for a measly $5. I honestly had to force myself to turn it off last night and I can’t think of any other Kinect game I can say the same about.

Achieving the hushed silence of shadowy success

A little update on my approach to Achieving before today’s story. I’ve finally amassed enough friends on Xbox that the constant pips of them coming and going has really started to get in the way. I turned off notifications recently which also includes Achievement pop-ups so I’ve been playing games pretty much like I used to. After I finish the main mode I’ll pop open the guide and see what I’ve done and what else I can aim for; it’s shaken up the typical Xbox experience for me if nothing else.

I figured Mark of the Ninja would have a few for collecting its hidden haikus and completing its level-specific challenges so I ventured back to the stages I’d missed them in. The game also has Achievements for finishing a stage without killing anyone, finishing a stage without being detected and one for doing both in the same stage. I was determined to get all three Achievements in one go, presumably on the first stage as it would be the least challenging.

A Shattered Stronghold’ was the last stage I needed a challenge seal in, one of the most complex in the game with sandstorms that obscure your view and explosive traps all over the place. The challenge was to retrieve some keys without using any ninja items so I started out with stealth kills in mind. Nevertheless, I found myself avoiding detection altogether even though I was pretty sure this wouldn’t be the stage to do it in. “This is a stupid idea,” I thought as I approached an area with criss-crossing sniper sights. Later it was a narrow passage full of loose and loud debris with guards and dangling explosives. Even with the game’s most useful ability unlocked it was amazing to see there really was a way through without so much as raising an enemy eyebrow. Even more amazing that I was able to pull it off.

By the time I saw the tally screen above I had nailed four Achievements in one super stealthy go. In fact it was so stealthy the Xbox didn’t even ba~goink at me with notifications… oh, right. The only thing I have left is finishing the New Game Plus which makes things tougher but lets me keep all my ninja gear. It’s been great so far and even with the extra challenge I’m feeling decidedly ninja-powered in dealing with these fools a second time through.

Achieving: Tales of Pointless Self Reward in Games retold in brief posts whenever we feel like it.

Done Playing: Trine 2 (Xbox 360)

For my money the original Trine was pretty close to perfect. It taught its character-swapping gameplay and let you focus on the clever physics puzzles, it was absolutely gorgeous to look at and — most importantly — it didn’t overstay its welcome. It’s a lean, focused indie classic whose only fault is that its boring combat is mostly there to break up the puzzle sequences. Trine 2 doesn’t stray far from that formula and starts out strong but the additions to the gameplay managed to kill my excitement in the end. According to Steam and Raptr I’ve played both games for around eleven hours each but Trine 2 might as well have dragged on for an eternity.

Let’s start on the highest of high notes, though, with Trine 2’s presentation. The images here may look nice but they can’t begin to capture the wondrous sight of the game in motion. The title screen alone has more artistic majesty than the entirely of two or three contemporary games combined. My words do it even less justice so I’ll skip the descriptions and sum it up as whimsical. Whimsical as hell! There is never nothing to be amazed about while looking at this game. Seriously, this is what it looks like when unicorns dream!

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Repetition + Luck = Achieving!

I’ve been playing Pinball FX 2′s Pasha table since November of 2010. Not daily or even weekly — not even monthly — but off and on I’ve come back to it because 1) it’s a great table that I do moderately well at and 2) Achievements. One of the table’s three minigames is a micro-table beneath the main surface and has rows of moving targets which need to be overcome to get a good shot at two stationary targets. There’s an Achievement for knocking down all the targets and along with shooting for a new high score it has been one of my main goals every time I’ve played.

In the last hour of my last day off over the Fourth of July holiday I got into what has been my most epic game of Pasha so far. I think I hit multiball five times and I kept the ball in play for a good thirty minutes at a time. Like usual I got into the micro-table repeatedly and flubbed it up but shortly before my entire game went to crap I finally pulled it off. All the targets taken down, some obscene amount of points awarded and ba~goink! A year and a half of trying and the magical equation of luck-divided-by-repetition finally balanced out in my favor.

Achieving: Tales of Pointless Self Reward in Games retold in brief posts whenever we feel like it.