Week of 05 May 2024
“Do you think they're hiding the Eye of the Ancients in the hot tubs or the cabanas?”
Achievements Earned In:
- Skylanders SuperChargers
- Vampire Survivors
- Human Fall Flat
Okay, back to Skylanders SuperChargers first thing this week, and I was quickly struck by an interesting observation: even though I’d already done this game previously, I didn’t remember a dang thing about any of this! Like, I had a vague sense of some of the general feel of the completion, but nothing stuck out. I can’t even remember who helped me through the co-op for one of the gold emblems! And those emblems and the grind to Portal Master level 70 are the bulkiest parts of this completion, though obviously just playing through the campaign takes the longest. For the emblems, you have 16 to choose from and you need to get 12 of them to gold for the related achievement, so you have some leeway to choose what content you wanna focus on. Most achievement hunters go for all but the races and co-op, but since I have one of the race cup toys and my kiddo to help, I chose to instead ignore the online races (screw boosting) and collecting hats (even after completing everything else, emptying the shop multiple times, and turning in all my tokens I still didn’t have gold in this at the end). I had tried some of the land races and raged a good bit, but the cup I have is for water races, which turns out seem easier somehow. I did all four of the courses on Hard, then the Hard Time Trials, and finally two Boss Pursuits (The Golden Temple and Mystical Vault) and it was all not that bad. For the co-op I just paired it with my second “playthrough” on Nightmare (which, you only have to complete the final checkpoint for each level) with BlueMelodia so we could get the Nightmare achievement and the gold co-op emblem.
Most of the other ones came naturally or while getting other achievements, so this just left leveling up to Portal Master level 70. With everything else wrapped up, I had only reached about level 56! There is luckily a pretty quick and efficient way to level up, by entering The Spell Punk Library, skipping the first book, opening the hidden Live Wire Lock puzzle to the left, open two chests nearby, and repeat. It’s actually pretty quick and in no time that was done, too! With that, I only need 1 more of Tessa’s daily missions, and 2 more of Hugo’s. So, I’ll be done first thing the next week! As long as Hugo doesn’t request me to do something I don’t have the toys for…
Achievements unlocked: 38 (+32) | Completion: 95%
Listen, if you all didn’t want giant kaiju monsters rampaging through your town, maybe don’t make your village casino an actual working slot machine?
There’s this thing amongst some achievement hunters they call “achievement season”, when too many of the scummier developers/publishers push out a bunch of title updates to their stupidly easy games that add thousands of Gamerscore for almost no further work. Well, my version of achievement season is when a bunch of the developers for the games I’ve played all decide to release updates at the same time. Before finishing out this week, a total of FIVE of my games were sitting incomplete more recently due to additional content and achievements. Heck, only a couple weeks ago Fallout 76 also got them. It just seems to happen in waves like this. So, first on the docket was Vampire Survivors, which is honestly always one of the more welcome games to get more achievements. Not only are they always added through a no-cost title update, but they’re never very time-consuming or hard, and tends to be a mixture of having to interact with new content and compounding on older features or items. The bulk of the completion is usually get new item, level up new weapon, evolve same new weapon, and survive new map for 20 minutes. Easy peasy, looty booty!
Achievements unlocked: 211 (+7) | Completed
On the other end of the spectrum, I freaking despise Human Fall Flat at this point. “Haha funny physics” was kinda fun the first few times I had to recomplete this, but now? I just rage at every wonky interaction this game gives me. It’s still easy, I know, and each new level takes less than an hour to clear. But, I hate it all anyway. This time developer No Brake Games was kind enough to add TWO new levels, "Port” and “Underwater”, so it was doubly fun/infuriating. There were no stage-long achievements for collectibles or tasks, so the miscellaneous achievements included in each batch were very easy. And, yeah, so were the puzzles. But while trying to move some furniture a desk got wedged in a doorway and I had to start the first 3 minutes of the level over so I give it a 1/10 would not recommend, eff off.
Achievements unlocked: 115 (+8) | Completed
I’m going to this island and never leaving.
Highest ratio: 13.46
To beach their own (Human Fall Flat)
Lowest ratio: 1.05
Perfect Pair (Skylanders SuperChargers)
