Week of 11 Feb 2024
“I need tacos. I need them or I will explode.”
Achievements Earned In:
- Watch Dogs
- LEGO Indiana Jones 2: The Adventure Continues
- Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl 2
Finally decided to circle back to the Watch Dogs DLC achievements I still had remaining. I only needed one more Fixer contract to knock out the last of those faction achievements, so I moved to breezing through the main campaign. There are only three short Acts to this one, with each mission not being very difficult, either. There were a couple tough ones (that stupid hacker maze, for instance) but the addition of the R/C car makes a lot of encounters really easy. Toss that sucker down and slowly cruise around stunning anyone that wishes to do you harm. You’d think these on-alert guards would be more suspicious of a modified R/C toy driving around near the unconscious body of their pals, but I guess I’m just more paranoid than most. And I wrapped it all up early on Tuesday! Now the interminable wait for Ubisoft to hopefully fix the multiplayer matchmaking so I can get the online achievements…
Achievements unlocked: 43 (+5) | Completion: 88%
With Watch Dogs “completed”, I figured I’d finally put some actual effort into LEGO Indiana Jones 2: The Adventure Continues. The game is broken up into hubs, one for each entry of the original trilogy and then three dedicated to parts of the fourth movie. In each hub, you have collect various color blocks by doing something around the map (destroy 10 plants, open ten boxes, etc.) and collect 10 golden chests by completing bonus levels. You also have to unlock all the vehicles and characters in each hub, usually on the way to doing everything else. This becomes pretty dull after a while, so I kept getting distracted or just lollygagging. Even then, I managed to clear the first and third hubs for Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Why do I keep playing these LEGO titles? Sooo dull!
Achievements unlocked: 12 (+8) | Completion: 32%
Sometimes the world can make you feel so small!
The amount of games leaving Game Pass have been minimal this past month, only a game or two. I did Echo of Starsong in the last batch, but I do tend to use the excuse of them leaving to play some newer games outside of my aging backlog. This weekend’s Free to Play options offered me a new excuse in the form of Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl 2. I’ve wanted to play the first game in the first game in the series, and actually purchased it a while back. But, I couldn’t pass this one up, both being an easy/short “free” completion and, from all the reviews, a fairly sizable improvement over the first entry in the series. And, after playing for about eight hours, I can say this is a pretty great platform fighter, standing equal with even the best Smash Bros has to offer. Well, at least in gameplay; the presentation still feels “cheap”, and the animations can be janky, but it’s fun, which I think is the biggest point. It’s such a hit of nostalgia, as most of the content is pulled from when I was still watching Nickelodeon, and the only newer franchises are El Tigre and The Loud House. For the completion, it’s mostly about Campaign mode when it comes to anything involving skill and you have to complete a “run” on the hardest difficulty. The good news is there’s a way to simplify this; the bad news is that you only have one chance to do so. If you can make it through the King Jellyfish on the hardest difficulty after first starting the Campaign without dying, you actually earn this achievement! Otherwise, if you don’t and try to later, it’ll be good deal tougher, because to complete a run you have to make it through 12 stages with only one stock and accumulating damage. For that very first run, it’s essentially a tutorial and you’re against very basic foes.
After that, you just have to complete the rest of the Campaign on easy, and at first this was pretty fun! It is not too dissimilar to The Subspace Emissary adventure mode in Super Smash Bros: Brawl. But, then you have to do the same run a second time. Then a third. And a fourth?! Pretty lazy if you ask me, but hopefully they expand upon it for the next entry. There’s a bit of roguelite elements, obtaining a choice of random power-ups in each run, but once you know that poison is the way to go the rest seems kinda pointless. Once I had that out of the way I could move to the longer, yet easier, part of the completion: running through Arcade mode with each fighter. I had reached halfway through the roster by the end of Saturday.
Achievements unlocked: 22 (+22) | Completion: 79%
If anyone can take down The Shredder, it’s an Aussie.
Highest ratio: 3.87
Negative Eugenics (Watch Dogs)
Lowest ratio: 1.08
I Want an Award! (Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl 2)
