Week of 19 Jun 2022
“Your hovercraft is full of eels!”
Achievements Earned In:
- Hitchhiker
- Resident Evil 2
- Last Stop
- Epic Mickey 2: The Power of Two
- Goosebumps: The Game
- Oh…Sir! The Insult Simulator
I only popped into Hitchhiker quickly on Sunday to keep my streak going after returning home from visiting my spouse up north. I don’t think this will be a very long or taxing completion, but when I do really get into it I kind of want to stream it at least once.
Achievements unlocked: 16 (+3) | Completion: 32%
Now it was time to finally really play Resident Evil 2! The next few tasks and achievements tasked me with avoiding my infinite rocket launcher, so this was the first time I really had to get a feel for how to deal with the various infected and how to use the weapons. And… I hate it. The typical shambling zombies you run into just take too much to kill. I get that shooting center mass should take 4-5 shots from a handgun, but it should NOT take 4-5 HEADshots to take one down. While this challenge didn’t bother me much in the final bit of my itembox-less Leon B run, it really started to aggravate when I moved to the Extra modes. First up was the 4th Survivor scenario, where you play as Hunk and have to escape from the sewers and back out through the police department with only the equipment you start with. I really struggled here and it took 3-4 tries before I managed to complete the run. When I did, I made it by the skin of my teeth and hit the A-button on the exit as Mr. X and a horde of zombies were bearing down on me with only a sliver of health left!
As I moved to the Ghost Survivors mode, I hoped this would be the hardest part. It seemed to be as I played through the first three scenarios in this mode and found myself not having to stress TOO much while playing as farther Robert, escapee Katherine, and soldier Ghost. You don’t even have to fight any bosses or anything and can often skate past enemies. I hit a hard brick wall when I reached sheriff Daniel’s scenario, where you have to fight off waves of zombies in the cramped gas station from the intro of the main game. Even worse, for the achievement, you have to complete this scenario with training mode turned off. This was where the mechanics of the game REALLY began to wear on my nerves. I hated shooting a zombie multiple times only to get grabbed by it, or one behind me, or for a Pale Head to just wreck me. You luckily don’t have the Tyrant to deal with or anything, but the constant flow of monsters in such a small space is stressful. You have to deal with 100 monsters in total, and there’s luckily no randomness to the spawns so you know exactly what monsters you’re getting and when certain weapons drop. You also have a pistol with infinite ammo, so it comes down to item management. I watched so many videos and strategies to try and find a method, and it really comes down to just surviving until you have 60 enemies killed. At this point you need the rocket launcher to take out the next wave, and if you can do this and have a flame thrower with most of its ammo, you pretty much have the win. You have to preempt the spawns and use the flames to pierce into their spawn areas to set off the zombies carrying explosives to blow up the large groups waiting. This will typically leave you with 2-3 more zombies to kill in the cooler. Torch them suckers and you’re done! Between this scenario and Hunk’s, I’m super unsure about moving to the Japanese version of this game. Yuck.
Achievements unlocked: 44 (+4) | Completed
Oh thank god I’m out.
Time to wrap-up the point-and-click Last Stop next, which was actually very interesting. I had only played through the Prologue the week prior, so it was now time to really dig into the game. The narrative follows three separate, but lightly intertwined, storylines that converge at the end of the game to finish up the story. There are six chapters of varying length in each storyline, and most of the chapters have a miscellaneous achievement to also unlock. I’m glad these achievements weren’t very difficult to get; I hate when complex tasks completely ruin the flow of the story as I have to reload a checkpoint multiple times to get something to unlock. I actually only had to reload a checkpoint in this game once, during a segment where you have to toss bottles at various items scattered about. It’s really the only skill-based achievement in the game. Oh, I guess there’s also a piano-playing minigame, but the margin for error is large enough that it’s pretty tough to mess up. So, I guess there are only two skill-based achievements. For the story, I loved it! It was very intriguing and kept me playing to see how everything would tie together and end. I have to admit, kinda didn’t stick the landing, but I enjoyed it overall so I’ll call it a win. And I completed it before it left the Game Pass library, so win-win!
Achievements unlocked: 35 (+34) | Completed
…I think she fell asleep.
So, now and then I like to partake in the events held over on TrueAchievements, but most of them are tough for me since I’m a completionist and don’t like dumping a bunch of random games on my ‘tag. But, sometimes it’s also fun to use this aspect of the events to get me moving a bit on my massive backlog of titles. Currently running on the site is the Warboats PvP event, which is essentially the board game Battleship but using achievement wins to take a shot. Since I can’t use the meager list of games I have open on my gamertag, I have to rely on my backlog for events like this to pull from. For this event, this means every shot I take will be a new game I have to start and complete. You get points for scoring a hit, while you lose points for missing a shot. So as long as my opponent isn’t winning I’ll just sit and wait. To get my first point, it required three shots, and the first “shot” came from Epic Mickey 2: The Power of Two, which is both in my backlog AND an Xbox 360 title, so I was happy to start it. I only played the original very briefly on the Wii back in the day, but they’re fairly typical mascot platformers. As with most of the achievements chosen for my game board, it’s a low ratio so it’s right in the beginning. I didn’t even complete the opening stage before I had this one for now. Sadly, this shot was a “miss”.
Achievements unlocked: 3 (+3) | Completion: 7%
I loaded up my gun and the next shot came from Goosebumps: The Game! I’ve already done the Xbox 360 version some time ago, so I knew what to expect. It’s a very simple point-and-click game for kids involving the various monsters from the books in the series. Following the walkthrough on TA, it took a while to get the achievement I needed, but this was because it set me up to blow through the rest of the game after collecting mostly everything I needed. I’ll blow through this soon, but for now this was sadly another “miss”.
Achievements unlocked: 7 (+7) | Completion: 18%
I got my first “hit” with the delightfully simple (and oh so British) Oh…Sir! The Insult Simulator, a game where you build and hurl insults at your opponent using a selection of random words and phrases. The game itself is really that simple, though you can also combo your insults if you use the same subjects in a row, whittling down the opponent’s health bar until they pass out from the rudeness. Not many games where you can finish off a match by declaring “your mother only has online multiplayer” or that they "are a hamster and tells dirty jokes at funerals”. That last one is odd because I’d sure hope someone would tell inappropriate jokes at my funeral. Anyway, while the gameplay is simple enough, the achievements are more annoying as they rely on that curse that is RNG. Many of the harder achievements require you to craft particular phrases, but it is completely random if the needed pieces will appear, much less if they all appear together. Some can actually be made to appear more frequently, like having two Fathers (aka God) go against each other in the Heaven level to get “your son died because of your sins” to become doable. It seems most people have a single achievement take much longer than the others, and for me it was “your hovercraft is full of eels”. I could often get “your hovercraft” to appear! That “is full of eels” part just wouldn’t, though. And, on the few occasions it did, never with the other part. It took a good three hours or so playing with two controllers until it finally happened, so by then I was thoroughly over the game and quickly grinded out the remainder of the 100 matches I needed.
Achievements unlocked: 17 (+17) | Completed
What a burn, old chap!
Highest ratio: 4.40
Hell of a Sheriff (Resident Evil 2)
Lowest ratio: 1.00
Calling All Creeps (Goosebumps: The Game)
