Week of 26 Nov 2023
“You reap what you sow, Artyom.”
Achievements Earned In:
- NeoGeo Battle Coliseum
- Eastward
- Metro 2033
Just used NeoGeo Battle Coliseum over Sunday and Monday to keep my streak going, first knocking out the Survival Mode achievement, then jumping into a solo double-box multiplayer session to get the first of the Xbox LIVE achievements done. I think I’m getting into the real challenge of the achievement list now, so we’ll see how it goes. I sure do hate fighting games…
Achievements unlocked: 6 (+2) | Completion: 50%
Sure enough, finding that final chest in Eastward turned out to be user error, as during my second playthrough I soon came across a chest in Chapter 3 I hadn’t see before, outside of New Dam City. Upon picking it up, bam, the achievement for finding them all unlocked. WHEW, good thing it wasn’t super late into the game or anything. This left my New Game+ run in Earth Born, which really wasn’t that bad at all. Took a while, but before making my attempt I spent every bit of salt I had getting plenty of capsule so I had more than enough supplies to get through all of the demon kings and the final battle. Most of it is copy-and-paste from the first run (save stuns and seeds for the final boss, level up as quickly as possible, etc.), but the only real change for me came in the final area, as you make your way to the True Demon King. You have to fight very powerful enemies on the way (luckily, no random encounters), and it didn’t take long before they started causing me to dig into my remaining items. I was close to hitting level 8 by the time I reached the final boss, so I made the executive decision to push my resources to the limit, hit level 8, and use the extra power to tip the scales in my favor. And it worked! I was surprised how easily the True Demon King fell, even though he died almost right after I used up my final healing item, so it was still cutting it close.
Achievements unlocked: 30 (+2) | Completed
The Monk speaks the tru tru. Now let’s dance.
It was finally time to get back to the Japanese, import version of Metro 2033 I started for the TA Bingo event, and it went just as annoyingly as the first time I played this game back in 2020. Even worse, my controller appears to be broken, or it’s just the game. Either way my inputs get stuck until I make another one, so I keep walking off ledges or firing wildly. Course, since I’m so lucky, the previous annoyances also occurred, meaning the two game-long cumulative achievements (for locating all military-grade ammo in the stations and “exploring” the Metro) glitched on me and won’t unlock again. DANG IT. The rest of the game was easy enough, and this completion is actually easier than the NTSC-U version due to the lack of the added achievements, but I spent all Saturday trying to get those two achievements to unlock to no avail. The Explorer achievement is notoriously finicky, but I have picked up all the gold ammo in the four stations multiple times now. I’m not really sure what to do here, and I didn’t really go into detail on my blog entry at the time on how I finally got it to unlock. I’m gonna start by clearing the HDD cache and moving my save to there. If that doesn’t work I’ll maybe find some way to just get my progress to a new save location (and not the checkpoints themselves). I don’t know. Just better not have to replay the whole thing…
Achievements unlocked: 36 (+36) | Completion: 92%
Bourbon, I think we took a wrong turn, my dude. Why are these guys speaking Japanese?!
