arne360

Last week I posted that I had scheduled an online, multi-player game of Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter with Staci of Killer Betties. To make sure it wasn’t just a two-player or, if was lucky, three-player, session, I also posted a couple threads on NeoGAF asking if anybody wanted to join in. Thankfully the response was, well, pretty overwhelming. Enough so that I was very glad Vark offered up his FiOS connection to host what could be a session with the maximum number of players.

On Saturday we didn’t quite get started on time as Vark was having some home networking difficulties and I was already hosting a few four to six player games, quite well thankfully (I think). Once Vark got back online, it was on in a big way. I can’t even remember everyone who was on off the top of my head. I think we hit about twelve people as our maximum over the four hour session. I probably had one of the best times I’ve had on Xbox Live since a few Halo 2 games back in the Spring of 2005. We played nearly every imaginable game type, got all of the campaign co-op achievements for everyone (including the “Perfect Chapter 1″ achievement) and played some super-long territory maps, where the kill count went over 400-500 enemy kills easy. Somehow I’m actually amazed someone didn’t get the “Heavyweight” achievement by the end of the night. No matter how or when you look at it, it was memorable.

A couple of days later Staci posted an entry about her multi-player experience on Killer Betties and I’m glad she really liked it. I didn’t realize it was her first time on Xbox Live over a headset even. It’s really interesting that she picked marksman a lot, because I think in a lot of cases, the multiplayer games we played didn’t necessarily lend itself to the slow strategic sniping that class is best at, at least in games where everyone is on the same side. I can see that being spectacular in versus games on most maps however. I wouldn’t mind seeing more co-op campaigns that reward the type of gameplay that Ghost Recon became known for — slow, stealthy, quick deliberate kills — but that’s not to say that GRAW plays any differently or worse, you can definitely adapt the game to the class you picked in most or all cases. GRAW comes nowhere close to a fast paced FPS. What I would really like to set up somehow is a slow, intense one versus one or two versus two sniper game on the right map. A good ten minutes of cat and mouse would be incredible. At least in my head it is.

You like them or you dislike them or you certainly have way too much time on your hands.

When I first heard about them as part of my job here, I thought it was a pretty cool idea but I still didn’t have a clue what it would be like. I even thought that people would be looking each other up and comparing each others achievements and getting a handle at how good (or bad) other folks on Xbox Live were.

I must have been really short-sighted to not realize that people would be competing for comparing Gamerscores and of course, a leaderboard has popped up too.

I’m not quite that competitive with Gamerscores at least, but I really like checking out what people have accomplished in their games. This is especially true since, at the moment, I’m really not good at getting secret achievements that aren’t specifically part of the game or story (like Kameo) or some downer achievement like the losses in DOA4. I also avoid reading the walk-throughs for games just to get achievements. Although I’m now eternally frustrated that I think I missed a mining point in Gun and I’m one away from getting the “Professional Prospector” achievement.

Anyway, what’s my point? Oh, even though I do my best to avoid spoilers, I like the fact that there are sites, like Xbox360Achievements and Achieve360Points out there to catalog them. That’s a pretty nice thing to have as reference.