Wasting Time

For the month of April, the Old Man Mafia has been doing a Gamerscore Challenge.  I'm not doing too bad but we have a couple of guys who are simply crushing it and I know I have no hope in hell of catching them at this point.  I've tried to simply just mine out the AC points for the games that I already have and never got around to finishing.  I've also not tried to do anything that would take days or weeks to finish just to get the points.  Particularly if I had no interest in doing that in the first place.  Finishing COD2 on Veteran comes to mind.  Where I could though, I've tried to put in some older games to farm out any of the low hanging fruit.  Which leads me to last night....

When I originally bought my 360, finding a console was like looking for a Cabbage Patch Doll in 1985.  When I finally did find some in stock at my local Fry's, I was pretty excited.  Unfortunately, Fry's took the opportunity to force would be buyers into buying 4-6 games along with the console in order to get one.  I didn't really want most the games that were available at the time, but like a sucker I bought some anyway so I could get the console and not have to wait another month or two to find one.  One of the games that I picked up with it was Quake 4.  I never really spent much time with that game 2-3 years ago when I first got it.  I think I played the first level and it's been sitting in the back of my media drawer ever since.  Well, last night I thought I'd pull it out and see if there were any easy AC I could get out of it over the course of an hour or two.

Now I remember why it's been collecting dust.  What a turdball of a game!

Everything is dark, but nothing is particularly scary so I'm not sure what the point of making things pitch black so you can't find where you're going is.  Some idiot at ID thought it would be a good idea to use the right thumbstick button to zoom weapons.  So you're stuck trying to aim and zoom on the same button at the same time.  You can't click to zoom and then click to un-zoom, you have to keep it held down. Stupid.  Then there's the worst part...The game will just trap you in areas of a level with no instruction or indication of how to move on.  I wandered around one room for about 20 minutes trying to activate anything I could touch, look for a hidden wall, trap door, key, anything.  Finally, in a fit of frustration I started randomly and wildly firing off the rest of my rounds when one of them accidentally hit a turret in the ceiling causing it to fire back at me.  Once I "killed" the turret, suddenly the game resumes. WTF?!  I've been wandering that room for nearly a half hour and that turret wasn't tracking me, firing at me or anything.  What's the point?

I thought maybe it was just a game glitch or an anomaly so I decided to press on.  about 15 minutes later I find myself in another area where once again all the doors are locked and there's no direction on what to do next.  I spent the next 10-15 minutes again searching every nook and cranny of the map for a way out and finally just said "fuck it!"  "There's no amount of points available to make this POS game worth playing". 

I guess some games are better left in the dust bin.

The Score Whoring wasn't a total loss though, I did manage to pick up a couple of points off RB2 and I finished the RB1 Hard Guitar Tour.  Then I put in Peggle.  What a weird and quirky little game that is.  I don't know if I'll take the time to clear every board on that or not, but it sure is an interesting way to kill an hour or two.