graphless but there's monkeys!

Well its a late entry and I have no idea where my current spreadsheet and graph are. They ain't on this computer and I'm pretty confused, but anyway, a belated Happy New Year internauts! Get anything nice for Christmas or are you rocking an empty stocking after a year of naughty? Personally I must have been good....or maybe I've been bad and Santa wants to see the Completion Project fail as punishment, the old sicko.
Whichever the reason, this chistmas I unwrapped:

-Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword (wii)
-Batman: Arkham City (360)
-Elderscrolls V: Skyrim (360)
-Rayman Origins (360)

Not great news for the graph, but who gives a monkeys about that when you've got 4 awesome new games to play through!

As for the previous week which I didn't update for because, ya know, Christmas and shizz, we got 3 games finished to tick off the list.

First being MarioKart DS which was one of the pre-mentioned Ambassador downloads. Not much to say about that as it's a game where you whizz around in karts and win races and win enough races to become king of racing or sumfink, so I did that and lets move on.

Sonic CD..

"must...not...gush...about....Sonic...argh!!"

Downloaded on PSnetwork but originally released for the Sega CD, an ill-fated add-on for the Megadrive. This was the next victory, which being a bit of a Sonic fanatic, I of course wrapped up in a day. I'd finished this game many times before thanks to emulation and an old Gamecube disc of Sonic rarities, but it still felt as fresh as ever and the slick updated HD visuals were a treat. Sonic CD plays a lot like the original Megadrive sonics and see's you travelling through time in a race to restore the planet by preventing Robotniks misdeeds in the past and contesting with the original Sonic rival, Metal Sonic. I'm not going into this much as I'm really trying to avoid banging on about Sonic on this blog.

So that leaves, Mario Vs Donkey Kong. Another GBA ambassador download. This one is weird to explain..

From what I gather, Donkey Kong just decides one day to be a dick and steal a load of Mario Toys, for what purpose I have no idea, but he does, and it makes Mario livid.

DK's best defense strategy is to run through what I suppose is a big toyshop, locking doors behind him so you have to do sort of puzzle-platforming stages to get keys and follow him. When you catch him, he's usually up on some sort of podium like that grinning psychotic Donkey Kong of the olden days

Just look at this asshole!

Mario, also known for bizzarly dickish behavior, decides the best solution is to hand DK's ass back to him by smashing his face in with bombs and anything he can find lying around. The concept of just sitting down and talking things out is not one either of these guys is familiar with, but if they were and it had worked, it would have been a considerably less entertaining game.

You get to the end and, spoiler alert, and casually cause the platforms DK is standing on to collapse, knocking him from the top of the Toy Factory and sending the gormless ape plummeting head-first to his grissly death. Then the credits roll.
Nintendo then proceed to ruin one of the most mental and brutal endings to a mario game by revealing after the credits then Donkey Kong is basically fine. Mario runs down and asks him if he's alright which only adds to the weirdness of it all and makes you wonder if Mario is bipolar. I'd imagine it must have been sarcasm and he was gutted at the absense of ape-brains on the pavement. Donkey Kong responds by kidnapping more toys and running off again. Mario runs after him.

There are no words. Frankly these 2 are basically welcome to eachother. A fitting end to the Mario franchise would be Mario stuck in an endless loop of being passive agressive towards an asshole monkey.

More like a DOWNdate.

Look I know you've seen the graph already and I'm sorry. I know I've been slacking when it comes to finishing games, there's been a lot on, it's nearly Christmas! "Stop making excuses, what the bloody hell is going on here Chadders, you're poxy graph has plummeted!"

Let me explain in a nutshell. A few months ago I bought the Nintendo 3DS. Not long ago Nintendo dropped the price as it wasn't shifting too many units. Early adopters who paid the original higher price became known as ambassadors. 

One of the benefits of becoming an ambassador was a ruck of free games. 10 original NES games and 10 Gameboy Advance games all downloadable for the 3DS. Now I couldn't give a monkeys about the NES games, I didn't have a NES so there's no nostalgia value and they just arent that much fun anymore. 

Wow yeah cool, do that thing where you press a button and go up again. Awessomee.

The GBA on the other hand actually was awesome and most of these games I've never played. What sense does it make to buy new games when I have GBA games I've never played! For that reason, despite technically being freebies, they have to go on the list. A couple of them aren't because I already owned and finished them back in the day ( Zelda: Minish Cap for example. Incredible game by the way ). 

So the new games on the list are:

Metroid Fusion

Mario Vs Donkey Kong

Super Mario Advance 3

Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones

Mario Kart Super Circuit

Kirby and the Amazing Mirror

Warioland 4

Not content with this, I also borrowed "We Love Katamari" for the PS2 from Neil (Thanks Neil) and bought the new Sonic CD remastered port on PSNetwork.

Absolute madness. 9 new games and non completed AGAIN. I've had no idea how badly I've been doing for the last month. Dead Nation feels like it was about a week ago. I am definitely going to pick up some slack now and crack on with it. Sorry there isn't much humour or interest in this post but this is business time I'm afraid, the lack of progress has come as a bit of a shock!

The Blog is Pikachu. I am Ash. You are Professor Oak I guess...thanks for helping, dick.

If you're thinking I've gone and listed a bunch of games but not talked about any of them (Bet your dying to know what a Katamari is) I'll cover in detail once I complete them of course! I'm going to shuffle off now, finish some games and be back with interesting fun posts and graph progress. In the meantime have another NES screenshot.

This is totally my favourite hole, play another golf shot Mario! Sweet!

Manly Man games for Men!

Question: WAR, HURGH, GOOD GOD YA’LL, WHAT IS IT GOOD FOR?
Answer: Driving mutated alien creatures with rifles and grenades off a planet you’ve tried to colonise while curing a disease caused by a parasite which is making said aliens turn into a new batch of even-worse-aliens which want to fight the aliens aswell as yourself and ruin everyones fun.

Also without it, what would the cast of Gears of War do for a living? Seriously look at this guy.

"Just popping down the shops."

It would have to be a job which involves nothing smashable, crushable or word processing as I don't think those big sausage fingers could hit fewer than 4 keys at once.
He could get a job in logistics lifting crates around, but Gears of Warehouse sounds like a rubbish idea for a game.
Shenmue sort of got away with it, but at least Ryo could fit in a forklift

"Which one's Warehouse B? Oh crap I'm gonna get fired."

So next time Edwin Starr starts piping up, just tell him it keeps people like Marcus Fenix in work. Me and Daf finished Gears of War 3 in co-op mode at the weekend. It’s technically not my game, but neither are the games on the list which belong to Cassy, Them’s the rules, if I want to play it (and have access to it), it goes on. So that’s one game added, one game completed, which means my number of uncompleted games hasn’t changed, but the percentage has crept up which I think we can all agree is the best bit of news we’ve had since Wispa’s came back

Pictured: The new measuring stick for goodness of news

Marcus Fenix has never had a Wispa, that’s why he looks so angry all the time.

Normal Programming will resume shortly

*eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee*

What day is it? Oh no. When did I last update? Oh no. What am I working on right now? Ooohhh balls.

It's that time of the Mouth!

Me and Steve fought off a lot of different zombie types on our path to completing Dead Nation. 

These are our mass zombie slaughter faces

Aswell as the usual armies of drone zombie, you have special "infected" who fundamentally disgree with your human right to not be eaten. Pretty scary bunch really, you've got your Bombies, Slicers, Jumpers....and Mouth.

There's a lot of things that we shouted a LOT during our playthrough, the top 5 probably being

5) Zombies!

4) Health Pack!

3) Treasure!

2) I'm being eaten!

1) MOUTH!!!!!

Mouth's school photo, doesn't even have a face let alone a mouth.

So what made Mouth so special? Well we have no idea what it's meant to do. It's appearance was terrifying at first, we'd never seen one before and it does look scary...until we shot it a few times and it went down. The more we fought, the less they seemed to do. No matter how long we left them standing there, no matter how hungry it's mates were, Mouth stood there certainly making quite a lot of noise and looking irritable but he seemed content to just watch until his brains got smeared along the side of a bin. The whole game we assumed it had some incredible power we'd yet to see. It didn't. It is Mouth.

We finished the game over a few beers and celebrated our victory over the army of undead, especially Mouth. The credits rolled and we noticed at the end, the development company provided an email address for contact. This is the email "Housemarque" received 10 minutes later

Date: Fri, 11 Nov 2011 22:02:12 +0000
Subject: Dead nation... And mouth
To: dn@housemarque.com

Andy and steve here, just finished dead nation for completionproject.blogspot.com.  We thought it was amazing! However... Please explain Mouth. He's our favourite :-)

Warmest regards, steve and andy.

No reply yet but it was only last night and they live all the way in Finland so fingers crossed. MOUTH!!!

0 games bought. 1 game finished but I've just realised my spreadsheets and graph for tommorows update are on a pendrive I've left at work. Will update that on Monday, Progress is progress!

Unless it's Mouth's progress.

 

LocoRoco is not something I've made up

Evening blogsters!

Another late update but it was an exciting week just passed for me as Sonic Generations was released! I got it, I finished it and I'll be uploading a video about it during the week.
Also last week I started and finished Loco Roco 2 on the the PSP.

What...is...happening?

Another game about what are essentially blobs and with a silly name. I promise this is the end of my brightly coloured blob fixation. The concept behind Loco Roco is tilting your environment to guide a bunch of rolly-balls which sing, through surreal environments to bouncy music. Pure mental rainbow joy. It's a bit like what you might see if you ate a bucket of skittles for dinner. The enemy designs are a bit...questionable though...

Seriously, is that alright?

1 new game bought and 2 games complete, let's take a look graph-fans.

Still a bit boring. Maybe cold hard stats next week

So that's last week, what about THIS week? Our current exciting week?! The only game I'm really currently aiming to finish is Dead Nation with Steve but I'm sure there's a few on the list where I'm right near the end and can maybe pick one or two off...but for now lets just say Sonic Generations video coming this week and hopefully Dead Nation finished by Sunday. I hope so, no more flat spots on the graph please.

Q and A

Good evening all! Doing alright I trust? Champion.
We have some questions today from a Mr Mark Davies, posted on the first entry of the blog. Allow me to paste them here and answer!

Hey, I'm looking forward to the progress of this blog. Just some general questions:
Am I right that the colour coding in the games list is by platform?
Blue=Wii
Green=XBox360
Black=PS3
Grey=PSP
Red=DS/3DS
Orange=Dreamcast/PC

Absolutely right. The orange was Miscellaneous really but does currently contain a PC game and a Dreamcast game at the moment.

How is completion defined? Finishing the "story" would seem the most appropriate and justified. So could you give yourself bonus points for doing all side missions and achieving 100% completion as defined by Trophies/Achievements?

Again correct, it's based on story completion or any kind of career/story mode. Hence the odd driving game has made the list as it had a career mode and can be "completed". For example with the fighting genre, Super Smash Brothers Brawl has a story campaign so it's in. Street Fighter 4 does not, so it's out.
No bonus points for 100% completion, but maybe if I ever complete this project there's something to think about in the future!

How awesome is Jet Set Radio?


Jet Set Radio is one of Earth's Ambassadors for awesome. Anyone with a love for anything SEGA needs a dreamcast, a VGA cable adapter and copy of Jet Set right now. They really don't make em like this anymore. 

Jet Set Radio: F YOU SQUARE CAR!

Up to the second, finger on the pulse, action!

It's the Sunday update...on a Tuesday!! Alright the blog post is a couple of days late but the data is from Sunday so no biggie.
As I've already mentioned, I finished the World Ends With You so that's good. It gets better though, I also managed to finish "De Blob 2".
I've been chipping away at this one for a while hence no mention of it so far on the blog. Or should that be De Blog? No, no it probably shouldn't.

Whats "De Blob 2" you ask? Well its a platformer where you control this thing, doing things by getting paint...and things, to stop all these other things..and rescue some things using the paint. Also there's things.
Another fun fact: it's a sequel to a game called "De Blob". See what they've done there, is stuck a 2 on the end of it which was a good idea I think.

It's a blob. Obviously.

 Nearly got a third game ticked off, as me and my co-op buddy Steve have been ploughing through Dead Nation, a top-down shooter which has you fighting off hoards of zombies (I'm talking hundreds at a time here), it's really fun and really addictive and I'd suggest you get about downloading it if you've got someone willing to play as I can't imagine it's as much fun as a single player experience. Plus Steves really good with landmines so that's pretty handy when it comes to not being Zombie-Chow and I can't say any of my other friends excel in explosives in the same way, so I'm thankful for his support. So much so, I never even mean to set him on fire, it just sort of happens a lot. There's a load of zombie games out there at the moment but I think this is the only one where you can get a giant sawblade launcher and decapitate an army of zombies at once.  Not only that but there's a massive bloated zombie which explodes called a "Bombie". If wordplay like that isn't enough incentive to give it a try then I just don't know WHAT you want!

Alternate Title: Ah bloody hell! Zombies!

No games bought, 2 down, before we go to the graph I'd just like to take a moment to thank all the people who have commented on, or followed the blog. You are lovely people indeed.
To the graph!

In the immortal words of the M-People, it's "moving on up, moving on up, moving on up"

Then they'd repeat it a few more dozen times but that's why you haven't heard from them in about a decade.

The World Ends With You - Done!

I finished 'The Worlds Ends With You' last night and massively enjoyed my time with it. Seriously recommended to any DS owners who have yet to try it. A fairly steep learning curve but once it clicks you'll find one of the most interesting, different and above all entertaining action-RPG's available.
The story follows Neku who wakes up in Shibuya to find his memories gone, a timer on his hand, and himself invisable to the people around him. Stuck in the limbo between life and death, Neku must partner up with other players who have shared his fate and compete in challenges set by the mysterious "Reapers" to try and win another chance at life or face erasure. Battles take place over both DS screens with Neku being controlled on the bottom with the stylus and your partner being controlled on the top-screen by the D-Pad. Sound confusing? It is at first, and you feel like you'll never manage to follow action on 2 screens at once, but you do, and it's brilliant.

Left:The battles will make your head spin at first but you'll get there

Right: Neku, Joshua, Shiki, Beat and Rhyme. You'll like these guys...well maybe not the lad in the skull hat, he's a bit of a nob who says "yo" a lot.

Mid Week Video Update

Just click to play! I don't really say much worthwhile, it's more of a test. Better video's to come, definitely*

*not definite

The World Ends With Who?

I started “The World Ends With You” on DS probably about 7 months ago. It’s another one of Cassy's and I honestly can’t remember why I stopped playing. Something must have come up. I was only a couple of hours in so I’ve picked up where I left up pretty easily! Great art style, great music, fun gameplay. Let’s get this one done after the cock-up that was Tactics.

As Neku would say “Focus!”

Trying to focus here..

                                                                  

Tactical Failure

After scoring a few “easy goals” I thought I should tackle something on the list which I hadn’t even started, which really means I’m picking one of Cassys. After a week or so of action I decided it was time for a bit of strategy, and where better to get confused by numbers than on the PSP!

I loved and hated the time I spent with Tactics but I’ll save you the suspense and tell you now, I’ve stopped playing and it’s not complete.

I know, that’s terrible, its against the whole concept of the mission! I know that, and I will finish it eventually, I swear…I have to! For now though, it’s so frustrating I might accidentally dunk Cassys PSP in the fishtank, which will not only make it much harder to finish the other PSP games but won’t be netting me any house-points with the missus.

Don’t get me wrong, when the game was going well, I really enjoyed it and genuinely want to finish it.

Tactics has you command a gang of medieval warriors through turn-based battles over board-like area's. Expect plenty of lines beginning "hast thou" of "forsooth!" and variations of my favourite "you forget yourself!" which I'm thinking of adapting into my own brilliant catchphrase.

You have knights, you have mages, you have bows and arrows, you have enemies that counter-attack for more damage than you do to them, you have chocobo's that go just out of reach and heal themselves relentlessly, you have neer-do-wells dodging, blocking or surviving with 1HP at the worst possible times, you DON'T have your dead party members back after battle despite the fact the battle should have ended 10 damn turns ago if the healing, dodging, goddamn chocobo would just die already!!!

Lady luck watches over your shoulder while you play this game and she hates your guts.

Maybe I was just unlucky with the fights I had and the game wasn't actually weighted against me, but it certainly felt this way at the time and due to a sore back, freezing cold feet a long day at work I put this one back on the shelf for something that would make me swear less.

pictured: The bain of my life

I will be back for you tactics, thou hasnt not forsaken me yet!

Graph Update 1

5 games complete since I started a few week ago. No games bought.

Bit of a boring graph at the moment to be fair. Any questions? No you can't leave, sit down!

Pre-Blog Progress

Since starting the graph I’ve not bought any new games and managed to finish a few! . Between then and this blog post I followed the path of good and  basically sorted everything out in 'Infamous 2', beat-in Bowser in 'Super Mario World', did-in Ganondorf in both 'Ocarina of Time' and "Spirit Tracks" and  ruined that pirate fella in 'Ratchet and Clank: Quest for Booty'. Sounds like a lot doesn’t it? Well to be fair, I was remarkably close to the end for all 4 of the latter (finished between 10/10-16/10) and infamous 2 was too brilliant to not finish within a week and a bit (finished between 03/10-09/10)

I made a commemorative image.

MISSION STATEMENT: To complete every game I've bought since 2005.

I buy a lot of games, or at least it feels like I do, and I thought I was generally quite good at completing them. One day I decided to go through my games and finish one which I'd got close to finishing but never did and only then did I realise the horrible truth, that I have't finished anywhere near as many of my games as I thought.

Not one to dally about, I went straight to work on excel listing every game I've bought since getting my Xbox360 back in 2005. I could have gone back sooner and covered the Megadrive - Gamecube era, but decided this was too ambitious, there needs to be limits. My list also contained games owned by my other half, Cassy, as many of them I know I would enjoy but for some reason never picked up, usually going and buying a brand new game instead. I knew adding these would be the motivation I needed to play through some stuff we already own but I hadn't touched.

my final list included Xbox360, PS3, Wii, DS, 3DS, PSP and a couple of miscallenous games for Dreamcast and PC respectedly. I also included all virtual console and PSN/XBL arcade games.   The list totalled at 114.

Marking through games which were complete revealed only 58 of these have been finished. A poor 51%. I whipped up a small graph and would update the stats every Sunday with any new games to add to the list any I'd managed to finish, ticked off.

While getting to100% is the obvious goal,  I've decided on a sub-goal of getting to and maintaining over 80% completion, anywhere above this is the golden zone that I want to be in. Basically, if you look at the graph, the red line needs to reach over the yellow line.

So without further ado, let the games commence!

(so cheesy)