Running Up the Score

With Sandy out of town for a few more days, I decided to do something silly…namely, binge on Gamerscore points by getting a Blockbuster Game Pass and renting as many easy 1000-pointers as possible. The goal is to see how much I can pump up my score in a short period of time. In preparation, I consulted Achieve360Points.com’s achievement list (which can be filtered by difficulty) to see which games out there are the cream puffs of the 360 line-up.

Starting Gamerscore: 10781

The first game I rented was the notorious Avatar: The Last Airbender: The Burning Earth. This game just came out recently, and has already earned a (well-deserved) reputation as an easy 1000 points. Why? You can get all of the achievements within a couple of minutes by simply mashing the B button. This video demonstrates how it works. Overall, I only played the game for the couple of minutes required to get all of the points.

Next up was NBA 2K6. By tweaking the game and coaching sliders at various points in the game, I was able to get all of the required achievements in one game. After maxing out Shaquille O’Neal’s stats, the 90’s West All-Stars coasted to a 264-39 victory over the Atlanta Hawks. O’Neal finished with 202 points, 26 boards, 28 assists, and 33 steals in a dominating performance, scoring over 50 points in the last 3 minutes of the game to reach the 200 mark. Since I was playing with 12-minute quarters, it actually took me a little over an hour to rack up the 1000 points from this game. Some of that was running up the score, though, so it’s probably possible to do it in a shorter amount of time.

Third on the day is Madden NFL 06 — I settled for this since they didn’t have NBA Live 06 available, and it took me a little more time to finish than NBA 2K6. The big kahuna in this game is the “complete 30 years of franchise mode” achievement, which any sane individual would accomplish by simulating those 30 seasons. This is where the picture-in-picture mode of my TV comes in handy — while slowly advancing through the 30 simulated seasons, I was watching TV or otherwise entertaining myself in between the sporadic button presses required to continue simming. Afterwards, I played one quick-play game to get most of the remaining achievements (a 192-9 victory for the Patriots over the Niners, in which Tom Brady threw for something like 1700 yards, and Deion Branch had over 1000 receiving yards), and one franchise game with 1 minute quarters (won 6-0 by the Cowboys).

Today I picked up NHL 2K6, which I’m about to start playing. After this, I should be up to 14781 points. UPDATE: That was fast. I pumped up the Dallas Stars, and faced off against Belarus, which was the lowest-rated default team that I could find. After figuring out the fastest way to get some of my own guys in the sin bin (wiggling the right analog stick furiously when defending against an offensive player), I quickly got all of the achievements except for the one involving a penalty shot, which took a little more research to obtain. Ring up another 1000 points.

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