Berzeger's (Mostly) Steam Achievements

OK, this game is weird. It’s all about connecting falling nodes of the same colour. After connecting a few nodes, you are awarded a note node (yeah). The game is divided into a few levels (9, me thinks) and to beat each one of them, you have to collect specific amount of the note nodes, which would be perfectly fine, if… that would not be the only game principle… AVSEQ would not have a weird kind of mouse acceleration cleverly preventing you from pinpointing the nodes… the game rules were explained better… I mean – for example, if you miss a node, you lose a note node. Sometimes. Sometimes you lose two at once and sometimes you don’t lose any. When that happens, I don’t know.

The another thing broken is achievements – you have to do them all in one sitting, because the game does not remember your achievement progress. Luckily for us, achievement hunters, it takes only about 2 hours to get them all. There is no other advice than to just beat all the levels first and then to repeat the very first one (the easiest, obviously) until you get all the achies. Oh, and more thing – don’t play infinite mode. The game loses your progress after exiting infinite mode, too. Oh, well. Another one off the list.

Finally! This game has 25 achievements, some of which made me very angry. As always, I won’t talk about all of them, but I’ll describe the hardest ones. But first things first – I really enjoyed playing the game. It’s similar concept as in Alien Hallway, but a hundred times better. This is how this genre should look like! Now about the hard achies:

King of the Stone Age

Kill all Vikings in a Boulder Mode game without killing any of your own.

Oh god, oh god, oh god. I hated doing this one. In boulder mode the whole map zooms in and you see only a big boulder rolling from left to right. You have to jump over friendly units and roll over enemy units. The map, however, is so zoomed in, that you have about 0.5 second to react. Better not try do this one tired. The only way to achieve this one is to actually try and try and try and… try. Until you remember the layout (which never changes). My first try was on Saturday and I got the achievement on Wednesday, so yeah. It took me all in all about 2 hours. But the feeling after I got it… Who am I to tell you, you know it for yourselves.

Blotting out the sun

Complete Chinese Campaign level 7 with 15 or more Rocketeers alive

IMHO the second hardest. Rocketeers got a bit nerfed in the latest version, so it is much harder than ever before. You get three Rocketeers in the beginning of the level and you can’t buy more. The trick here is to multiply them with your magic. However! You can’t use the magic for anything else, because you wouldn’t have enough mana to make 12 additional Rocketeers then. Buy 10 workers as fast as you can, build a Buddha statue and then research Ninja Monkeys. When Rocketeers appear, start cloning them immediately. Keep building Ninja Monkeys (don’t you ever stop creating them) – they come in handy when catapults appear, as Ninja Monkeys are able to stun them. Build Buddha statues wherever and whenever you can and keep pushing forward. This achievements needs a bit of luck, too, so if you don’t succeed in your first try, try again. I had to do it 4 or 5 times.

Uncontrolled Demolition

Destroy a tower under construction with Rage.

I wouldn’t say this one is hard at first. But well… It was. This did the trick for me: Start skirmish, pick Vikings for you and Chinese for AI. Pick a large map (doesn’t really matter which one) and set gold, mana and workers at maximum. When you’re in game, research axe throwers, lightning bolt and rage. Keep producing axe throwers and use rage on them at once so they come closer to each other. AI usually starts building a tower as soon as its unit comes past a build spot. As soon as you see it started building, kill enemy units with lightning bolt and rush to the tower using rage. It took me about an hour until I rage’d there in the specific moment.

Phew! Glad I got them all.

I saw  Penguins Arena for 99 cents at the newly open Gala Store. Considering it’s one of the first Steam games with achievements, it was a no-brainer for me. 6 hours later, I had all of the achievements, some of which I’ll describe here.

Duel Master

Win 50 duels

This achievements is a bit weird. According to 100% Achievements Group forums, it won’t trigger in… well… duel mode. You have to start classic multiplayer (yes, even bot fights are called multiplayer here, no one else plays the game today anyway) and be the only one penguin of your team alive. When playing with bots, after you die you take control of a bot controlled penguin, so the best way to get it is to kill yourself a few times, so that you’ll be the only one. This is the most annoying and time-taking achievement here. Penguins Arena gets boring fast.

Tribe’s berserker

Win 100 fights

Tribe’s grunt

Take part in 150 fights

These two are actually very, very easy. Just start the game, turn off your screen (to save some energy, be ecologic), take your girlfriend to the movies, get some dinner afterwards and when you come back, you’ll see that you’ve earned not only these two, but also 80% of the other achivements as well. Simple.

Well, the Steam Summer Sale started yesterday. Like every year, the deals are insanely superb. However, when it comes to summer achievements, it’s a bitter disappointment, because if you count every one of them, you’ll come to zero (the only exception being Killing Floor). Yup, there are no summer achievements, no prizes, no anything. Maybe cheaters ruined it on Christmas? Who knows. There is, however, a new thing, which has come to Steam Community and is called badges. Post a video, post a screenshot, leave a comment on a friends profile. Stuff like this. We’ll see what will be Valves next turn.

Looks like the Steam Summer Sale is almost ready to start. No matter whether you are from Team July 9th or Team July 12th, you can now spend some time getting Killing Floor summer achievements you may have missed last summer and also getting the new ones. All of the new ones can be achieved easily in solo mode.

Those are: 

Brittish Superiority

Kill a zed each with both the Bullpup and FN-Fal

Easy peasy. Buy both of these weapons and kill two zeds, one with the Bullpup, one with FN-Fal.

 Combat Medic

 Kill a zed that has injured a player (M7A3 rifle)

Notice the description says “a player,” meaning it can be you. ;-) Buy M7A3, let a zed attack you, then send a few bullets straight through its head. Achievement unlocked!

 Spec Ops

 Kill 12 clots with one magazine without reloading (MK23)

This one is a little bit harder, but nothing unachievable. MK23 has exactly 12 bullets in a magazine, so make every one count. Just run around like no tomorrow, kill zeds with a different weapon and when you see a Clot, switch to MK23 and shoot its head off. Repeat 11 times.

 The Big One

 Kill 2 scrakes with one shot (M99)

Just line two of these hell messengers up and then *bang*!

Fugly

Kill one of each type of zed in one round (HSG Shotgun)

This one seems a little bit bugged as it should read “Kill one of each type of zed in a round and the Patriarch in the final wave.” I don’t think the Patriarch counts as a zed, so let’s consider it partly broken now. It is, however, obtainable, for the Patriarch takes about 3 or 4 shots from HSG on Beginner difficulty.

Apart from these five, a new map has been added, so there is a new “Beat the new map on XYZ difficulty” quadruple. It’s good to see a great game like Killing Floor not being Left 4 Dead by its developers yet. The summer event ends on July 23rd, so hurry up!

My finals are finally over, so I’ve started completing my games. The first one is DEFCON. Pretty funny RTS, but you will definitely not spend much hours with it, because it gets stereotype after a while. Anyways, the achievements are mostly grinding ones, especially the hardest one, which requires you to nuke 7 billion civilians. Given each continent has only 100 million… Well. Luckily I have two Steam accounts, both with DEFCON in them, so I started it up on my laptop and PC, set cities per territory to 1, 200 million people per teritory, grabbed a good book and once in a while restarted the game. Also, one of the achievements can be done only at Christmas (just set your clock to Dec 25 2011, it should work).

Oh, I should also tell you you can only unlock most of the achievements playing against other people, you can’t get them with bots.

Alien Hallway is a mediocre Swords and Soldiers-like game from the most immature company I have ever seen. The game consists of a few elements – your base, enemy base and the battlefield. Engineers gather (infinite) minerals with which you can buy soldiers. Soldiers have their own AI, the only thing you have to carry about is the right choice of your army. The enemy does the same and whoever destroys the opponents base wins. I usually like this kind of games, but this one fails at several levels. First, it is horrendously bugged. Second, it looks as if it was made using MS Paint. And furthermore, it feels like a remake of a Microsoft XNA tutorial.

The achievements are pretty easy and most of them I got in a standard gameplay. The only harder one requires you to finish the game on Extreme difficulty. Which only means the enemy has more health and deals more damage. So you have to play the easier levels to make money in order to buy unit upgrades. Oh, wow. It must have been tough to come up with something like that.

First of all I have to say that I totally love Botanicula! I love the style, the gameplay, everything about it. It’s a czech made point ‘n’ click adventure where you have 5 characters (but control them as one) and have to save the nature from evil all-eating spiders. The game includes 53 easy achievements, you’ll get them all if you try to collect all the game cards. Strange thing is that you can buy this game at humblebundle.com and activate it on Steam, but you can’t buy it on Steam directly. Maybe somewhere in the future?

I actually finished Portal’s achievements a long time ago (some of there are really hard, especially the challenge ones), but then, just prior to releasing of Portal 2, VALVe added a new achievement called “Transmission Received” with a cryptic hint “..?” All you have to do is find 26 radios hidden throughout the game and deliver them to specific locations. I couldn’t get myself to doing it, because I knew it would mean to play the whole game from the beginning to (almost) the end. But today I finally started it up again and after 3 hours I got the achievement, so I’m at 100% again. Yipee!

Today I’d like to talk about startup achievements. These mean that you have to start the game up x times. I’ll talk specifically about Garry’s Mod and Universe Sandbox and exactly how to earn these achievements.

Startup Millenium:

Start Garry’s Mod 1000 times.

 

Startup Too Many:

Start Universe Sandbox 10^4 = 10000 times

You don’t have to actually sit down for 10 hours and repeatedly start the game up and exit it. For the Garry’s Mod Achievement: Create a file called gmod.bat on your desktop. Then create a shortcut leading to your Steam.exe (typically C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\Steam.exe) with parameter -applaunch 4000 ad call it GMOD. So it will look like this: “Target: C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\Steam.exe -applauch 4000”

Now edit the bat file and copy the following into it:

ECHO “GMod laucher by @B0FH”

START  GMOD.lnk

ping -n 30 127.0.0.1 > NUL 2>&1

TASKKILL /f /im “hl2.exe”

CALL gmod.bat

Let’s go over what it actually does. The first line is just a credit to @B0FH, who came with this great little script. The second line executes the shortcut, so it runs GMod. The third line pings your PC for 30 seconds (you can edit this number according to your PC’s performance – if you can run it faster, decrease the number, if you can’t run it in 30 secods, increase it) and forwards the output of the command to NUL, so it doesn’t spam your screen. Then the fourth line force kills Garry’s Mod and at the fifth line it goes back to the first line (calls itself).

The modification for Universe Sandbox is simple. Create another shortcut, this time with the parameter -applaunch 72200 and call it US. Then create a bat file again and call it us.bat. Edit it and put the following into it:

ECHO “Universe Sandbox laucher by @B0FH”

START  US.lnk

ping -n 10 127.0.0.1 > NUL 2>&1

TASKKILL /f /im “Universe Sandbox.exe”

CALL us.bat

And just leave it running overnight (in case of GMod) or for a longer time (in case of Universe Sandbox ;-)).