By leaps and bounds

My gamer score shot up by leaps and bounds over this weekend. Why, you ask? Because I got a new game.

I picked up Scene it? to have something the whole family can play when we get together. It worked . . . kind of. My mother spent most of the time in the other room trying to get her infant grandbaby to sleep. And my sister-in-law spent most of her time wrangling her other two kids and the controller they were suppose to be sharing. It was chaos and bedlam most of the time so I wonder if anyone had any fun.

I was able to score 340 points in three games. But I really didn't earn them all myself. While the family was playing, dain and I were sharing a controller. We were logged into my profile on that controller so anything we did I would get the credit for. My parents were playing under dain's log in and they did manage to get a few achievements for him, but not many. My brother kaiakapero picked up some for himself all on his own.

But the achievement I picked up this weekend that I'm most proud of was the Heartbreaker achievement for Portal. You get it for completing the game. The last time dain and I played Portal (side by side) we had to quit because our brains were turning to jelly. We had no idea how close or how far we were from finishing the game. Apparently we weren't far from finishing it at all. We only had about four or five areas left but we were hopelessly stuck in one area. We could see where he needed to go but we couldn't figure out how to get there.

When I was out buying my second Plug and Play charging cord I picked up a strategy guide for The Orange Box game. I figured we would need it if we were ever going to finish Portal. And we did. I told dain that we'd check to see how to get ourselves unstuck but I wanted to try to finish the game without getting any more help unless we absolutely needed it. Turns out we didn't.

It also turned out that we wouldn't have figured out how to get unstuck without the book's help. I never would have figured out that I had to set up portals to get a laser to shoot the tube releasing a cube so I can use that to get up into a small crawl space. I felt incredibly stupid for not seeing the solution to the problem. But then I finished the game and felt incredibly smart for having figured out all those puzzles and made it to the end. Of course I had dain sitting with me to help work through things. Two minds are so much better one.

Do I expect my gamer score to go up this much every weekend? Not unless I buy a new game with easy achievements every weekend. And I know from past experiences that some new games don't always handout achievements so easily (I'm thinking Blue Dragon for starters). Besides, my bank account would need to grow by leaps and bounds in order to afford all those games. Bummer.