So I've finally got to 20,000 points, and I'm way behind schedule. However, I am slowly getting there, so I'm still pretty confident of hitting my overall target.

Recent games that have added to my total have been Street Fighter IV and Halo Wars.

Street Fighter IV has given a pretty easy 400 or so points, but I think it's the kind of game that I'll probably keep playing, even though no points are involved. It's not perfect by any means, but it's the kind of game that you could always easily just put on for a few quick online games.

There are some really annoying parts to it that should never be in a game that ranks so highly on Metacritic though. Like not even giving you the ability to turn, what has got to be some of the most horrible music ever made, completely off.

You can turn it down.

But never off.

...Then on top of that, there's the incredibly annoying fight announcer!

There's an achievement to play 500 online games, plus there are all of the fights that you'll have to do to unlock all of the characters, and then you'll want to finish it with every character, and the challenges, etc, etc.

Did they not think that they'd need more than 2 or 3 phrases for the fight announcer to come out with over possibly THOUSANDS of games!?!?

They phrases get so annoyingly repetitive, all you want to do is turn them right off, but guess what?

You can only turn them off if you turn off all the speech in the ENTIRE game!

That's right, no fight announcer, no 'Hadooken!', no 'Tiger Uppercut!', no 'Sonic boom!'.

If I had reviewed this game, I'd have given it a big fat ZERO for audio.

So besides that, I've also been playing Halo Wars, which I've enjoyed a lot more than I originally thought I would. I just don't seem to get bored of building massive armies in different ways and taking out my enemies.

I've never really been into RTS games before.

I tried Command and Conquer, but it still remains one of those 'yeah, I'll play that one later' type games that I have so many of.

It could be the case that Halo Wars is more straight forward than most other RTS's, so it allows me to focus on the building and fighting parts of the game that makes it so appealing to me. I'm not sure, but enjoying this game as much as I have has made me want to see what else the RTS genre has to offer in the near future.

30k, here we come!

I've got a bit of spare time on my hands over the next few days, so along with the many other things that I've been meaning to catch up on, I should be able to work on my gamerscore.

I've managed to get back to adding to it after spending so long on the COD4 multiplayer, and might even be able to get up to the 20,000 points mark over the coming week or so. I'm currently on 17,750, but I have enough games to play through that the 2,250 points to get there should be fairly simple.

I've been playing a wide variety of games recently. I've spent about 70 hours playing Midnight Club LA, for a pretty straightforward 800 points. I went back to Halo 3 and completed the campaign ('finished the fight') on Heroic for a good few hundred too. I've also got a few more points from here and there, including PGR4 and Pure.

At the moment I'm playing through COD:WaW on Veteren. I should be able to get anywhere between 600-800 points just by playing through to the end.

It's been quite an inconsistent experience so far.

It's not what I expected. Some parts have been fun, but other parts have been really, really awful. Having said that, I'd probably put the awful parts more down to the fact that I'm playing it on Veteran, and the AI is just ludicrous at times. If I was playing it on Hardened or a lower difficulty it might be different. I've played the multiplayer a few times and as interesting as I'm sure some of the WWII weapons are, I just don't have the urge to stick with it without my favourite, the P90.

Maybe that's good news for my gamerscore anyway.

One final comment that I wanted to make was on one of the unlockables on Midnight Club.

I like cars, and one of my favourite cars is the Audi R8. For some reaon, Rockstar decided to licence this car and make it practically impossible to get.

I've won pretty much every single race in the entire game, and done almost everything that there is to do and I still haven't done enough to unlock it.

There are 12 different objectives that you have to complete, such as win a certain amount of races and hit a certain number of objects. I've done 10 of the 12. The final 2 are to drive 5000 miles (i've done about 4500) and use something like 2000 'specials'.

The 5000 miles is no problem. I could probably very easily do the 500 more that I need, but the 'specials' is just a stupid idea.

I mean really stupid.

Considering that I had played the game for about 60 hours before discovering that I was only about 60% through completing this particular objective, it doesn't seem likely that I'd be able to do it without having to play the game for 100 hours, unless I spend hours and hours just boosting.

Playing it for 100 hours isn't really the problem here. The problem is that I've already done pretty much everything in the entire single player game, and I still don't have the R8, so what am I going to do when I get it??

The online is ok, but it's not something that I really want to keep playing for a long time, so all I'd probably end up doing with my new R8 is cruising for a while, and that's pretty much it.

Is it really worth playing the game for 100 hours just for that?

No.

So I won't be trying to get it for the time being. Which basically means that I'm not getting to play with one of the main reasons that I bought the game in the first place.

Perhaps it would have been a better idea to make the objectives be the kind of thing that the typical player would get through after playing it for around 40 hours, rather than 100.

If most people would spend around 50 hours playing MCLA, then that would give them a good 10 hours to play with what's probably the best car in the game if they chose to.

That seems like a better idea to me.

I finally managed to reach level 55 of the 10th prestige of COD4.

I did it this morning after around just over 17 days playing time.

I only needed 1991 points this morning after having played a bit last night, which I was fairly confident that I could get in half an hour or so. After about 40-45 minutes, I only needed 180 or so points to do it.

My usual weapon of choice is the P90, but I went for the M16 on what looked like being my final game before finally reaching the top rank.

It was Free For All on Overgrown and I won easily enough, finishing the round with a headshot with good few minutes to spare. I think that the person who finished 2nd had about 80 points.

FINALLY! NO MORE RANKING UP REQUIRED! It's taken me the roughly 9 months since COD4 got realeasd to do it.

I know that some people probably managed it in the first few weeks after release, but it doesn't bother me. I've done it now, and to be honest, I don't plan on playing COD4 for a good long while...

I worked out that over the 9 months that it's been out, and the 400+ hours that I've been playing, I've averaged just over 1.5 hours a day. I'm not sure what that means for my stats, but I'm sure that there are many people who put in many more hours a day, but would probably end up on the losing side if they played me or my clan.

So anyway, it's back to gathering the gamerpoints for me again.

I played one round after reaching 10/55 and then put Fight Night round 3 straight into my 360. Just a few hundred points left to go on that which should be easy enough.

So it's no more late nights of using the G3 or the Skorpion just to get the points.

No more trading insults with clan after clan after clan.

No more getting frustrated with the horrible lag when the other team had the host.

At least until Gears 2 comes out anyway...

Wow!

I've missed my gamerscore target by miles!

I'm stuck playing COD4 at the moment.

I don't think that I've ever played a game for this long before. When I checked this morning, I think I remember my stats saying that I'd been playing the onlione for more than 14 days. There is someone on my freinds list who's been playing it for more than 26 days, so even though 14 isn't all that much compared to some paople, it's a whole lot for me on one game.

That's more than 330 hours on the same game.

I'm the kind of person that usually gets bored after 3 or 4 unless I'm playing a real killer app, in which case I get bored after 40 or 50, maybe.

I thinks it's the variation of playing different people all the time that keeps me coming back.

There's also the feeling that I get when I'm not playing and I know that my clan probably is. It's enough to make me want to play even though I probably wouldn't if I was going to play on my own.

The final thing that I think keeps me playing, and probably the biggest reason of the lot is the fact that I just want to get to the top rank before I stop.

I'm currently on the 9th of 10 rankings, or prestige's, and I just want to finish the 10th one before I finally put this game on the 'done it' pile.

I really want to do it soon, because I want to start playing Unreal III soon.

I plan to buy it today.

I'm playing Call of Duty 4 multi-player at the moment.

That's why I haven't gotten many gamer points for a while.

But I think I will be back on the case soon enough, because I'm already much higher up the rankings than I originally intended to be before changing games.

I want to change games soon. I think I've bought at least 4 games since I started playing Call of Duty, and haven't really managed to get going on any of them yet.

Two of the games that I've bought since then are Timeshift and Medal of Honor. Two first person shooters.

I've become very good at COD4, so I think I'm getting to the point where I can handle almost anything that any first person shooter can throw at me. Maybe I'm just kidding myself and have forgotten how frustratingly hard completing COD4 on Veteran was, but my plan is to go straight into my two new FPS's on the hardest difficulty settings to try and get a whole bunch of points without having to play through them more than once.

I played through the COD4 single-player twice.

Once on hardened and once on veteran.

I have to admit that veteran probably took me less time, but it's possible that the reason for this was that I was able to learn the best way to beat the most difficult parts whilst playing on hardened.

Anyway, I also have two driving games ( yes, I'm back on the driving games... Forza 2 didn't manage to totally finish me off! ) to get going with soon too.

At the moment I think I'm sitting on about 3-4000 pretty easy gamerpoints out of the games that I have, but haven't really tried to seriously play yet.

As well as that, there are a good few games that I fancy playing which are due for release over the next couple of months, so I'm going to try and pencil in a milestone of 20,000 points by the end of April.

Realistically, I should be able to beat that fairly easily, and may even go well beyond it, but setting a milestone should at least encourage me to get off COD4 at some point in the near future.

The way things are going, I could see myself not feeling the need to play a different game for the rest of the year.