Three in a day: fight, shmup, tile rpg

(tags game, Xbox 360, Xbox Live, Dual Screen, Soul Calibur, Geometry Wars, Shiren)

I started off the day realizing that I can't be moving forward in Mysterious Dungeon: Shiren The Wanderer without scraping the earlier levels for experience. Or at least that's the rationalization after losing my +8 sword of brilliance from a merely innocuous foray into the next area. To think that I hate games that lose more than 15 minutes of my progress, and here I am trying to play this game more. The DS needed battery charging so I let it sit out a day.

Geometry Wars 2 on the brain. Pacifism mode is the total bomb, worth the 800 XBLP alone. I have stick control, if only before my hand tremors set in. Yesterday, I scored my personal best, 140+ million. I really love "sticking a fork in it", which I describe the technique of "popping the dumbbell" when embedded in the blue diamond blob. This is totally risky play, of course. Geoms are the "crack" I can't stop picking up, and slipping through the gaps of incoming blue blobs is pure delight. The other modes are shoot shoot shoot which is nice, but my dissatisfaction with the tighter spray in comparison to GW1 irritates me. Then again in GW1, I always liked the tighter mode instead of the spray because the former was faster. Today, I have trouble breaking 70+ million so I let it slide after probably an hour of effort. Erratic performance.

And Soul Calibur 4. An online friend got all of the Achievement Points before me, which makes me irritated. Online is something I give up, but I can't figure out how he got through the Survival mode (I can only get to 5) and Mission mode (I can only get to 20). Or how he got all the goods. There must be some gold laundering scheme in the online, that's got to be it. In any case, I am continuing to unlock the swords and costumes in single player. At the same time I'm trying to set the Style level for each character to max. This is work, not fun. And I do it for the Achievement Points.