Archive for the 'Cheevers' Category

05
Dec
09

Cheevers: Assassin’s Creed II Tips

By Russ Crandall 4 Comments
Categories: Cheevers and Games
Tags: ,


I finished Assassin’s Creed II yesterday, racking up 940/1000 achievement points. Here are a few tips I figured out along the way:

Kleptomaniac (pickpocket 1000 florins, 10G):
You know those heralds, the guys you can bribe in order to decrease your notoriety? It costs 500 florins to bribe them, and then you can pickpocket them immediately after. It’s like GTA‘s prostitute trick all over again. Do it twice and you’re good to go.

Sweeper (sweep 5 guards at once by using a long weapon, 10G):
First, you need to go to the practice arena in Monteriggioni and learn how to sweep by purchasing Special Moves->Long Weapon. After that, go to the San Marco building in Venice (the constantly-restricted area) and assassinate a guard that has a spear. Take his spear and run around until you get a bunch of people surrounding you. Then just hold the ‘X’ button and sweet until you get five guys at once. You can actually sweep a few guys and sweep some more while the others are still on the ground and the achievement will pop up. You’re going to get hit a lot before you pull it off, so make sure you have lots of health. Takes about two minutes.

Messer Sandman (stun 4 guards at once by throwing sand in their face, 10G):
Like the achievement above, you’ll need to learn how to throw sand at Monteriggioni through Special Moves->Unarmed Combat (this one’s free). Again, at the San Marco building in Venice, get surrounded by a bunch of people, and just throw sand until you get four people at once. Another trick is to throw a smoke bomb first to stun them, giving you time to gather a bunch of sand.

04
Oct
09

Cheevers: Behold, Feast Ye Eyes On Ye COD:MW2 Achievements/Trophies

By Russ Crandall Leave a Comment
Categories: Cheevers and Games
Tags:


Those pesky bloggers at Joystiq have revealed the trophy/achievement list for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, and it’s a long one. Only 300/1000 are the always-frustrating “complete this level on Veteran difficulty” achievements. Nicely done, Infinity Ward.

Full list after the break. It’s spoilerish if you consider names of levels to be spoilers. I don’t.

Continue reading ‘Cheevers: Behold, Feast Ye Eyes On Ye COD:MW2 Achievements/Trophies’

21
Jul
09

Home To Oblivion

By Russ Crandall Leave a Comment
Categories: Cheevers and Games
Tags: ,


Hey, did you get the song reference in this post’s title? You didn’t? Sheesh, you should get out more. Or I should.

I played through the first hour of the game, which was just enough time to escape a prison and make my way through some sewers. The whole initial setup of the game is very similar to Fallout 3, with that same “emerging from a dark and cramped area to a large and daunting open world” kind of feeling. I did net 50g in achievements just for leaving the sewers, which was a nice surprise. I had heard the achievements in this game were hard to come by.

20
Jul
09

Leaving Vault 101 For The Third Time

By Russ Crandall Leave a Comment
Categories: Cheevers and Games
Tags:


I spent a good chunk of my weekend finishing up the Point Lookout DLC in Fallout 3, as well as closing in on a few of the achievements I never got to earlier (word to the wise, there’s a store near Tenpenny Tower that has most of the items you need for the “make every custom weapon” achievement). But now I’m left with two sets of achievements that I didn’t get the first time around: reaching levels 8 and 14 as Good, Neutral, and Evil characters. My first time through I didn’t figure out until later that you could do a quick trick to get all three at once, so I have to start with a new game altogether to get the Neutral and Evil achievements.. So now I’m leaving Vault 101 for the third time; the first two happened in my first playthrough (because there’s a quest that involves returning to 101, remember?).

Considering I’m at level 2 just by leaving Vault 101, I should be able to run through the first 14 levels in less than 10 hours. 10 hours for four achievements sounds like a pretty bad play vs reward ratio, but I have really been enjoying this game lately and it doesn’t seem like work at all.

04
Jul
09

Cheevers: Gamerscore Weekend

By Russ Crandall 1 Comment
Categories: Cheevers


Spending the weekend at a friend’s house, who is a certifiable achievement whore. I mean, can you be anything else with a gamerscore of over 108k? We’re working on co-op achievements, specifically Kane & Lynch and Gears of War 2, all for my New Year’s resolution of reaching Tyler’s gamerscore. Considering that fact that he’s only about 1500 points ahead of me right now, I just may catch him someday. The question is, will I pop in my friend’s copy of Jumper for a quick boost in score?

17
May
09

Re-Cheeving

By Russ Crandall 5 Comments
Categories: Cheevers, Editorials and Games
Tags:


Every time I see Crackdown on GameStop’s used games wall, I am tempted to grab it and run. I had a great time plowing through that game in about three solid days. I would love to go back and get some of the high-end achievements I missed on my first playthrough (getting all the agility/hidden orbs, for example), but unfortunately my gamesave got corrupted last year. Which brings me to my question.

Right now, you can delete games from your Xbox 360 gamerprofile if you didn’t get any achievements in the game. In other words, no one has to know that you played Surf’s Up for a few minutes with your nephew. But if they gave you the option to delete a game (plus the achievement points you got for it), would you do it? The only thing holding me back from playing Crackdown again is that it’d take me 20 hours just to start seeing the few remaining achievements pop up again. I’d gladly erase all of my previous cheevers for the chance to start the experience over from the beginning.

14
Apr
09

Cheevers: Milking Them For All They’re Worth

By Russ Crandall 1 Comment
Categories: Cheevers, Editorials and Games
Tags: , , ,


In this day and age, video games come with a butt-ton of content. I remember spending $50 on the NES game Shadow of the Ninja, which can be completed in 12 minutes. By comparison, look at Halo 3: it features a single-player campaign (with several hidden items and difficulty levels to keep you busy, not to mention offline and online co-op), a multiplayer experience so robust I can’t begin to list it, the ability to save films of every match you play, a level editor, and downloadable content to keep the fanboys at bay. And you can buy the game used at half.com for about $20 right now. Games today have so much in them that I feel bad trading them in to GameStop after I’ve played through them the first time, knowing that there’s more to them that I just haven’t seen yet.

Xbox 360 games in particular have a great incentive for replaying them: achievement points. Those little “bloop” sounds are enough to make me want to go back and milk my games for all they’re worth. That being said, I’ve gone through my Xbox 360 library and sorted out the games that I would like to re-experience some day, and the achievements/items that I still need to get. Here are the likely contenders:

Mass Effect (only did one playthrough)
The Orange Box (still need to get all the lambda locations)
Assassin’s Creed (I actually want to get the flags/templars)
Crackdown (need all the orbs, but my save game got corrupted)

What about you? Do you have some rainy-day discs that could use a little lovin’?

02
Mar
09

Cheevers: Zangief Exploit in Street Fighter IV

By Russ Crandall 5 Comments
Categories: Cheevers and Games
Tags:


Now don’t get me wrong, I’m all about a fair fight when it comes to Street Fighter. That being said, I’ve found out a way to beat the game easily on the hardest difficulty using no skill at all, and everybody’s favorite Russian bear wrestler, Zangief.

Basically, you do his Spinning Lariat move over and over, which you perform by pressing all three punch or kick buttons (you can map to any single button on your controller):

Here it is in action:

Piece of cake. I played it on the hardest difficulty and beat the game without losing even one round. Took about five minutes. If you haven’t beat the game on Medium difficulty yet, that will net you three separate cheevers for a total of 80g at once. Now I just have to keep myself from using this online, lest I get some whiners who would bring me a verbal beatdown.



26
Feb
09

Cheevers: Unlock Every Street Fighter IV Character

By Russ Crandall 6 Comments
Categories: Cheevers and Games
Tags:


I’ve been wondering how to unlock every SF4 character, and my two cohorts were clueless about it too (as demonstrated in our most recent podcast), so I did some old-fashioned sleuthing. Not being one to let valuable information go to waste, here are the results of my searching:

Beating the game with the characters on the left unlocks the characters on the right:
Ryu = Sakura
Sakura = Dan
C. Viper = Cammy
Chun-Li = Gen
Abel = Fei-Long
M.Bison = Rose

Seth: beat the Arcade mode with every character (but not Gouken or Akuma, I think).

Gouken and Akuma are trickier. Here is a guide, straight from Capcom.

25
Feb
09

Cheevers: Unlimited Energy in Comix Zone

By Russ Crandall 3 Comments
Categories: Cheevers and Games
Tags: ,


Another game from Sonic’s Ulitmate Genesis Collection that was giving me a bit of trouble was Comix Zone, a surprisingly fun side-scrolling beat ‘em up that I missed back in the day. The achievement is to beat the first chapter, which can get a little tricky considering that you have only one life.

Luckily, there’s a code for unlimited energy, courtesy of xbox360achievements.org:
Go the the Jukebox in the options menu. Then push B on these numbers: 3, 12, 17, 2, 2, 10, 2, 7, 7, 11. You should hear a Kool-Aid Man-like “Oh Yeah” confirming the code.

24
Feb
09

Cheevers: Pause Button Exploit in Columns

By Russ Crandall Leave a Comment
Categories: Cheevers and Games
Tags: ,


For nearly every game in the excellent Sonic’s Ultimate Genesis Collection there is a specific achievement, most being unlockable in the first few minutes of play. Others, like “Easy as Pie: Get 20,000 points only on Easy Mode in Columns” are actually quite hard, and require some skillz.

Luckily, I owned the original Columns back in the day and was familiar with a little trick in the game. This was later remedied by just about every puzzle game in existence, but in this one you can pause during play and the pieces remain on the screen. Which means that every time a piece appears, you can pause the game and assess the situation, placing the blocks exactly where you need them to go. It might take a while, but you can get 20k points easy that way.

21
Feb
09

Impressions: Sonic’s Ultimate Genesis Collection

By Russ Crandall 1 Comment
Categories: Cheapskate, Cheevers, Games and Impressions


While giving in to internal/external pressure and buying Street Fighter IV yesterday, I also shelled out $30 for Sonic’s Ultimate Genesis Collection, a collection of 40 full Sega Genesis games (although admittedly, a couple are Sega Master System and Arcade ports). Considering the fact that I am a tried-and-true Genesis kid (out of necessity really, I envied my Super-NES-owning friends), this game seems right up my alley. That price tag is hard to pass by, anyway; 40 games at their original $50 retail price would cost $2000, while now we’re getting each game for $1.34! Plus there are some hefty games in here – including all four Phantasy Star games – you could spend weeks on this collection (as long as you can still dig the 16-bit graphics, which I can).

The single most rewarding aspect of popping in each of these 40 games is how quick and easy the cheevers are. They’re so fast that there’s really no reason not to play each game. Most achievements are based within the first 5-10 minutes of play for each game. Start up Ecco the Dolphin and simply talk to a dolphin – bam – 10 cheever gold. And while I’m here, I might as well play the game for a few minutes, right? You can also rate each game, which allows you to sort the list by your favorites (and help you avoid the soooo dated Columns).


Favorite game that’s new to me so far? Comix Zone, which is a side-scrolling beat ‘em up with some comic book flair added to it.

My only complaint so far is that there is a significant load/pause while switching from each game to the overall menu. I may install the game on my HDD to see if that speeds things up.

19
Feb
09

Cheevers: Kane & Lynch, This Way And That

By Mark Hill 1 Comment
Categories: Cheevers, Editorials, Games and Reviews
Tags: ,


I just solved the Kane & Lynch gametape, and figured out that you can get the cheevers for seeing both endings without having to play through the whole game using some well-timed pausing. I’ll tell you how to do it while keeping it as spoiler free as possible because if you haven’t seen the ending, you won’t read this and it won’t matter, and if you have, you aren’t going to care either.

So let me just say this: you have two choices at the end: go back or leave right away. To get both cheevers, you have to choose to escape right away. As soon as you choose this, you will be awarded the “Damned If You Do” achievement. Then, right before it finishes and fades out, pause it and restart the last scene. You’re going to have to kill the last few guys again, but no biggie, then just choose the other path. When you do this though, the game continues for another 30 minutes or so, and you don’t get the “Damned If You Don’t” achievement until the very end.

There you go, now you’re 50 gold richer. I know it’s not rocket science or anything, but just let me have my fun, okay? Check out Russ’ earlier K&L achievement chronicles for some more juice.

P.S. The game is good. B-.

07
Feb
09

Heads Up!

By Mark Hill Leave a Comment
Categories: Cheevers, Editorials and Games


If there’s one thing I love that game makers do, it’s when they reference their games in other ones that they’ve made. I came across a perfect example today while playing Kane & Lynch when I unlocked a cheever titled, “Headmaster,” (which was also my nickname in high school, coincidentally), which is unlocked when you get 47 headshots. I wondered why it was such a random number until I realized that K&L was made by Eidos, the same company that makes one of my all-time favorite series, Hitman. And we all know who runs that show: Agent 47.

Very cool.

08
Jan
09

Threecast Episode 10!

By Threevue.com Staff Leave a Comment
Categories: Cheevers, Editorials, Games, Internet, Reviews and Threecasts

threecast-banner-10

Episode 10! Let’s see, one podcast a week for 10 weeks. That means we’ve been casting for… 27 years right? Man I feel spry. This week we finally get to sink our teeth into some of last year’s games like Rainbow Six Vegas 2 and Kane and Lynch as well as a smattering of the ongoing titles like Fallout 3 and Rock Band 2.

Episode 10

  • Mark discovers difficulty settings. Also: controllers, buttons
  • Russ reminds us why we should never, ever agree to rob a bank with him.
  • Tyler staves off the discovery that he is, in fact, illiterate with a perfectly timed observation of the movie, Eragon.

Subscribe via iTunes
Download the .m4a file directly. (with pretty pictures)
Download the .mp3 file directly. (just the audio)
Listen streaming:

Intro – Bitshifter, Outro – The Gaslight Anthem

« Previous Entries


Send us tips or requests
Subscribe to our RSS feed
Follow us on Twitter

Archives

meet the staff:


Mark Hill:
Russ Crandall:
Tyler Miller:
Steve McKay:
Giang Cao:

People like us. We have

  • 469,173 visits

this many people are totally into threevue.com right now:




web tracker