CRAZE KILER's Blog - Apr to Jun 12 (16 followers)

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I have my son coming to visit for starting on Wendsday which is awesome on every front but gaming. He does play games but he makes achievement hunting very hard but instead of trying to force him to help me achievement hunt this year I am looking to see which games I can do co-op playthroughs. I just have to hope I can get him to cooperate, anyone with a pre-teen will know cooperation is not somthing they do. Well here are the games I am planning on trying to work on

Kane and Lynch
Kane and Lynch Dog Days
Marvel Superhero Squad
toy story 3
Alien Defense Force: Insect Armaggedon
Fantastic Pets
Dance Central
Dance Central 2
Kinect Sports 2
Kinect joy Ride
Guitar Hero 3
Guitar Hero Aerosmith
Gears of War
Gears of War 3
Battlefield 3
Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3
Halo Anniversary

Of course there are going to be different games be played, he will probably start several of my games while I am at work but I do not expect him to earn any achievements on his own because he doesnt understand the awesomeness achievement hunting is.

As some of you may know by my posts that I have been going through some frustrating times, the majority of it is because of work. Before I get into my current situation Im going to give a little backstory on myself so my struggles can be fully understood.

When I was growing up I was not directly abused but I watched my mom go through way to much mental abuse, all of which changed me in some cases for the better and in some the worst. First my dad was a womanizer, when I was around six he was cheating on my mom which lead to a divorce. For reasons unknown to me they remarried but he was was keeping the relationship with the other lady, within a year he married his mistress and than divorced my mom. My dad did show some intrest in us, we would go for a weekend a month and for a month during the summer until he moved to Washington State, than I would fly out there once a year for a week or two. He would never call but we always knew when we were going there.

My mom was single for a while but eventually she started dating a guy who was suppose to be an electrician. He did have jobs here and there early on but once my mom married him he never worked again. He lived his life in an alchohalic haze, he was so lazy he would yell for us kids to go get him his beer. We were poor to the point we did not have a working vehicle, I personally would get new clothes every few years, which was partially my fault becuase I let my sister get them because it was important to her. My mom worked the 6 PM-midnight shift at a grocery store about 5 miles from out house. Around age 12 I took it upon myself to go get my mom from work everynight, she road her bike and I would rollerblade. My mom would like to have a beer to go to sleep with but 9 times out of 10 they were all gone before she came home which usually led to a fight, I did not got to bed til 2 most mornings becuase I knew what was coming, thats why I am up at all hours of the night now, I was only get 3-4 hours of sleep throughout my teenage years.

During this time period is when I gained my dependance on gaming, I hated leaving my room so I stayed in there playing mainly Aerobiz, Sonic 2 or Robocop vs. Terminator on my Genesis. When I was 16 I got in a fight with him and moved out the next day because I didnt think it was fair to my mom to make her choose between us. From there he was starting to get physical with my mom and younger sisters so my mom left with her new boyfriend, who happened to be a never working drug addict. When she left both my sisters were stuck there, my full blooded sister eventully moved in with my grandma and my half sister was stuck. They fought over her for years but she eventually moved around from relative to releative until she was fortunate enough to live with my grandmas neighbors, they took great care of her.

Because of the things I witnessed growing up I decided I was going to be nothing like my parents. The good parts of this decision is that I am 100% loyal to my wife and kids. I do not drink but maybe once a year and I have never done drugs but I do have a strong addicition to soda. I have only been out of work for an extended period of time once in the 15 years I have been in the workforce.

I do have a negative outlook on life, I have grown to trust nobody. I have no real freinds I havent spoken to my closest friend in at least 2 years. The only people I trust is my wife, inlaws, both grandmas and my sisters. I also take my job wat to seriously, I guess I try to hard because I have wired myself to be nothing like my parents.

The sad thing about this story is that what my ex-wife put me through makes my childhood a walk in the park. I guess I can talk about that another time.

No onto what bothering me know, for those of you that do not know I am a department manager at Lowe's. I am actually in charge of three departments, I am responsible for 22 of the stores 72 aisles and my departments literally span thesouth west corner to the north east corners of the store. I am also responsible for 11,500 of the 36,000 SKUs within the store.

I dont mean to make myself sound like I am awesome but I do an awesome job. I have the third fewest hours in the store but I am still having the best sales. My store currently has four departments making their sales budget and I own two of them, my Hardware department is down 1.3% on the year. I also have the highest profit margin and since our fiscal year started I have the highest sales at roughly $1.6 million while the runner up is appliances at just over $1 million.

The only issue I have is I am considered to be the highest shrinking department but that title is a little unfair to me. Tools and the Outdoor Power Equipment (lawmowers, weed eaters, ETC) have the same buyer so we are combined i terms of shrink even though we have different managers. According to our inventory report OPE accumulated more shrink than tools did.

The reason why this is relevant is because since Tools is higher profile I get all of the blame. My store managers response is that me and my employees are not allowed to leave tools unless it is for a customer. I feel like I am in prison when I am there because I need to upkeep my other department but they wont let me. I come up with many ideas on how to reduce shrink and generate more sales but my boss wont even listen. The problem is when I bring this ideas to him I am fully prepared, I have my little speech giving him my projected numbers based of past performance. It would be one thing if he had a logical explaination as to why he wont let me do what I want but instead it falls on deaf ears, what it has done is killed my spirit because I feel he is keeping me from doing my job.

At work they are so far behind in sales they are currently cutting 400 hours storewide while many departments are already understaffed. I have been fighting for one of my part timers to get more hours becuase she is going through a rough breakup with her baby daddy and it pisses me off to see hard working people getting their hours cut. I told my boss it isnt fair to my people to get their hours cut becuase we are doing our part. We are making our sales, if her thanks is fewer hours than how is she going to be able to be motivated for the remainder of her tenure at Lowes. I was able to get her in his "black book" of top people to call in though.

Now onto my personal stuff, the problems mine but my sister-n-laws. She is 19 and rushed into a relationship and got knocked up by a 24 years old that was still married to his 2 year olds mom. Long story she is now 6-7 months pregnant he has been talking to his wife a lot and is banging a co-worker. If that wasnt bad enough he has been open about not wanting to be around the new baby becuase he is attached to his two year old. This is so similar to what my mom went through, to make it worse my wifes family do not know how to handle stress. My sister-n-law has been having contractions and is now on medicine to help in subside, I am really worried for her and my nephew because they are the victims here. All I could do is tell her I am here for her if she ever needs anything.

Thats the main points of my frustration, I am sorry to go on and on about my issues but I needed to get it out. As one of my boosting partners knows I have not been sleeping for the past week, I havent wanted to play with my awesome family. Even on fathers day we went out for dinner and I spent most of it going on about work and my concern for my sister n law. If anyone is interested in the remainder of my story let me know and I can clue you in and comments are always welcome.

This week I dont feel like boring people with stats becuase I am literally less than a week away from reaching y goal instead. I have been thinking about what I should do when I reach my goal and I have decided that instead of pushing hard for 250 by years end I am going to try and complete some games that have been sitting on my shelf for way to long. The reason for this is becuase my shelving unit that I keep my games on is full, I allow myself to have three shelves on XBOX games and the bottom shelves are reserved for CDs.

I have not decided what method I am going to deploy but I think I know where I want to start. I have several games that are close to being complete, they just need a few hours dedicated to them. For me to accomplish this I am going to be my own worst enemy becuase I struggle with spending 5 or 6 hours working toward just one achievement. I also tend to get to either get bored or frustrated with a game which causes me to move on way before I should.

I do have a short list of games I am going to try and finish up

Dead Space - Need to start and finish a third playthrough

Prey - One playthrough and five levels to go

MLB Front Office Manager - Had final two achievments glitched, will try one more time.

Call of Duty 2 - Half way through vetran but I suck

Meet the Robinsons - Need to play 80% of game for final achievement

Magic the Gathering - Need one online achievement and 11% til completion

Lego Star Wars III - Mainly Collectables

Lego Harry Potter 2 - Collectables

Driver - Random achievements and one online

Bolt - Random achievements

Darkness 2 - Hard playthrough

Kungfu Panda - Beat game without dying on Dragon Warrior difficulty

Jumper - Hate it on every level

Wish me luck on accomplishing this feat becuase I do not know if I have it in me to be disciplined enough to pull it off.

Another week has come and gone and from a gaming perspective it has been a rather unproductive week, well it really depends upon your point of view. I spent most of the week working on Magic the Gathering, I am a rookie at best but I was able to get a basic understanding of the game. I am 11% and a three player game away from completion. Since I am writing this on my lunch break I am going to cut to the chase and get to the important part, the weekly rundown.

Gamerscore - 196100 (1735)

After having a moster week last week I cooled down and missed my average by 300 points. I am still two weeks or less away from reaching my goal. I am going to continue pushing for 250 by the end of the year. I am off the next two days, depending upon how much I can unlock tommorrow I may push to get it done by the end of the week. I have the games to do it, the question is do have it in me to do it.

Completion percentage - 8,797 of possible 15,775 (55.77%)

My completion percentage only increased by .16%, which is not much considering I only played seven different games this week. I did start three of them so they may be to blame for my poor increase but excuses are a waste of time. Lets just hope I can keep increasing it throughout the rest of the year.

Completed games - 135 (1)

I know I said I would complete two games this week but I couldnt bring myself to do much the past few days. I have CSI Deadly intent waiting for completion, should be done tommorrow. Other than Deadly Intent I shouldnt complete anything else, unless I decide to spend more time with Magic and Feeding Frenzy 2. Who knows maybe Ill pull a surprise Kinect game and attempt to finish it.

This week I realized what some of the real achievement hunters feel like. I had probably m highest scoring week ever to bad I was playing some of the easiest games available to the XBOX. Without to much rambling on I am just going to update my stats becuase I have another easy new release sitting there waiting for me to unlock another 1000 points.

Gamerscore - 194365 (+3825)

Your reading that right I was able to score just under 4000 points this week, it would had been more if I didnt have a birthday party to go to. All of the game I played were very easy. The only game that gave me any issues was Magic the Gathering, I am not well versed in the game so the AI beats me half the time.It is starting to look like I will reach my goal of 2000 by the end of June, Im going to shoot for three weeks from now.

Completon percentage - 8,726 Achievements of15,692 (55.61%)

This week I actually raised my completion percentage .25%, this is good news for me becuase Magic the Gathering was the only game I played that I didnt start this week. Its getting to be the about the time for me to start playing some of the games I have bean dived and start increasing my completion percentage.

Games completed - 134 (+3)

All three of my completion were games I started and finished this week, I was able to get the full 1000 in less than seven hour each in the games. I started off with Battleship, very easy game and not to bad of a game. Monday I got Surfs Up from Gamefly, another decent game but some of the collectables were a little frustrating. The final game I completed was Hanna Montana, not my cup of tea but I got through it in no time. I am looking to start and complete at least two more games this week, it depends upon what I end up with from Gamefly on Thursday.