SpeleoFool793,950 (450,420)

No More Bean Dives

• The Long Road to Recovery (From Bean Dive 2016)

It's been almost a month since my last blog, and forward progress has been glacial. At least in terms of achievements unlocked from my backlog. I snagged the 6 easy achievements to wrap up 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand (JP). And I did manage to close the book on another of my oldest incompletions:

But otherwise it's been a dry spell for cleaning up old achievements. I made some progress on Platinum Medals in Project Gotham Racing 3, and Hardcore levels in Splosion Man, but I still have a good amount of work left before I pop any achievements in either game. And even if I completed both, I'd only net 4 achievements out of the 12 I needed to recover my dive.

I decided to break up the monotony of tedious grinding by dipping into a few quick games. That helped me to keep my energy levels up for grind sessions, but due to inconveniences of math, new completions do next to nothing to improve my Completion %. A couple hundred achievements @ 100% only pulled my average up about 0.01% and cut the number of achievements I need by one. So, now I'm 11 away from full recovery, lol.

Although playing new stuff was refreshing, it's disconcerting that even one problem achievement would undo a couple hundred achievements worth of progress. Every new game only adds however-many hours to get right back to where I already am. I hope that as I continue to push my completion to ever greater heights this anxiety about starting games doesn't get worse, but I think it's going to be OK once I finish this push.

I really just want to reach my targets of 99.5% completion and 10 incomplete games and then get on with enjoying new (to me) games. I'm not going to get there with new completions. And I'm not getting anywhere fast by limiting myself to the grinds I have now. Which leaves me with only one obvious course of action:

• Sound the Alert!

I've been actively avoiding Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3 for a while now. It's the last title left untouched from Bean Dive 2016, and it accounts for 49 of my 109 unearned achievements. At least several of those will be fairly easy to unlock.

What originally started as a series of conflicts preventing me from playing Red Alert eventually morphed into a personal challenge to postpone it for as long as possible. I don't just want to top out at 99.5%, I'd like to maintain there--or at least stay somewhat in the vicinity when I get back to starting games. I wanted to see if I could completely recover my dive before starting Red Alert. Now I know: I could, but I don't want to.

I looked at my unearned achievements to see if I could cherry-pick a dozen from the three titles that still have more than a couple left (Vampire Rain, Kinect Adventures and Battlefield 2: Modern Combat). Short answer: no, not without getting fairly invested (or really sore, lol). And if I'm going to get invested in another backlog game, it ought to be the one with MP achievements....

So, that's it then. Sometime in the next few days I'll finally end this 14-month long journey to resurface from a 50-title dive back to record heights. And then I can change my focus to maintaining. No more Bean Dives for me.