After getting my 100th ARAM win in League Of Legends a while back after a decent run of form, I set myself a new goal of hitting 200 wins before 150 losses. I figured it was well within the realms of possibility, especially if we could keep playing like we were, with 29 wins out of the previous 38 games.

How wrong I was.

Humbling is not a strong enough word to describe the journey we've been on during the last 190 games. Whereas I thought we would see our number of wins steadily increase at a faster pace compared to our losses, we've been frustrated time and time again. Other than a good run during the first half of December, where we went 22 wins to 6 losses, the entire rest of the run saw our total losses slowly catching up to the number of wins.

And today I hit the 200 win mark, with 181 losses on the board. Nowhere near as comfortable as I hoped it would be. Yes, we've stretched our margin by a further 10 wins, but it could have been a great deal more if not for silly players disconnecting or playing like idiots. Yet again, barring maybe two or three times in the entire run, the idiots and AFKers always seemed to be on our team.
If there's a player in the game who constantly snowballs into the entire enemy team with no backup, nine times out of ten that player is on our team. If there's a player that just stands there while Nidalee spear after Nidalee spear hits them in the face, nine times out of ten that player is on our team. Well you get the picture.
It's just very frustrating. As I'm not a great player, I just try not to do anything stupid, and play the team game. So to have reached the goal I had set myself, I'd have needed more reliable players than that.
Oh well.

Here's some sad pointless stats about the last 190 games:

• My largest win streak was 7, and my largest losing streak was 6.
• My most played champs were Soraka (15), Annie (10), Warwick (10) & Shyvana (9).
• I performed best on Garen (6/0), Annie (7/3), Warwick (7/3), Sona (5/1), Miss Fortune (4/1), & Sejuani (3/0).
• I performed worst on Soraka (5/10), Karma (1/5) & Amumu (1/4).

I know the stats don't tell the whole story, as team comps and how the players behave has a great deal to do with it, but the above info shows some surprising twists compared to last time. The game continues to love giving me Soraka to take to the Abyss, but whereas before she was my angel of ARAM, recently she's been a bit of a curse. I picked up her dryad skin, and I'm guessing she doesn't like wearing green, as since that day I've been really struggling to find wins with her. A 1/4 win ratio on Amumu is also very bad, especially considering how well Scoob can use him.
Though it was not all bad. Unlocking Sona, Sejuani and Galio have all brought me some good wins, and I've turned it around with Miss Fortune for the most part, though I think her recent update definitely helped. I even got some wins with Nidalee at long last, going 2 for 2 in her 4 games.

One thing I've learned over these last few months is that it's a bit stupid setting targets that rely on total strangers, so I'm not going to do it again.

Over the last couple of weeks I've been bashing my head against a wall, and laughing my ass off, as I've been going through Resident Evil Code: Veronica X for the PS2. This was the last of the old style Resident Evil games I could possibly play, as I don't do Nintendo, so have no access to Resident Evil Zero. It seemed wrong not to at least experience it at least once.

Wow, I gotta say this thing was a drag. All the old Evil games had plenty of going back and forth collecting weird items to solve weird puzzles, but they were mostly all in one big building. In this game, there were several fairly large areas, and not only was I running around within those areas, but running back and forth to other areas. Over, and over, and over again.
Add in all the re-spawning enemies, and I had myself the longest, most frustrating Resident Evil experience I've ever had.

Still there were some fun moments mixed in with the frustrating ones, mostly provided by the awful writing and voice acting. I couldn't help but smile and shake my head at most of it. And I was so glad with what happened to Steve. Damn it that guy was annoying. I definitely think they should have put a bit more focus on Alexia as the big bad, but her character got very little exposure compared to her brother Alfred, who you have to deal with throughout most of the game.

By far the worst aspect of the game, even over the running around and bad characters, was the graphics. It seems it's a PS2 problem, but it was so dark and misty in places that it was hard to see things. And in many places there was a weird motion blur that made it difficult to even move around at times.

Like for the first two games in the series, I decided I would make some decent maps for this game after skipping Resident Evil 3. After all, the maps seemed quite popular early this year so I must have done something right.

In the last couple of weeks I've finally been motivated to work through Assault On Dark Athena after finishing Butcher Bay a while back. It was mostly much of the same, but I found some of the later sections very frustrating and difficult. I breathed a sigh of relief when it was finally over.

My main issue was with how the fighting style changed as the game progressed. In the early sections, it was all about sneaking up on people and taking them out, or stunning them with the tranquilizer and moving in for the quiet kill. Later on in the game, sneaking became pretty much impossible, as the enemies always seemed to know where I was. With the added loss of the tranq-gun about half way through, the game pretty much became an FPS, where the enemies had more accurate and stronger weapons than I did. It sucked.

Some of the bosses were also a pain in the ass. Pretty much all the later bosses demanded I use a weird mine-shooting gun called the SCAR gun. That thing loaded so slowly that just one miss could totally screw me, and regularly did. The last boss in particular was the worst, as you need to use the mines to knock her down an elevator shaft. Sometimes the mines would knock her over, sometimes they would knock her back, and most of the time they would do nothing at all. It took me ages to knock her back enough times to get her over the edge. What a ball-ache.

There were a few bugs here and there, but I don't think as many as the first game. The one that really pissed me off was when all the Nanomed cartridges I had saved up just went missing from my inventory for no reason, meaning I couldn't heal up. Fucking game.

But it's done, and that's a good thing. I was hoping it would set up Pitch Black, but it gave absolutely no clue as to how Johns captures Riddick leading into that film. Oh well.

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Before tackling Riddick's second adventure, I had originally intended to complete a game from a Humble Bundle I bought ages ago, as it was about time I had a go at some of those games. I chose Psychonauts, as though it's an old game, it seems to be held in high regard, and looked worthy of a play through.

I was wrong.

It's been a while since I've played a game that got me this frustrated and wondering why I was wasting my time playing it, but this one managed it very quickly.

Without a doubt, the most annoying thing was the very limited camera controls. I even switched from controller to mouse and keyboard trying to find the best way to play it, but that only made it fractionally better. Most of the time, there was hardly any vertical movement available on the camera, so I couldn't look up or down more than a few degrees. For a 3D platformer, this was stupid. Then at other times, the camera was completely locked, especially during boss fights for some reason. Give me control damn it!
Didn't help that there was no compensation on the camera when it came to the environment, so things like rocks and trees would constantly block my view as well.

I found the controls a bit awkward also, but I think this was mostly linked to my camera issues. It only got worse when using the psychic power "levitate", as my character pretty much had a mind of his own at that point.

The last straw came when I reached a level that flat out told me I could go no further without levelling up first. There was no way I was going to go back through the old stages to grind and level up, so I decided to immediately uninstall the game. What a piece of shit.

I'm still not sure what the story was about, and I guess I never will. It was something about this kid wanting to become a "Psychonaut", kind of like a psychic crime fighter or something. There was some bad shit going down at the training camp he is attending, and he had to figure out what. That's about it.

I really did try and finish it, but holy shit the game was so frustrating I just couldn't drag myself through it.

I'm being naughty here and uploading this blog entry without completing a game, but it still needed to be done as I have just managed to hit a target I've been aiming at for the last few months. Also, it's been a long while since I've done any League coverage, even though it is still my most played game, and has been for the last couple of years.

So, me and Scoob really got into playing ARAMs late last year, but I had to drop out for around 6 months because I couldn't trust my internet. At the time we stopped playing, I had quite a lot more losses than wins, not helped by a massive 11 game losing streak back in December, or by all the people on our team who acted like idiots or ditched the game entirely.
When we got back into ARAMs in August, I made myself a strict target to hit 100 wins before 100 losses. Lots of study concerning runes, masteries, builds and tactics followed, finally allowing me to play a bit better and managing to finish games with more kills than deaths.

We really started to pick up some momentum, and today it happened that I hit those 100 wins with 91 losses on the board. We only lost 9 of our last 38 games, which is good considering the losses we were picking up some months ago.

I was very worried loading into the last game, as typically I ended up with a champ I'd never used before, being Azir. I had no idea what I was doing, but we managed to pull out a very close win. Near the end, I even had a chance to take their Nexus myself, but couldn't quite manage it before they caught up to me and took me down. But still, we won in the end and the goal had been reached.

I looked up some pointless stats from the match history website, but it only tracks the last 186 games, so my first 5 ARAMs must have been played before the new match history was created. Oh well. But from the last 186 games:

• My largest win streak was 8, and my largest losing streak was 11.
• My most played champs were Morgana (11), Elise (10) and Soraka (10).
• I performed best on Soraka (9/1), Elise (8/2) and Nami (3/0).
• I performed worst on Evelynn (1/5), Miss Fortune (0/4) and Nidalee (0/3).

I'm especially salty about the single loss with Soraka. It would have been really nice to be unbeaten in her 10 games, which looking back would also have given me a 12 match win streak. But it was not to be, mainly due to two of our team mates spoiling it, with a Singed player refusing to play, and a suicidal Wukong player. There was only so much healing I could do man...