I have been playing a crazy amount of Forza Motorsport 2 lately. This game is fun but now has gotten to the point where I'm just grinding to level up my driver so I can earn more achievements. For the most part now I'm winning races on my first attempt and have started turning off some of the adjustments to increase the difficulty. I'm not sure why I didn't try this before but I am now driving my car with manual shifting. The game defaulted to automatic shifting when I set my difficulty in the beginning. By turning on shifting I've learned to use shifting gears to help stabilize the car while taking turns. I will now down shift as I enter a turn to increase the traction in sharp turns by revving up the RPMs. I also don't think the game did a good job adjusting the gears for you on automatic so often it took a while for the car to change gears. Once I made this change I was winning races with little difficulty.

My goal now is to get to level 50 and unlock as many cars as I can. So far I've unlocked all the cars from France, Spain and South Korea. I'm currently working on getting all the cars from Japan and the US since those are the two countries with the most cars. There are achievements for owning cars from different countries and achievements for owning all the racing models and production models. I'm hoping to get this all done by the time Overload comes out but most likely I will not have the time. As you level up it takes more and more points to increase levels. For me to move to the next level (41) I need to earn 290,000 credits in races. Most of the races I'm playing only pay out 20,00 credits per race so getting to level 50 will take a lot of races. To help this there are some races that pay out large amount of points but they can take an hour to race. One race last night paid out 250,000 credits but took me 55 minutes to race 35 laps. So, think I can get this done in two weeks? I may have to put this game on a shelf and come back to it eventually to get those last few achievements.

Forza is not the only game I've been playing. I download a trial version for Pac-Man CE and was really impressed. It a new variation of Pac-Man that makes the game all about eating as many ghosts and pellets in a given amount of time. The board does not default with all the pellets on the screen but only a section of the map has pellets. As you eat more pellets you are awarded fruit and once you eat the fruit more pellets are displayed. It's a fun twist on the original game and is a nice addition to the Xbox Live Arcade.

I download the demo of Overloard last week and was very impressed. You are an evil lord and you need to rebuild the evil tower and seek revenge on the heros that defeated the previous overlord. The game plays out as you control a group of minions and have them do your dirt work. You get your hands dirty too using magic or traditional swords and axes. I liked the controls and the demo was fun. It's on Xbox Live marketplace so I suggest pulling it down.

I also downloaded the Shadowrun demo. This game is a FPS with magic. It's a multiplayer only game in the mold of Counter Strike. I tried a little of the demo and it has some cool features like enhanced sight through walls, the ability to teleport several feet in any direction and there are gliders. I might give it a chance later on but it looks like a fun online game.

On Saturday I had a friend over and we played several games. We started out playing Forza (which I enjoyed and dominated), Table Tennis, Madden, DOA 4, Lumines Live and finally Halo 2. One of the things this emphasized for me was how much I don't like playing Madden. I bought this game because I like football and used to really enjoy playing Super Tecmo Bowl on the Super NES. Now I just find these games to be very boring and not a lot of fun because they are just too complex. I might grind though Forza for the achievements but I'll still have fun. Playing sports games for achievements is a true grind and I left a lot of Tiger '07 achievements on the table because video game golf is worse than watching real golf. I will never pick up an NHL, Madden or Tiger (Golf) game just for fun and often buy one per generation just to have one if someone else want to play. I tend to enjoy the racing, fighting, action and shooter games. So it's no surprise I got whooped at Madden and Table Tennis. I barely held my own at DOA but did well at Lumines and Halo. I guess I'm really good at laying blocks and shooting guys in the face. Oh ya, I got a running riot on Jay.