Night at the Museum is quite possibly the most straight-forward and short game you can play, apart from Avatar, to increase your gamerscore by a quick 1,000 points. The game only has 37 achievements, and most of them are pretty well laid out in-front of you. A few of them require some collectibles, but even those are not easy to miss. A couple of them do require knowing the specifics of the achievement, and which level they will appear in, but then you can simply replay any level that you need to after you finish the game. That task shouldn’t take you more than three hours, and that’s being generous for you to take it easy collecting the items you need.

Mini Ninjas is quite an entertaining game. The graphics are great, and the overall art-style is quite cute and kid-like. The fact that the enemies turn into small woodland creatures after you defeat them adds to the child-like charm. This game is also a very easy 1000/1000 title, taking me only one play-through and a few level replays to mop up the few remaining achievements I didn’t pop during the main story attempt.

As I progress on my quest to complete Cabela’s Big Game Hunter 2008 to full completion, I got past one of the trickier rival hunt achievements last night. The Cougar cannot hit you during the “battle”, and he is quite sneaky sometimes coming out from the bush giving you little time to react to the dodge prompts. After a few restarts I was able to get this to pop, after shooting him more times than I feel that I should have had to shoot a Cougar with a high-powered rifle by the way.

This has to be one of the most frustrating achievements I have attempted. Trials HD ramps up in difficulty very quickly, and the last four tracks induce controller throwing rage, especially after you watch the replays from the top of the leader-boards to witness the ease they dispose of the challenging sections. Inferno II almost defeated me at the very end, I finally finished this challenging map with only 33 seconds left. I do not anticipate going back to attempt a speed run on any of these maps, nor do I foresee myself attempting 200/200 completion on this game because of my hatred for replaying this track ever again.

So I have been playing a lot of Forza 2 lately in an attempt to finish up all of the races, as well collect all of the achievements I had not. Finishing out all of the races was not bad, but now I will be grinding out races to get the 1,000,000 Online Credits achievement, as well as enough credits to purchase the remaining cars I am missing from various regions. I wish back when I had originally played this game I had not purchased cars as I got credits, because I spent more money than I should have buying some cars. I bought a lot of cars before I got the 50% discount on non-race cars which would have went a lot way to helping me avoid the grind I am going to face to finish out these collector achievements. Oh well, this gives me something to work on in between easy Gamefly rentals.

Another Madden game played, another 1000 gamerscore earned. While the 2008 version required a few more games played than 2009 did, it was still pretty easy to rack up the required tasks. Quite a few of them were attainable by letting the computer play the game itself. Some of the final ones I had to play the game myself, with the assist of some slider adjustment, to get the conditions of popping the achievement. One more easy football game down.

Forget about just breaking 50,000 this weekend. I rocketed past that number and even managed to break 51,000 as well. Thanks to finishing off Madden 09 and then Disney-Pixar’s Up, I was able to add 2,000 gamerscore last week.

I would like to point out that Up is a fun little co-op experience in the style of the Lego games that my wife and I have enjoyed playing together in the past. There is one quirk with Up, if you are playing co-op when you reach the final level the camera can go a little wonky. It is best to have the second player drop out before loading that final stage.

Madden 09 will put me over the 50,000 gamerscore mark as I work on 100% completion of this game. Last nights total for one game played Franchise game netted me 635 points and seventeen of the twenty-five achievements up for grabs. I’m currently sitting under three-hundred points shy of the 50k mark, so I will break that milestone sometime during the completion of Madden 09. The only difficult achievement looks to be the 6 INTs in one game, which may take an additional game to focus only on that achievement.

So over the end of last week I finished up a couple of left-over achievements from NCAA March Madness 08 and got all of the off-line achievements from NBA Live 07. Since both of these games have virtually no on-line communities, I don’t think I can 1000/1000 either of them. However, after less than an hour with NBA Live 07 gaining 650 points was not a bad trade. I am now on my road to breaking the 50,000 mark, which should happen sometime this week.

So I finished grinding out my 100 matches to pop the Tour of Duty II achievement in Battlefield 1943.

In addition to finishing out a solid 200/200 on this XBOX Live Arcade title, I have been using FPS Freek stick extenders. I do feel these have helped me step up my game while playing either the Scout or Rifleman classes. I haven’t played much with other FPS games, I played a few short rounds of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare with these, but I think overall these will help raise my shooting scores to the top of the rounds I play. They are definitely worth the small price-tag if you are looking to improve your online shooter play.