Weekly Report - 07/27/2012

This is the first of a (hopefully) ongoing, down-to-earth series of posts which will describe my Backloggery progress each week. I normally try to post more thoughtful and philosophical content, but these reports are intended to be more concrete (and, perhaps, less interesting).

Last weekend a few friends visited from mid-afternoon until after midnight. We downloaded the Free to Play (F2P) shooter Tribes: Ascend. The vast majority of our time together was spent huddled around our laptops, reminiscing about Tribes 2 while playing round after round of this new F2P title. None of us earned much more than 20,000 XP which is barely enough to unlock a new character class, let alone some of the more valuable items. Naturally we weren’t inclined to spend any real money (Pay to Win). It seems a decent game and all three of us were productive members of our respective teams, but I probably won’t play it much more.

Late that night we discovered the Magicka collection sale for $7.49 was about to end, so we hurriedly purchased it with plans to play Magicka: Vietnam during our next gathering. I look forward to that.

Monday and Tuesday evenings I spent polishing off the last two achievements for Mass Effect 3 (5,000 kills for Veteran and weapon level 10 for Gunsmith). I’m 100% complete on the entire ME trilogy (minus a few DLC, which I rarely bother with).

No forward progress was made on GTA: Chinatown Wars or Torchlight, where I’ve been working on a very hard hardcore (VHHC) playthrough.

However, I did fire up the long-unfinished Call of Duty 3 on my 360. I plan a single frustrating playthrough on veteran to earn the worthwhile achievements and complete the game (multiplayer will be ignored given the age of this game).

Economics of Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars

Aside from the distasteful subject, the continuous drug trading side quest in Chinatown Wars is actually entertaining as well as useful. I’ve found it to be by far the most efficient way to earn cash in the game. After about two hours of doing nothing but schlepping illicit substances back and forth across Liberty City, I have probably accumulated more than enough funds than I could possibly ever need to supply myself with enough ammo and equipment for the duration of the game.

The strategy is pretty obvious: buy low, sell high. Every now and then you’ll receive an in-game message about a dealer who’s selling some product at a huge discount or buying another product like it’s going out of style. Take advantage of every such situation. If someone is selling low, buy up all of their stock even if you don’t have a buyer in mind for it yet. If someone is buying high, sell them all of your stock then run around town and buy up more to resell to the high buyer. Just make sure any extra you purchase is cheaper than what you can resell it for, and ignore the glaring logical fallacies inherent in such outrageous price gaps between two dealers who work only a few miles apart from one another.

It’s that easy, and you’ll have earned plenty of cash to enjoy the rest of the game in comfort (i.e. fresh armor on every mission!) long before you get even begin to get bored of driving back and forth between the various traders in the city.