Zombie Grinder

In addition to picking up our dog today, I've also been grinding out one of the last achievements in Dead Rising. Dead Rising is an Xbox 360 zombie game, and quite possibly the best reason to purchase the system at the moment. It's a game that's wickedly flawed, but whose awesomeness actually makes up for the flaws and still puts it far ahead of a lot of other games out there at the moment.

Achievements are Xbox 360's way of permanently recording your accomplishments. They don't actually do anything (except earn you Gamerpoints, which are equally meaningless and are just a nearly-arbitrary number), but each Achievement has a title and a corresponding picture. Think of it as a combination of a Boy Scout Merit Badge sash with a bunch of badges on it, a permanent journal of your gaming accomplishments with time and date, and a scrapbook of the various things you've done in a single game or across lots of games.

They're also an excellent way to keep you playing a game beyond when you might have stopped, especially if you're an OCD freakshow like yours truly.

I've got 46 out of 50 of Dead Rising's achievements, and I'm grinding out two of the last four today. Unfortunately the last of those two means leaving the game running for 14 hours straight, without saving or pausing. If you pause, you're going to leave the game on longer. And you have to pay attention to it every 20 minutes or so, so you can feed your character.

Sound like a pain in the ass? Yeah, but no more so than grinding out levels for a WoW character, I suppose.

I started the console at 6:45 this morning, and now (11:30 at night) I'm about an hour or so away from finishing and going to bed. Yeah.