Since getting a copy of Rockstar Table Tennis this afternoon, I've been playing this game pretty much non-stop, and my nerves are totally shot from it. Before I retire for the evening, though, I'm going to try a little experiment. I've already racked up 225 gamerscore points in TabTen (props to Carrie for that one), and I'm going to see if I can get a few more while I'm asleep. There is an achievement for playing the offline game for 10+ hours, so I've started up a single-player exhibition match where there's no auto-serve function, which effectively means that there are two table tennis players standing there, eyeballing each other.
Like so.
The rub is that I've been lazy about investing in the Xbox 360 Charge & Play Kit, so my controller is straight up AA battery-powered at the moment, and if there's no input on a battery-powered controller for a few minutes, it automatically powers down. When that happens, the game pauses, which would prevent me from getting my filthy, ill-gotten points while I sleep. At first I was dreaming up plans of building a robot that could just tap the A button for me to keep the game going, but instead I opted to wrap one of my girlfriend's hair ties around my Xbox 360 controller to maintain the charade that I'm actually playing a game.
Like so.
Other aspiring point-junkies, take note--the band is wrapped in such a way that it's activating both the left analog stick and the right shoulder trigger at the same time. I originally tried just activating the analog stick, but the controller still powered down after 10 minutes or so. Of course, if I had a Charge & Play Kit, none of this would be a problem, since a plugged in 360 controller never powers down.
The only thing to do now is go to sleep and hope for the best. If this experiment works out, my next target will be the achievement for playing 10+ hours in the online mode. I think that one might actually be even easier, since I don't think a powered down controller would stop an online game, but it'll require the cooperation of another player willing to leave their Xbox 360 on overnight. Lucky for me, I'm pretty sure Jeff's game.
UPDATE: This didn't work. Rockstar's cleverer than I thought! As much as I'd like cheap points, I'd actually prefer it if the achievement points system were less exploitable, since that would give more value to your actual gamerscore. I find it encouraging that developers are becoming more serious about this business.