When I had first played through Grand Theft Auto 4, I did not take any steps to save my money.  I spent freely on clothes, food, weapons, and ammo…

This REALLY ended up frustrating me because as I defeated the game, I came very far from having enough money to satisfy the “Half Million” achievement.  To get this 55g achievement, the player needs to gain a balance of 500,000 dollars in the game.  And, if you can’t do it with the end-game bonus then your options become very limited.  Many users have guides on youtube for getting it by using cheats; mainly by spawning expensive cars and selling them.  But, that’s very time consuming and many purists don’t like to use cheats to get something like that.

I had given in and decided that this achievement was not possible short of a complete re-play of the game from scratch.  That was not going to happen.  Mentally I tried to forget this achievement existed but very unsuccessfully.

Enter GTA4: The Ballad of Gay Tony.

I was very surprised and extremely overjoyed to find out that the Ballad of Gay Tony expansion still allowed you to unlock achievements for the original GTA4 release.  When I found out, I went on an achievement unlocking spree of sorts:  Flew my helicopter under all the bridges, went on all the helicopter tours, blew up 10 cars in 10 seconds, survived 6 star wanted level for 5 minutes, took a long taxi ride without skipping, etc etc etc.

Then I had what I considered to be a very smart idea:  I thought of a way to very simply get the Half million achievement.  TBoGT has a cage-fighting minigame where you can fight against people or bet on fights for money.  This location is painfully close to your safe house/save point.  I figured there would be some sort of maximum for the amount you could place on a bet in this fight minigame – but there is no limit!

Being an expansion, TBoGT left me with somewhere around 40,000 dollars total.  Quite a ways from the half-mil mark.  But, I went to work on a fool proof venture.  I saved my game immediately before visiting the cage fight arena and betting all of my money on one fight.  The first fight I did choose correctly; so I had a cool 80k.  I take the one block drive to re-save my game and then proceed to do the exact same thing and bet every penny I have on one fight.  This 2nd fight I chose wrong 3 different times 🙁   But, through the magic of saved games I very quickly had 160,000 dollars.

I think you get the idea.  I repeated the above steps until I got bored; which left me just under 2 million dollars…  And, along the way I got the famed “Ka-bloop” sound and the 55g achievement “Half million”.

I’ve totally been on self fulfilling achievement quests as a whole lately trying to get my numbers up somewhere near Vanlandw’s 10k gamerscore.  I don’t know that I’m catching him to any degree as he has progressed at an astounding rate; but my Gamerscore has surprassed 6,000 as of last night.  That is pretty impressive in my opinion – considering my Gamerscore was 1,000 back in June of this year.

Overall, I’ve really gotten my money’s worth out of my 360 this year.  The turning point was when I decided to move it upstairs vs being down in our Basement.  I simply just did not go downstairs ever and barely ever played my 360.  A very sad story.  But I’m making up for it now and trying to cram as much video games into my soul as humanly possible before April of 2010 comes around.  🙂

Hooray for daytime video game posts.