Imagine you’re reading a book. You read every word, line, sentence, paragraph, and page, ultimately arriving at the book’s satisfying conclusion. Upon closing the cover and sticking it back on your shelf, you recall the excellent manner in which the author crafted drama, plot, tension, and development into the story. As you pause, staring at the occupied spot on your bookshelf, you quickly decide to take the book back down and meticulously count every usage of the word the in chapter 8. After that, you break for some coffee and return to read the book backwards and upside down while wearing an eye patch and listening to the Jonas Brothers.
It sounds stupid, but I’ve just described XBox 360 achievements. For anyone who doesn’t know what these are, they are the developer’s strategy for keeping gamers playing games long after the sequels have usurped the original’s right to Christmas stockings everywhere. For every XBox 360 game released, there are typically anywhere from 40-60 achievements that accompany it.
It’s almost impossible to get every achievement on an initial play through, unless you are somehow omniscient or know how to use YouTube (please post helpful comments on how to do this below). As a result, a gamer is usually forced to replay certain sections of the game over and over until he or she satisfies some absurd request. Upon doing so, a familiar blip will sound and a message will flash across the screen signifying that another portion of your soul is now forfeit.
What does the gamer get for these achievements? The bad news is that the gamer gets nothing. The good news is that you’re now familiar with the word that will forever describe your ambitions.
Why would a gamer sacrifice so much time and effort for something that ultimately possesses the same amount of impact as a marshmallow hitting the Charmin Labrador? The truth is, XBox 360 achievements are big business. There exist entire websites devoted to strategy guides and videos showing gamers every meticulous step necessary to reap every possible XBox 360 achievement. That’s right, people are paid to tell gamers how to get Xbox 360 achievements.
So, if Xbox 360 achievements amount to nothing, they couldn’t get any worse, right? Well, turns out some games have invented what are essentially the achievement equivalents of negative integers. Achievements such as those that require gamers to…
#1: ABANDON STRATEGY
Guiltiest Games: Borderlands, Gears of War 3.
Both Borderlands and Gears of War 3 have achievements for which there exist no conscious strategies for pursuing them. Most achievements require some level of skill or careful planning to get, but not these. Instead, you must literally join public match after public match until you run across someone who already has the achievement.
Development studios wanted these achievements to act as viruses, beginning with the studio’s employees and ultimately trickling down to everyone who played their games. It sounds like a solid strategy, but it requires players to methodically join and quit public matches, hoping someone they play with is at most six degrees of Kevin Bacon removed from the development team. It’s like if you bought an airplane ticket and then sat in the terminal asking every passenger to sneeze on you as they walked by in an attempt to catch typhoid fever.
#2: TRADE
Guiltiest Games: Fable 2, Fable 3.
I’m just going to come out and say it: trading with other players absolutely sucks. It’s akin to jumping in the pool at a party. It needs to be done in order for it to be a party, but nobody wants to jump first.
Fable 3, in particular, excels at asking players to exhibit the three traits that, when used in tandem, are in complete violation of a large percentage of the gaming community’s personalities: patience, trust, and nobility. There is an achievement in Fable 3 that requires you to collect 50 different weapons. These 50 weapons don’t appear in a single play through, so you’ll have to play the game multiple times to get around 35 of them. This, as you might expect, takes a great deal of patience. In order to get the other 15 or so, you’ll have to trade other players for their weapons.
This sounds easy enough. Unfortunately, the developers of Fable 3 forgot to create that ever-so-important device that allows players to trade items simultaneously. This means that you’ll have to trade an item to another player before he trades one to you, or visa versa. This takes an obscene amount of trust, seeing as “absconding with other player’s hard earned items” is practically a job description for some people who play these types of games. There is absolutely nothing stopping the other player from taking your item, backing out of your game, and sending you a text message equivalent to a dropkick the the groin telling you how stupid you are for trusting other people.
This whole fiasco doesn’t even account for the fact that by trading weapons, you’re essentially throwing dirt into each other’s holes. When the goal is to get every weapon in the game, no ground is made by a one-for-one trade.
Better get cracking, gamers. There are a bounty of life lessons to be learned online, most of which require you to take a kick to the groin smiling.
#3: DO EVERYTHING
Guiltiest Games: Gears of War, any game with a 100% stat completion achievement.
I’ve made note of the flak gamers get for “wasting time” or “being lazy.” These achievements exist to prove correct every stereotype heaped upon the gaming community since we discovered that Rock Stars and Doritos are viable supplements for showers and sanity.
Take Gears of War 2 for example. There is an achievement in Gears of War 2 called Seriously 2.0, the only requirement of which is to kill enemies. At first glance, that sounds right up the game’s alley. I mean, killing enemies is as close to a description of Gears of War as I’ve ever heard. Seeing as you can rack up kills in a variety of game modes (averaging anywhere from 1-50 per public match), an achievement like this should be no problem.
Let’s see, how many kills does this….100,000!!!!!! Crap!!!
If you want a greater perspective on how long something like this actually takes, keep in mind that beating the Gears of War 2 campaign will reap you about 2,000-3,000 kills in exchange for 7-10 hours of work. I’ll let you do the math. Better yet, go out and buy a math book and read it, cover to cover. You may be able to save the margin of your sanity that didn’t already die once you realized the Seven Deadly Sins were authored with this achievement in mind.
To add insult to incredible injury, Seriously 2.0 will only reap you 50 achievement points. That’s out of 1,000. Darn you, Gears of War 2.
#4: DO NOTHING
Guiltiest Games: Deus Ex: Human Revolution, ‘Splosion Man, Prince of Persia.
Quick, what does the word “achievement” bring to mind? Success? Hard work? Accomplishment? How about none of the above? If you chose the latter, you’re familiar with what’s required to get certain achievements in the aforementioned games.
These are achievements which require you to at times, no joke, turn on your game and walk away.
Prince of Persia (the version with all the light seeds in it) is particularly to blame when it comes to achievements like these. Not once, but twice in the campaign you’re required to essentially put down your controller and look at the screen. It’s as if the developers ran out of stuff to challenge gamers with and decided to just start giving away achievements. However, by doing so, they are basically telling gamers to buy games and then not play them.
Eventually, the achievements are just going to come stamped on the outside of the cartridge. That way, you don’t even have to unwrap the plastic to get your $60 worth.
Welcome to corporate America, kids. If you’re not getting what you need inside 10 seconds, you’re playing Gears of War 2.
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And now that you’re thoroughly convinced of the utter meaningless of all things achievement, here’s one more:
blip
*ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED: READING ALL 30 AFOREMENTIONED USES OF THE WORD ACHIEVEMENT*
You’re welcome.
vg shambler 