The Lamer Gamer

Achievement Locked underwear design @ © SplitReason.com

I had to chuckle a little…  The trick is finding a woman who would agree to wear these.

I didn’t manage to play Halo Wars yet, but I noticed a friend did.  While browsing the list of achievements that he’d gotten I took a minute to look over the rest.

FUCK!

Why in gods name does this achievement exist?

24 Hours of Quality

Play Halo Wars for at least 24 Total Hours
 

It should be an achievement to complete the game in less than 24 hours, not to leave it paused over night gambling that your Xbox doesn’t overheat.

Among other stellar achievement inclusions

• Ram 50 Grunts with Warthogs
• Kill at least 5 Covenant Units with the Bridge
• Win a Matchmade Skirmish Game on Xbox LIVE
• Win and have the Highest Score in a Matchmade Skirmish Game on Xbox LIVE

I’ll forgive them the lame, do X Y times, but I’ve never understood what the fascination is with multiplayer achievements.  Worse, they have the Gears-esque complete the game in Co-op achievement, which to me should be the same as completing the game.  Might as well be a “Wow, you have friends?” achievement.

Since I’ve been playing a lot of Team Fortress 2, I’ve been hitting a lot of the grinder achievements as I go.  They’re all fairly trivial, so over the course of a few weeks they’ve just been popping up.  It too has its own annoying co-op achievement, which I’ll probably never get. 

With Friends Like these…

Play in a game with seven or more players from your friends list.
 

Why would anyone care?

Being a bit OCD makes it only that much harder to ignore unlockables within games.  I remember killing myself to gold medal all of the stages in GoldenEye back on the N64, the reward for which escapes me now.  For that however, there was a tangible, if digital, reward that probably added a unique item/map/mode to the game thereby increasing my enjoyment of the game.  

But there’s no such guarantee of a reward with Xbox Achievements or PS3 Trophies. GamerScore and Gamer Level are much more bragging rights systems than rewards systems, and that’s fine, but their public and required existence creates some annoyances.  The Xbox 360 had them from the get go, and the PS3 has recently required them for all new games, so the experience on each system will largely be the same for both.   Goals, to use a neutral word, being required, inevitably leads to games with really poorly thought out implementations and on top of that it leads to GamerScore or Gamer Level whoring.  

Somewhere out there, someone bought or rented Avatar: TLA for the 360 simply because they saw this video.  And that is one of the prime examples of game studios clearly not giving a crap about adding that sort of thing, and punting when it came time to do it.  It doesn’t affect me that someone does that, but plenty of the hardcore whores look upon it akin to cheating, just read forums at achieve360points.com and xbox360achievements.com.  I tend to lurk both of those as I’m obsessed with finishing the titles that I pick up, and sometimes the achievements are based on really abnormal things.  

So fine, someone got an extra 1000 GamerScore from Avatar and that’s an ill gotten gain.  Unless you were specifically competing with that person in terms of accomplishment bragging rights, you don’t care, or maybe you do since you can now laugh at them for playing Avatar.  But there is a much more insidious side of poorly thought out goals. Those mixed with online play.  If you’ve played Halo 3, there was some jackass who spent the entire match driving around the map on a Mongoose, trying to splatter someone.  There’s at least a 50/50 shot that guy was just doing it for an achievement.  I know, because I was that guy.  That guy ruins games.  He doesn’t contribute, throws off the balance, and worse probably gives up a bunch of points to the other team because he’s not even looking out for himself.  

Developers really need to be mindful of how these affect play, or worse discourage play as above.  When designing a a game, you can look at adding goals in one of two legitimate ways.  The first, you’ve actually achieved something, e.g. performed an task that doesn’t have a likely avenue for cheating, ala Mile High Club in COD4.  Completing a game on a ridiculous difficulty setting work too.  The second way is more about steering gameplay, e.g. “X” kills with “X” weapon, or take route 1, take route 2.  Many games fall into the 2nd.  

I understand why designers use the 2nd, sometimes it helps to encourage the user to try something they wouldn’t have done normally.  Gears of War 2 did that with the melee 30 tickers achievement, had I never seen that it wouldn’t have occured t try.  Gears of War had a bunch that were tedious, 100 kills with every weapon in every way.  Mass Effect required a number of kills by weapons, or uses of abilities.  For boostable achievements Gears’ “Seriously” achievement was at least impressive, even if what it says to me is you probably play too much, but good for you.  Maybe Epic kept you playing just a bit longer by making go for 10K kills.  I do not have that one, I’m not that patient.

I think I’m going to have to get together my list of most annoying achievements. The insanely annoying, this could never happen naturally, get 13 friends together to play at 13:00 on Friday the 13th 2013 for 13 minutes achievement.

Okay, so I admit I’ve never come close to finding one that bad, but there are ones that come close…