Candid Confessions From An Achievement Points Chaser
Back in the day before Xbox 360
Achievements (and now PS3 Trophies), completing certain tasks in gaming
were only done to attain a level of accomplisment and pride that existed at the very core of video games. After all, why else would
we even bother playing anything in the first place if there was no
sense of success or closure in what we did, especially given that
memory cards weren't around back then and if you died it meant
starting all over again from the very beginning and you had to challenge those deformed freaks in Rock Paper Scissors in Alex Kidd again (and lose, repeatedly) until your child self wept?
These sons of bitches caused me so much grief as a kid
Those core incentives of reaching gaming perfection could be from, say, finishing Sonic the Hedgehog and finding all the Chaos Emeralds (something I never managed and am still bitter about to this day - I only had one left and I could see it but couldn't get to it) or trying to get the highest score possible in the original Mario and writing it down on ripped-out exercise book pages in between crude drawings of Street Fighter's Zangief and "pee pee" figures and comparing it (the pee pees) with school buddies who wouldn't believe you anyway. Oh the bygone era where the internet and online stat tracking were yet to be realised, how did we even survive? These days I find myself comparing gamerscores with iceblast21, ignipotentbrendan, and of course, zumafire, of whose lofty statuses I can only dream of reaching as I stalk their pages in a non-Facebook setting.
Mr T was really popular back then
All those
reasons for gaming valour, the honesty and purity of the challenge, started to become
altered when 360 achievements came along...enter the "Achievement
Whore", i.e. those who play games just for
the points. This isn't a criticism of anybody as I myself often find that I'm guilty of playing through titles
for the points, too. But man, I'm certainly not going to go out of my
way to hire Avatar for the free thousand points, that just seems...
excessive.
Case in point: as much as I enjoyed Call of Duty 4, I have never experienced as harsh an exercise in ridiculous futility as when playing through the whole game on Veteran difficulty. There were so many times, corresponding to the number of my deaths in-game, that I just wondered "Why am I doing this? For a few hundred virtual points?" Ultimately I soldiered on until the game became downright annoying and the inconsistent spawning of checkpoints was clearly not synchronised with the ridiculous numbers of enemies who never stopped flooding towards you with perfect aim. I eventually finished it but have not done the epilogue plane mission on Veteran because NO! Just, no.
An example of downright bad achievements would be for Pro Evolution Soccer 2008 where a host of them were dedicated to online play and yet the online lag rendered matches so unplayably bad that getting those points was more an exercise in blind luck and frustration rather than what surely should have been a focus on good competition. Another required you to commit one foul or less in ten straight games, which was just unfair given how whistle-happy the referees are in the game and the only way to get that achievement is to play in an unfeasibly unattractive keep-ball way that opposed the very principles of the sport. All that for 25 points too when buying FIFA 08 would have been the better option.
There are also times when achievements get in the way of gameplay, particularly in sandbox titles where the chances are that you will end up getting them naturally over time anyway, and at your own pace, but because it's there on the list you may go out of your way JUST to attain them. I found that when I was playing through Bully Scholarship Edition, GTA IV and Saint's Row, I would definitely become a bit too achievements-focused and it had a negative impact on the way I usually approached these games: performing so many wedgies in quick succession and storing a crazy amount of cars in my garage that, as soon as they were done, all the fun was gone in doing them again. I mean, why bother? These type of achievements tend to kill the fun a bit when you've reached the goal and its as if gamers are being held to ransom by them.
I've got to say though, as conflicted as I may feel about achievement points, it has in some cases enhanced the gaming experience. For instance, I was so very close to trading in Assassin's Creed after I heard the words "I only wish my sons were as brave as you" for the thousandth time but hung on and finished the game just to score some points before trading it in. Ultimately, my opinion of the title had improved: it wasn't utterly atrocious but at the same time certainly not very good, resulting in a game that was just barely worth keeping.
I liked the stealth-method too
Currently I'm busy on
Rainbow Six Vegas 2's achievements, which have been beneficial in terms
of improving my level of skill: having to kill 100 online opponents
with a pistol was definitely a long haul but I do think I'm a better
player because of it. Although as soon as that was achieved I went straight back to my preferred weapon
- I cannot stress how relieved I was to get that one over and done
with, and again, now that the achievement has been reached I doubt I'll be handgunning it again anytime soon for the fun of it. As for the dodgy achievement which requires you to own an Xbox
Live Camera and put yourself in the game, there is no way I'm buying one of those just for the sake of 20G unless
there is a bona fide reason to get one.
Personally I do prefer it if game achievements rewarded you in different and original ways: you will always get them for finishing the game of course, but it helps when they encourage you to 'discover' things as well. Crackdown is a much-cited example of coaxing the player into playing through in a different style to what they may have been accustomed to, and the Bully Scholarship Edition achievements expanded on that, particularly with 'Over the Rainbow', the one about kissing members of the same sex a certain number of times. Bioshock encouraged us to find all the audio diaries, and in doing so helped draw you in further to the world of Rapture. Dead Rising made you play through the story mode multiple times with different objectives and hence see more of what they created (but on that note, playing Survival Mode and staying alive for 7 days which equated to something like 14 real life hours was just not on. Not on).
So
why is that gamerscore so important to so many of us? What about the guys
who have hundreds and thousands of points? Do they actually play through games
for the sake of fun or just for the points? Many of my Live buddies
have formidable tallies, as above; others are clearly very
anti-gamerscore points and only have the default achievements that come
practically automatically with their games. I wish I could play through
titles unmarred and unaffected by the lure of virtual points, but I
just cannot help myself sometimes as the whole sense of reward and accomplishment has me hooked like Pavlov and his dogs. 15G might not be much, but it sure does beat going through Alex Kidd in Miracle World for the 23rd time only to be outdone by two fingers stuck up at you, followed swiftly by death.
Please share your experiences with Achievements, I'd love to hear from you all.
These sons of bitches caused me so much grief as a kid
Those core incentives of reaching gaming perfection could be from, say, finishing Sonic the Hedgehog and finding all the Chaos Emeralds (something I never managed and am still bitter about to this day - I only had one left and I could see it but couldn't get to it) or trying to get the highest score possible in the original Mario and writing it down on ripped-out exercise book pages in between crude drawings of Street Fighter's Zangief and "pee pee" figures and comparing it (the pee pees) with school buddies who wouldn't believe you anyway. Oh the bygone era where the internet and online stat tracking were yet to be realised, how did we even survive? These days I find myself comparing gamerscores with iceblast21, ignipotentbrendan, and of course, zumafire, of whose lofty statuses I can only dream of reaching as I stalk their pages in a non-Facebook setting.
Mr T was really popular back then
Case in point: as much as I enjoyed Call of Duty 4, I have never experienced as harsh an exercise in ridiculous futility as when playing through the whole game on Veteran difficulty. There were so many times, corresponding to the number of my deaths in-game, that I just wondered "Why am I doing this? For a few hundred virtual points?" Ultimately I soldiered on until the game became downright annoying and the inconsistent spawning of checkpoints was clearly not synchronised with the ridiculous numbers of enemies who never stopped flooding towards you with perfect aim. I eventually finished it but have not done the epilogue plane mission on Veteran because NO! Just, no.
An example of downright bad achievements would be for Pro Evolution Soccer 2008 where a host of them were dedicated to online play and yet the online lag rendered matches so unplayably bad that getting those points was more an exercise in blind luck and frustration rather than what surely should have been a focus on good competition. Another required you to commit one foul or less in ten straight games, which was just unfair given how whistle-happy the referees are in the game and the only way to get that achievement is to play in an unfeasibly unattractive keep-ball way that opposed the very principles of the sport. All that for 25 points too when buying FIFA 08 would have been the better option.
There are also times when achievements get in the way of gameplay, particularly in sandbox titles where the chances are that you will end up getting them naturally over time anyway, and at your own pace, but because it's there on the list you may go out of your way JUST to attain them. I found that when I was playing through Bully Scholarship Edition, GTA IV and Saint's Row, I would definitely become a bit too achievements-focused and it had a negative impact on the way I usually approached these games: performing so many wedgies in quick succession and storing a crazy amount of cars in my garage that, as soon as they were done, all the fun was gone in doing them again. I mean, why bother? These type of achievements tend to kill the fun a bit when you've reached the goal and its as if gamers are being held to ransom by them.
I've got to say though, as conflicted as I may feel about achievement points, it has in some cases enhanced the gaming experience. For instance, I was so very close to trading in Assassin's Creed after I heard the words "I only wish my sons were as brave as you" for the thousandth time but hung on and finished the game just to score some points before trading it in. Ultimately, my opinion of the title had improved: it wasn't utterly atrocious but at the same time certainly not very good, resulting in a game that was just barely worth keeping.
I liked the stealth-method too
Personally I do prefer it if game achievements rewarded you in different and original ways: you will always get them for finishing the game of course, but it helps when they encourage you to 'discover' things as well. Crackdown is a much-cited example of coaxing the player into playing through in a different style to what they may have been accustomed to, and the Bully Scholarship Edition achievements expanded on that, particularly with 'Over the Rainbow', the one about kissing members of the same sex a certain number of times. Bioshock encouraged us to find all the audio diaries, and in doing so helped draw you in further to the world of Rapture. Dead Rising made you play through the story mode multiple times with different objectives and hence see more of what they created (but on that note, playing Survival Mode and staying alive for 7 days which equated to something like 14 real life hours was just not on. Not on).
Please share your experiences with Achievements, I'd love to hear from you all.
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