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The Best Achievements
Like them or not, achievements have become a staple of modern gaming, giving players goals to strive for and a measuring stick with which they can compare themselves to random strangers on the internet. Eurogamer discusses why they've become so popular, and takes a look at some of the most entertaining examples. Quoting:
"... we mock Achievement points because they spell out in large numbers what is so pathetic about video games. But we also celebrate them, because, when used in funny, creative or interesting ways, they also spell out what is so compelling and wonderful about video games. Because for every Achievement in which you have to do nothing more than play through a tutorial there's another that subverts convention, rewarding you for skipping it instead. For every fetch quest that has you collecting dogtags for the millionth time, there's another that makes you fight the baddy with your arms tied behind your back. And for every Achievement you earn in jest for pressing the start button, there's another that only rewards the single best player in the world."
With a grand total of 311,673 gamerpoints, Xbox Live User Stallion83 has won more in-game achievements than any other player. Indeed, he's earned the full 1000 gamerpoints for no less than 204 of the 437 games he's played on his Xbox 360, a Herculean accomplishment of time, effort and, in a great many cases, skill. And yet, as the URL of his website, www.1milliongamerscore.com makes perfectly clear, Stallion83's quest for numerical glory is not even halfway done.
People love recognition. And you're making this published online? Finally, something you can look at at the end of a day spent gaming and feel some sort of achievement (no matter how small).
Hats off to you, Stallion83. I somehow envy and pity you at the same time.
Hell, I myself am guilty of this on the very site we are communicating on (reminds me, need to go moderate to keep that running total).
Brilliant move on Microsoft's part (can I say that here?). Certainly not original but ingenious to add an additional level of addiction.
My work here is dung.
Another one got caught today, it's all over the papers. "Teenager
Arrested in Computer Crime Scandal", "Hacker Arrested after Bank Tampering"...
Damn kids. They're all alike.
But did you, in your three-piece psychology and 1950's technobrain,
ever take a look behind the eyes of the hacker? Did you ever wonder what
made him tick, what forces shaped him, what may have molded him?
I am a hacker, enter my world...
Mine is a world that begins with school... I'm smarter than most of
the other kids, this crap they teach us bores me...
Damn underachiever. They're all alike.
I'm in junior high or high school. I've listened to teachers explain
for the fifteenth time how to reduce a fraction. I understand it. "No, Ms.
Smith, I didn't show my work. I did it in my head..."
Damn kid. Probably copied it. They're all alike.
I made a discovery today. I found a computer. Wait a second, this is
cool. It does what I want it to. If it makes a mistake, it's because I
screwed it up. Not because it doesn't like me...
Or feels threatened by me...
Or thinks I'm a smart ass...
Or doesn't like teaching and shouldn't be here...
Damn kid. All he does is play games. They're all alike.
And then it happened... a door opened to a world... rushing through
the phone line like heroin through an addict's veins, an electronic pulse is
sent out, a refuge from the day-to-day incompetencies is sought... a board is
found.
"This is it... this is where I belong..."
I know everyone here... even if I've never met them, never talked to
them, may never hear from them again... I know you all...
Damn kid. Tying up the phone line again. They're all alike...
You bet your ass we're all alike... we've been spoon-fed baby food at
school when we hungered for steak... the bits of meat that you did let slip
through were pre-chewed and tasteless. We've been dominated by sadists, or
ignored by the apathetic. The few that had something to teach found us will-
ing pupils, but those few are like drops of water in the desert.
This is our world now... the world of the electron and the switch, the
beauty of the baud. We make use of a service already existing without paying
for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn't run by profiteering gluttons, and
you call us criminals. We explore... and you call us criminals. We seek
after knowledge... and you call us criminals. We exist without skin color,
without nationality, without religious bias... and you call us criminals.
You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat, and lie to us
and try to make us believe it's for our own good, yet we're the criminals.
Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is that of curiosity. My crime is
that of judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like.
My crime is that of outsmarting you, something that you will never forgive me
for.
I am a hacker, and this is my manifesto. You may stop this individual,
but you can't stop us all... after all, we're all alike.
My greatest achievement is studying and upholding the thoughts of Chairman Mao Tse-Tung! He is the brilliant red sun in my heart! Long live Chairman Mao Tse-Tung and his Thoughts!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! A thosand red revolutionary salutes to Mao Tse Tung and Marshal Lin Piao! Slashdot is pure dog-fart!
Great fun to watch and to do. Although these usuall aren't "official achievements", as they tend to exploit the game in some way or another.
A good classic example: Super Metroid
If each mistake being made is a new one, then progress is being made.
Because as we know, there are achieved achievements; there are things we know we achieved.
We also know there are unachievable achievements; that is to say we know there are some achievements we can not achieve. But there are also unachieved achievements -- the achievements we don't know we didn't achieve.
Brilliant? No.
A ripoff? Yes.
http://guidesarchive.ign.com/guides/14725/skill.html
Sony and Insomniac Games invented the Skill Point(aka Acheivement) system all the way back in 1998. They've been a staple of Sony/Playstation games ever since all the way up to their current incarnation, Trophies.
What is mind boggling about Microsoft's ripoff of Sony's Skill Point system was that Microsoft utterly failed to grasp the entire point. Skill Points were something extra above and beyond the game that if you put in the effort you were rewarded with unlockables, cheats, new skins, and so on.
Microsoft copied the mechanics of Skill Points, but then idiotically just made them give you a completely pointless 'gamerscore' that means nothing other than silly 'my gamerscore number is higher than yours' e-penish waving.
Which is why this is the greatest game of all time
http://armorgames.com/play/2893/achievement-unlocked
City of Heroes did the whole 'Accomplishments' thing fairly early on.
Some of my favorites are
'Untouchable' - Defeat 200 mobster bosses.
'Speeder' and 'Speed Demon' - Navigate the Christmas-only ski slopes in Pocket D (twitch-haters LOATHE these since they cannot be ground.)
'Transmogrified' - Save the Terra Volta nuclear reactor core from melting down while it's being attacked by waves of enemies (Skyraiders, Freaks, or Rikti aliens). This is, incidentally, also the trial which earns players the right to respecify their powers.
Two of the hardest to achieve are 'Master at Arms' and 'Demolitionist'. They require the player to participate in 10 or more 3-6 group raids to plant bombs on the crashed Rikti Mothership and then to fight the Rikti Master at Arms, U'kon G'rai (You con grey).
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
The Slashdot Achievement "Days read in a row" is killing me. If I'm out of town for a weekend I find myself worrying if I'll have access to, and time to hop onto the internet and log in to Slashdot to keep my winning streak rolling.
Weighing the consequences, I've decided to just play it safe and live with mom in the basement. Don't have to have a job to pay rent that way.
I've hit 2^6 so far, anybody have better? (Be honest please, no scrips that check for you every day. Yes that's a good idea, wish I had done it myself before giving the idea away like this, heh heh ;)
I had just planned a nice weekend before reading that Dead Rising achievement.
Seriously though, this is just legitimizing some of the more well known tricks we used to show off to our friends, plus allowing developers to sneak a joke or two our way.
Who else doesn't remember being able to shoot a grenade or mine in golden eye to kill your opponent?
import system.cool.Sig;
Old arcade games had points. Your goal was to get on the high score list, so everyone could see how good you were. You weren't meant to actually win games. Heck, if you get too far in Pac-Man, it crashes.
When console gaming got big, people didn't care too much about points. It wasn't as fun -- nobody was there to see it. So points went out of fashion, and the goal was instead to win. Super Mario 3 for NES had points, but who cared? It was beatable, and we wanted to win.
Now that consoles are networked, gamers can have public recognition again. And back to points we go...
They could be really good, but so far they've mostly been nothing but flashy and uncreative.
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
Sort of, but not everyone, or not in the same way. For example, as early as the first online games (MUDs), Bartle wrote his classic paper in which he distinguished the following kinds of players and their interactions with the game and with each other:
- achievers, who love achieving stuff. They want to have the biggest score, the most virtual money, have the full top-tier equipment set, etc
- explorers, who are mostly interested interested in reverse engineering your game. They want to discover places, or to reverse engineer how your game works, or whatever other intellectual pursuits. Many actually don't care much about material achievements or titles, except in as much as they're needed to explore. Their "achievements" are all about knowledge gained, not stuff you could hang on the wall or sum up in points.
- socializers, who are pretty much just using your game as a chat room which incidentally happens to also have a game on the side. These people are there to make friends, organize some guild party, stuff like that. And chat lots. Although you could point out that these are their own kind of achievements, they're also not the kind that's easy to automatically measure and slap a title on.
- "killers", named so because their greatest reward is driving someone off the game, effectively perma-killing them off. They're the kind who'll try to harrass, annoy, give you grief, etc. Or what the rest of the world calls "griefers" or "trolls". Their favourite prey are the ones who take unwarranted hostility personally, i.e., the socializers. Although the "killers" title can be confusing, don't confuse them with PvP-ers. A lot of PvP-ers are actually just achievers (e.g., for the honour points), and a lot of killers actually are more creative with their harrassment than camping your corpse all day.
Anyway, again, it's the kind of thing which is hard to measure in achievements. And most killers don't care much about their character (including equipment, titles, etc) as such anyway, it's just a harrassment tool. Think of all the guys who didn't even bother getting another armour than the death shroud in UO, for example. Their achievement wasn't having the best looking outfit, but the fact that they could gank you repeatedly when you went mining. A lot bought disposable accounts who will get banned, but hopefully serve their purpose as harrassment tools in the meantime. What makes anyone think that on such a disposable account any titles achieved on a character matter at all?
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
It is rumored that Microsoft is finally fixing their broken Skill Points ripoff to follow more closely Sony's Trophy system where you have various Trophy levels that are exponentially more difficult to obtain. And also Microsoft is finally understanding that no one cares about the stupid gamerscore and that the original purpose behind Skill Points was to reward the player, not just add to some pointless number.
The real question is why did it take Microsoft so long to finally catch on? Microsoft obviously has no one working for them that has any experience with console hardware design and manufacturing with the RRoD fiasco and the PS3 humiliating the 360's graphics. But you would at least Microsoft would have people working on the Xbox that are actual gamers and understand something as obvious as the Skill Point and Trophy systems.
1998's Spyro on Sony's PS1 is the earliest example that anyone has come up with that:
1. A unified system with an overall progression level
2. Elements that a player normally wouldn't do in normal gameplay
3. Rewards for obtaining X number of those elements
Nintendo had games for the GameCube with something similar, but they came a few years after Spyro.
High Scores
Easter Eggs
Secret weapons and items or areas
Rewards for high scores
all existed before Spyro. But the Sony's Spyro game was the first to ever come up with what we now know as the Skill Point aka Trophy aka Acheivement system today.
The size and location of my house
The emblem on my car
The labels on my wine collection
The title on my business card
The loyalty of my friends
And most important
The number of times per day I make my wife smile.
Video games simply don't enter that equation no matter how much I may enjoy them.
I have something in common with Stephen Hawking...
It's like seeing someone who thinks some shitty band that stole the look and sound of a much better older band and they lash out because they look like retards for letting everyone know they are the ripoff band's biggest fan.
It is hilarious that you have these 'bad ass' 20 something Xbots going out and buying games like My Little Pony just to inflate their retarded and pointless gamerscore...
The "Worst Day-Shift Manager Ever" achievement is a nod to Chad Vader.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4wGR4-SeuJ0
I remember earning patches when you got over a certain high score and sent in a picture. I got the Laserblast one, which was pretty easy once you figured out the right pattern given the poor AI.
D6 63 0D 70 89 81 BB 8E 7B 7C 5F 5D 54 EA AB 73
For liking it!
All of those achievements are BUTTS, I say! Where are the WEIRD ones? Like the 1 point achievement for beating Bullet Witch on HELL difficulty? Or the 0 point achievement you get for falling down a damn manhole five times in a row in TMNT Arcade?
And what kind of buttass list has multiple achievements from THE SAME GAME in it? Piss and piffle!
Change is good, but not in a wallet.
They're badges of shame. I remember cringing when I was on a serious Team Fortress 2 jag and it proudly displayed my in-game hours (eagles scream!). After they decided to add full-on achievements I'd decided to explore a bit more of this life thing I'd heard so many people talking about.
Quack, quack.
Look, clearly you're an enormous dickhead, so rather than belabour the point that logically either Microsoft copied skill points OR gamerscore is entirely different from skill points but NOT BOTH, I will instead inform you that you have no clue what exponentially means.
Awww, poor liddle Xbot!
Xbot faggots always start crying every time their shitty copies of existing game concepts gets laughed at. Go fuck yourself loser. You're nothing but a shitstain on the shoe of the gaming world.
they spell out in large numbers
Shurely shome mishtake?
It is completed by grinding for reputation to become exalted with several different factions. This takes 100+ hours and thousands of gold pieces. The insane part of it comes into play because half of the factions are completely useless, and the only reason anyone would want reputation with them is only for this achievement.
The other half of the factions? They are neutral factions that most people probably already have a lot of reputation with. However they will become fully hated to you if you go for the achievement because you need to kill them over and over to become good with one of the useless ones. So you get to start reputation grinding all over with them, only from fully hated instead of neutral!
You can tell that the Achievements thing has worked out pretty well for MS, because of the number of other companies out there who have frantically tried to copy it. People talk about motion-sensing controls, but it may prove to be achievements that are the defining legacy of this console generation.
Unfortunately, I'm not 100% sure I like this. I don't much mind achievements on the 360. If I buy a full-sized game (as opposed to an XBLA game) I know that there are 1000 achievement points to be unlocked in there. However, I also know that I don't particularly need to bother about these if I don't want to and, because I've read reviews, I know that I am buying a full-sized game that there is a good chance I will like.
I'm far more worried by the direction taken by Blizzard with the achievements they've added to World of Warcraft. Achievements were added to WoW just before the latest expansion was released and there can be absolutely no denying that they have been used as a substitute for including proper content. It's clear that Blizzard wants to run down the amount of resource it devotes to keeping WoW updated and achievements are their quick fix of choice. Even with the recently released Ulduar, the amount of raid content we have in Wrath of the Lich King is vastly inferior to what was around in the Burning Crusade pretty much from launch. But then, why have a team of developers spend months creating new dungeons, when you can have the office temp sit down for an hour or two and think up some stupid and time-consuming ways of getting people to recycle the same old content.
So yeah... achievements as currently impelemented by MS are at worst harmless and at best quite a fun little distraction (and this often depends on how they're implemented in a particular game). However, I can see the little dollar signs flashing in eyes across the industry, as people wake up to the potential for using achievements as a means of increasing profit margins while screwing over all but the most guillible of customers.
I once made it to the Wizard's lair, but then stupidly choked myself to death on a large corpse.
The thing about Xbox Live achievements isn't that you were provided with nifty little goals for doing specific things. It's that you then received acknowledgment after you did them and you could show off your achievement. That networking, allowing other people to see what you've done, is the real success story. I find myself looking at friends' gamerscores and thinking, "hey, I need to catch up with him." It's a lot more than merely notifying you that you've done something.
If you need to feel like you are achieving something or progressing in some Progress Quest by playing video games, good for you.
I wish Sony would let me turn off trophy announcements on the PS3 though. I play games for their own sake, not for e-peen points, and this idiocy interferes with my gaming.
Since they made them mandatory, I have terrible images of playing Ico 3 when it comes out and having the PS3's OS dinging away at me during the game.
I play a game. Why do I play a game? Because it's fun. Else, I would refuse it the title 'game'. A game rewards me with having a good time.
Now a game has to convince me to play it by giving me a carrot on a stick. So playing the game is not enough reward, I need to get a dangling carrot to keep playing?
Not a good game. If the fun the game gives me is not enough reward, why exactly should I be playing it? To get a reward for doing something I would probably not consider important enough for myself that I do it on my own already, without getting something arbitrary for it?
Last time I checked that was called 'work'.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Achievements are a terrible thing to add to a game: a mere gimmick to get people to overplay their games to death, get bored as quickly as possible, and run out to buy more games for MOAR POINTZ. They harm quality by taking developer effort away from things that matter, and they provide a cover for killing real replay value: an unprofitable thing that has been a thorn in developers' sides for years.
Shame on Microsoft for introducing this scourge, however brilliantly it may have worked for its attach rates. Shame on Sony for copying them. Shame on Nintendo for its flirtation with the concept, even if they have stayed away from them in the core system.
I really don't care about achievements/trophies/etc at all. At best they are a list of interesting things to try in a game and a way to compare progress in specific titles. At worst they are marketing and false competition.
Importantly, they are not cost-free to developers, and I would always rather have better gameplay or more content or a higher level of polish than a masturbatory checklist.
Goals alone aren't gameplay, and fall in the category of pointless collecting.
Being a completionist is the surest route to ruining your enjoyment of a game.
For example, in Left 4 Dead, there's no deep plotline or character development, but there are loads of achievements to master. When I hopped on the server last night, I looked through which bronze medals I had yet to achieve in the 16 Survival mode maps. Achievements are nice -- they give direction and structure to games that otherwise would lack direction.
I like watching people whine about achievements being evil, be they in any form.
Some of the achievements are actually fun, and a way to say, "Hey, I actually did that." It's nice to have a log for bragging rights sake with your friends who might not be sitting there when you pull it off.
One example would be Ikaruga on the 360:
There is an achievement called 'Dot Eater', in which you MAY NOT FIRE through the entire level. As a single ship on Normal, it's a little aggravating to squeeze through some of the bullet showers coming at you, but on Hard? Fun times. Get your happy finger on the polarity switch and start flipping FAST.
Other achievements are just boring (Outrun Online Arcade: 'Frequent Flyer' - Complete 50 single player games), aggravating due to low player volume despite the game's age (Outrun Online Arcade: 'Legend' - 1st Place in 5 ranked multiplayer matches in a row), or just not worth the effort needed to get there (You all know what I'm talking about).
One of these days, I am going to flip out. When I flip out, I'll be back in five minutes.
And here I was all looking forward to reading about something real, like scientific discoveries, philanthropic work, or contribution to the arts.
I'm tagging this !realachievements
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
These achievements can be had with just half an hour of action gaming (quoted):
Combo Whore! (Kill lots of people with combos)
Flak Monkey! (Kill lots of people with the Flak)
Head hunter! (Make lots of headshots with either the LG or the Sniper rifle).
Top Gun! (Destroy enemy Raptors with your Raptor in ONS or destroy five Spacefighters without getting killed in the Mothership Assault)
Eagly Eye! (Destroy a Raptor with a Goliath)
Fender Bender! (Head on collision between vehicles)
Road kill! (Drive over a person)
Pancake! (Splash a person underneath your Manta or Raptor)
Wrecker! (Destroy vehicles/turrets in the Assault maps)
And then you have the sprees going up to Dominating!! and Wicked Sick!! and the multi-kills:
Double- Multi- Mega- Monster- Ultra- Ludicrous- and Holy Shit Kill.