Memoirs of an Achievement Whore: My Milestone

         

 

          This is the third time I’ve tried writing this introduction. I don’t know how else to write something that doesn’t make me look like a totally lifeless nerd who’s dumped hours of his life into video games. All I can say is that it’s my hobby and I love it to death. I don’t love it more than my wife or my kids. I don’t love it more than any friend I’ve ever had in my life. It’s a harmless escape for me when I’m feeling down or when I’m bored. Hell it’s a great way to spend some free time when I just want to have fun. It’s better than watching a movie sometimes because I get to engage in the story I’m witnessing. So there, I love games, and get over the fact that I now have 100,000 gamer score. Did I just say 100,000? Yes I did. That’s a huge number, right? I think it’s safe to say that most people who play games on the 360 have never seen a score over 15,000, and there is nothing wrong with that.

            You see, there is a huge journey that led me to the score that I have and before I get into it, let me tell you what that score means to me. Do I view it as my proverbial penis that I can show off to everyone because of how big it is? Sometimes, sure. But it’s more about keeping track of all the games that I’ve ever played and how feverishly I went after them. I love certain games more than others and in those games I am very proud to have not only conquered the main plot, but I also played it to the extent that granted me all of it’s side achievements. I like looking back at what I’ve done so I can reminisce about how fun this game was or how crappy that game was. It’s my own personal stat tracker and I freaking love stats. But my views on my gamer score haven’t always been so easy for me to get along with, so let me share with you my journey that led to such an insane feat and perhaps you’ll understand my view a little better.

            I understand that thousands of people have already reached this number, hell some of them are even pretty close to one million, but please realize that I do have a life and it has taken me close to seven years or however long the 360 has been out to even reach this number. I’m proud of it, so don’t rain on my parade or else I’ll be forced to hit you with my Jeep, mmmkay? Thanks. I had been an avid Xbox gamer since around 2001 when my Uncle purchased one the day/week/month/year that it came out. I don’t know the exact date, but I was freaking hooked after we had all tested out Halo (check here for a whole in depth story for that). 

            I loved Halo so much that I eventually saved up enough money from working at Mail Boxes Etc (now called the UPS store) to purchase my own. It was awesome. I could play Halo all day and night, and I totally did. Halo was the main game in my life and I rarely strayed away from it. I had my moments with the Grand Theft Auto franchise once it came over to the dark side as well as Splinter Cell and Unreal Championship (love those games), but I was always back playing Halo or Halo 2 as much as I could. It was my drug, man. Once I heard that Halo 3 would be coming out on the 360, I knew I had to own one (much like I’ll “have” to own the next gen Xbox for Halo 5 haha).

            I was saving up money while working part time at Wal-Mart so I could snatch a 360 as soon as it became available (in those days they were hard to find because they always sold out in a matter of hours). During my long wait for this unavailable console, I decided to purchase some games for it since it would be useless to own one without having anything to play on it. So being a fan of fighting games (Mortal Kombat and Dead or Alive were some of my favorite titles on the original Xbox as well), I went ahead and purchased Dead or Alive 4 (sucked). On top of that, I had heard Perfect Dark Zero was supposed to be pretty good. It’s a shooter, just like Halo, so why the eff not? (That game was mediocre at best). Regardless, I had those games on hand when I finally brought my console home and plugged that bad boy in.

            I got my profile set up and transferred my Xbox Live and from there I was ready to go. It was awesome. I played the crap out of the two games I purchased and couldn’t help but wonder why the hell these notifications kept popping up saying “achievement unlocked.” In the early days it didn’t say which achievement was unlocked, just that you unlocked one. I suppose I hadn’t really fooled around much with the console’s menus and tools, but it was after a discussion with my Uncle that I realized what they were for. I figured out how to find where they were displayed and before you knew it, an obsession had formed.

            The first game that I really got all nuts over was Madden 06. Those achievements were insanely easy to go for and I nabbed all of them minus the one that required me to complete thirty seasons in Franchise Mode. Mother effing redonkulous is what I thought. I’d never get that. I loved playing Madden, but never in my life have I completed any more than five franchise seasons, let alone thirty. But I decided to try something. I simulated twenty-nine seasons (I actually played the entire first season) and boom, achievement unlocked. I was enthralled. I couldn’t believe how easy it was to exploit the game into giving me what I wanted. From THAT point on, I was an achievement hunter. I only really got into one other game prior to leaving for basic training, and that was Need For Speed Most Wanted. Simply completing the game was enough for all one thousand points, but it was that game that made me realize that I could enjoy a game thoroughly while still completing all of it’s achievements.

            So, blah blah blah, I joined the military and didn’t really get to play games for a decent while until my mom mailed me my console during my technical training school. It was there that I had kind of forgotten about achievements, sort of. I didn’t really care about them as much as I did prior to leaving, but I still played all of my roommate’s games and tried to get all the achievements I could. I played Call of Duty 2, Dead Rising, Hitman: Blood Money, and even some of the games that I had purchased while I was there like Arcade Hits and Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter. Of course, he also owned Halo 2 and we would have little tournaments where I showed off how insanely good I was at that game. It’s easy to be fantastic at a game when you literally spend close to three years playing almost nothing but that one title. So yeah, I was the best around the dorms (it was like that back home too), I still wasn’t as good as these other dudes online though, and just murderous they were.

            After tech school was over I went home for a couple of weeks before driving to my final destination in Mississippi. I lived by myself in a dorm room and was dating a girl who would later become my wife. Unfortunately we lived four hours from each other so during the week I had tons of time to play games. I got sucked into little gems like Tomb Raider that my Uncle had let me borrow and Fuzion Frenzy 2, which sucked massive donkey balls. Finally, being the sweet and amazing woman she is, Nikki purchased Prey for me. I was in love with that game for a little while (still pretty disappointed that I sold it along side Blazing Angels). During all of this, my Uncle and I kept in touch pretty well and we would constantly talk about games, because when you’re not playing them, it’s fun to at least speak about them to people who love them as much as you, right? Well he too was going through Prey and we had noticed that the achievements included online multiplayer ones that forced us to log in and battle random Joes from across the globe. I sucked at that game and I hated the fact that I had to get one hundred freaking kills with each and every stinking weapon. But my Uncle and I decided to start up a private game where we would take turns killing each other until we got the achievements. Finally, we had mastered everything the game had to offer and thus once again I had a raging hard on for achievements.

            Game after game came and I wanted to play as much as I could. I was still balls deep in my Halo 2 phase though and I spent more time slaying the youth of our nation in an online game with my buddies from back home than I did hunting down new achievements, but the passion *cough* obsession *cough* was still there. Achievements had opened up a new realm for me. I wanted to play more games, and the more games I played the higher my gamer score became. But I began to realize something else, and that was the potential game developers had when it came to crafting a game. I’ve played hundreds of great stories, I’ve also played quite a few terrible stories, but each game has something different to offer and I have been able to respect them because of that. If it weren’t for achievements, I would have never picked up some of my favorite titles due to my Halo induced glaucoma. Those games were Bioshock, Assassin’s Creed, and Mass Effect. They all came out around the same time and I fell in love with all three of them.

            You see, my achievement road has always been rather rocky. At first I wanted to play as many games as possible in order to get a higher score. But then a competition grew within in me as I saw a couple of my friends reaching numbers I didn’t know were even possible. I would look through their games and see that their numbers in certain titles were larger than what I had. It was because they went for as many as they could and therefore they were gaining more with less. That’s when I realized I should try to get every achievement from every game I ever played. Holy God let me tell you that it is impossible. Unless you only play the easy games that you know you’ll complete even before you get it. Trust me, it’s not hard to gauge the difficulty of a games achievements when you can get on the internet and head over to websites like xbox360achievments.org. They have user generated achievement guides that will literally walk you through how to get every achievement for virtually every single game that offers them.

            So I began to play fewer games and in return I achieved more. I aced Blazing Angels (pun intended), I did my best to conquer Project Gotham Racing 3 and Burnout Revenge. But I quickly came to realize that some of these games had achievements that were making me hate them. That’ s when I began playing games for the wrong reasons. Instead of completing Burnout Revenge’s main campaign, I tried to gold star every race as I came across them and continued to retry it over and over if I failed. It was impossible. In fact, I found out much later, that the achievements in that game were easy to get if you simply finished the game and went back to race previous events using the new badass car you unlock at the end. Whaaat? No, instead I got pissed off at the game and haven’t played it since. After getting married and having our first kid, I got a subscription to Gamefly, you know, to save money. More games, less money = more achievements for freaking less. I would literally sit down and study a game’s guide days before it showed up in the mail. I was ready. I knew what had to be done and I would sit there playing a game with a computer sitting next to me while I raced through and tackled all of the achievements in an easy and linear manner. That felt wrong though. It felt like work to me and as time went on, the game grew stale.

            At first I played games that I wanted to try out, or at least I convinced myself that I wanted to try them out. Two Worlds looked great, but it sucked so hard that I sent it back after thirty minutes of playing it. I was then pissed off because the forty points it gave me messed up my completion percentage. What? Why was I worried about completion percentage? Stranglehold was a great game, I think, but I kept replaying the same sections over and over in order to get the kills I needed for a certain weapon and I grew insanely bored. I played the shit out Blitz the League even though I hated it. It sucked, but I decided to put up with the torture long enough to get all that I thought I could out of it.

            After a few games like that, I decided to take the easy road that these other “hunters” were doing. Play easy games that net you 1000 points in a day or two. So what did I do? I played King Kong, a movie license game that I frankly found not too great, but it had easy points. I didn’t have to do anything but play the story and boom; I had all of its achievements. I played Cars, another movie license title, that actually was pretty fun to play, but my judgment was clouded due to my gamer score hunt. Then I moved on to CSI the game, it was awfully stupid yet awfully easy to score points. Three games, three thousand points. But the worst was yet to come. My friend had rented the game that nets people the easiest and fastest way to 1000 points (In case you’re not a gamer and you’re wondering, every game released with 1000 points max, you only get more if the game has downloadable content). The game was Avatar: The Last Airbender. It actually took longer to load the game than it did to get all of its achievements. I was actually embarrassed to call myself an achievement hunter after that game and I went to my instant queue on Gamefly and took off all the games I was renting only because I knew they were easy points.

            After that, I went back to playing games I actually wanted to play. The problem was still there, though. Time Shift was fun, I think, but I didn’t really remember having fun. Frontlines: Fuels of War is a game I remember being fun, but the most excruciating moments of it came during the levels I needed achievements from. The Bourne game was fun, yet repetition of certain actions (for achievements) caused it to bore me.  I was no longer having fun playing games. Then it happened. Battlefield: Bad Company came. I studied the achievement guide, I prepared myself for it’s grueling list of achievements, and then I snapped. I couldn’t get a certain achievement (I wrote about it here) and I grew extremely angry at it.  It caused me to send the game back early without over half of the achievements. I then cancelled my subscription to Gamefly. I just couldn’t take it any longer.

            I had gotten myself to a point where I couldn’t understand why the games I was playing weren’t fun to me. Hell, when Halo 3 came out, I spent the first ten hours in multiplayer trying to get achievements, and to my surprise, so was EVERYONE else. It wasn’t like Halo 2 where I played because I had fun. Fortunately after I got all of the achievements for Halo 3, I was still able to play it because it was indeed a great game to play. I had almost as much fun with it as I did Halo 2 (H2 is king, suck it fanboys). I had come to a crossroads in my hobby that forced me to stop having fun. Achievements had literally clouded my vision so bad that I forgot what a fun game was supposed to be like. I still wanted to get my achievements, but I didn’t want to go through the hassle of chasing down every last one of them so my completion percentage could be perfect. So from there, I went on to purchase only the games I wanted to play, and I played them first before hunting down any achievements they had to offer. Hell, I even went back and played other games I have already beaten and realized how much fun they really were.

            Don’t get me wrong though. That part of me has never died. I still hunt down achievements the way I use to, but I only do it if I WANT to. On top of that, I make it a point to play a game all the way through without even thinking about getting the achievements first. If after that I decide i want to go back and hunt, then I will (I normally do). Grand Theft Auto IV was fun to me because of this, so was Gears of War 2 and The Orange Box. I was having fun again and I realized that I had lost sight of what really matters. I played games long before they came with achievements and, as my Uncle would say, I’ll be playing games long after they’re gone (which I’m hoping is never).

            Here’s the thing about achievements that I think every achievement hunter needs to know. First off, we need to realize that they’re a marketing ploy by Microsoft. They know how freaking addicting they can be to perfectionists like me. They know that I will pay for every DLC package they put out because I want to get all the points I can (although I no longer purchase DLC unless it’s something I want to play). People are paying their hard earned cash so than can get more achievements. They're paying for points instead of a quality content package in games that suck so bad that they shouldn’t be putting it out into the market. Secondly, achievements aren’t a bad thing. They’re good for games. But you cannot let them get into your head the way they did to me. Please remember that you play games for fun. I know I do. I haven’t played one game, not ONE game, since Avatar that I haven’t already wanted to play. And it’s a relief people. I can play Rock Band and Guitar Hero knowing full well that I won’t get even a quarter of the achievements, but the games are still fun to me. I can play games like L.A. Noire and not have to worry about the achievements because I know I can go back later and get them. It's about entertainment. Some people enjoy hunting achievements while other enjoy everything but.

            Now, some games do exploit achievements in order to get you to play their game more. Games like Unreal Tournament III have achievements that require you to log in and get a certain number of kills each day on multiple different days. I think Band of Brothers has an achievement that you can only get on ONE day out of the year. If you miss out on it, you’ll have to wait a full 365 before you can try to get it. Some games want you to log a certain number of hours online in their multiplayer. Gears of War comes to mind when I think of this because they want you to get a certain number of kills with each weapon and a total of ten thousand kills and the only way you can do that is in online multiplayer. I’ve tanked hours into that game and have still come up empty handed.

            I suppose I’m getting off topic here a little bit, my bad. I’m just trying to knock the point into your heads that achievements can be good and bad, but they don't define gaming. Well, I suppose it all depends on how you look at them. I hunted achievements for many reasons. At first I was fueled by competition. Then I was fueled by perfectionism. Now I’m fueled by my lust for a great story and a fun game. I still care about achievements, but not the way they should ever be cared about and most certainly never more than the game itself. That is why I’ve had so much fun playing games since I have given up that obsessive journey to have the highest score possible. To me, games have become just as enjoyable as they’re meant to be with added perks to feed my completionist hunger. On that same note, I’ve enjoyed some games even more because the achievements have gotten me to go outside the box a little bit to find a hidden Easter egg or collect all of the voxophones (Bioshock: Infinite) that reveal more of the story than you would have gotten without them. This is why the last fifty thousand gamer score I’ve added to my total have went by in a breeze. I’ve been stress free and I’ve been enjoying my hobby to it’s fullest. I’ve even branched out and tried games I was too scared to try because of how difficult the achievements were supposed to be (Skyrim). I would have been missing out on so much!

            So just two days ago I was on the final leg of Bioshock: Infinite, a game that I believe will win Game of the Year from many publications, when “plachink” a twenty-five-point achievement popped. Infused with Greatness: Collected every infusion upgrade in a single game. Not once did I look at an achievement guide to find them all, I just played the game like I normally would and as I went to look to see what goodie I just unlocked, I realized that my Gamer

score had finally breached 100,000. It’s a milestone indeed people and I’m very happy to have made it this far. It’s fun to go back and look at all the games I’ve played that got me here. Most of them were fun; a lot of them were simply mediocre, and a small percentage of them totally sucked. Here’s to the next ten years in my hobby where I’ll possibly hit 200,000, but until then, game on people. And stay thirsty.