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.
Late last year, Armour Games released a free to play browser game titled Achievement Unlocked. The instructions read: "Who needs gameplay when you have ACHIEVEMENTS? Don't worry about beating levels, finding ways to kill enemies, or beating the final boss... there are none. Focus solely on your ultimate destiny: doing random tasks that have nothing to do with anything. Meta-game yourself with ease! Self-satisfaction never felt so... artificial!" To date the game has received 1,156,149 plays and enjoyed countless mentions and dissections on blogs and gaming websites around the world.
You know your idea has made it when close to 1.2 million people play a parody webgame about it. Come to think of it, you know your idea has made it when Sony steals it wholesale to use in its own console's online superstructure. Or when Blizzard builds it into the framework of the most popular MMO in history. Or when The Simpsons, that sieve of all cultural detritus worthy of satire, make it the subject of their game's very first joke, rewarding players with an Achievement merely for pressing the start button on the menu screen for the first time.
Microsoft has been quick to respond to the Achievement love-in, allowing for web gamercards and Xbox.com integration, and making them more visually exciting in the NXE update.
It didn't take long for gamers' initial reaction to the Xbox 360's meta-reward system to turn from uncertainty to acceptance. For many, like Stallion83, it was then just a short hop to all-consuming obsession. That we should have become so enamoured with Achievements should be no great surprise. Maintaining an indelible record of our in-game accomplishments somehow ascribes them a greater sense of purpose and worth. And, by keeping a running tally of all the points we've ever won, the very act of playing videogames is turned into a high-score challenge, a meta-game that plays out across our entire videogame library, not just within individual titles.
But for all the satire, every gamer knows that Achievement points, as ridiculous and vacuous as they might appear to the outsider, reveal deep truths about why we play videogames. Humans like to be told they are clever and talented and skillful and videogames are machines precision-designed to do just that very thing. They may first hurl us on to spikes, blow us up and punch us in the tits, but these setbacks only make the accomplishments all the sweeter. Master a game system and, in contrast to the fickle vagaries of real life, you will have your reward. And we have become so accustomed to having our worth as a gamer relayed by a number - a high score in Pac-Man, a character's level in Final Fantasy, a number of kills in Halo - that simply watching a number slowly increase is often enough to convince us that what we're doing is somehow worthwhile, perhaps even that we are somehow worthwhile.
The truth is that Achievement points are, for many, the glue that holds Microsoft's Xbox Live service together, the reason why we buy a cross-platform game on one particular system and not the others, one's gamerscore simultaneously a badge of bragging rights, a measure of how thoroughly we play our games and, most troubling, an irrefutable record of how we spend our days.
From the perspective of a developer, however, Achievements have a great many other tangible benefits. They allow game-makers to tap into the different reasons why different players play particular games, sending one group off to collect a thousand orbs, another to accumulate ten thousand kills and another still to work to become the best in the world.
The gnome quest in Half-Life: Episode Two is at the extreme end of the meta Achievement scale. (Thanks to PC Gamer's Tom Francis for the use of this screenshot.)
Some developers employ Achievements to encourage players to use all the in-game tools available to their character, or even to explain in explicit terms how the game systems work. Many developers use Achievements to make jokes or wry commentary. Dead Rising's 'Zombie Genocider', awarded for killing 54,594 zombies was drolly-trumped by Left 4 Dead, which offered 'Zombie Genocidist' for killing 53,595 of the undead. Almost all of Civilization Revolution's Achievement names will be hilarious to hardcore RTS nerds (and impenetrable for the rest of us).
Of course, at their worst, Achievements seek to somehow make up for a lack of interesting in-game challenges, sending players off on empty fetch-quests and inane collect-'em-up hunts. But at their best, they inspire us to play the game in new and interesting ways, subverting the games rule-set, and, in the case of Geometry Wars' Pacifism Achievement, even birthing new game modes in future sequels.
So we mock Achievement points because they spell out in large numbers what is so pathetic about videogames. 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 videogames. 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 that in mind, turn the page for ten of the very best.
1. Dead Rising
- Achievement: 7-Day Survivor
- Instruction: Survive for at least 7 days.
- Gamerscore: 30
- See it done.
As if being set upon in a mall by fifty thousand zombies at the end of the world wasn't enough of a challenge, the infamous 7-Day Survivor achievement requires you to play the game for 14 hours straight, while everyone and everything in the game is turned against you and, just to top it off, while having your health constantly deplete. Sure, it's a challenge of endurance, as much as skill, but this is the longest day for the Achievement whore rivaled only by Rock Band 2's Bladder of Steel achievement for an act of sadistic endurance.
2. Crackdown
- Achievement: Body Armor
- Instruction: Use the Harpoon gun to attach 5 gang member corpses to a single vehicle.
- Gamerscore: 10
- See it done.
More fun than using a rudimentary map printed out from Gamefaqs to locate that bastard last hidden orb, Body Armour has you using the DLC-exclusive harpoon gun to impale five gang members to a car of your choosing. The harpoons disappear after around 60 seconds, but that should be more than enough time to get the set. Brings new meaning to the phrase Pimp My Ride.
3. Fallout 3
Forget killing this guy - go rescue a violin.
- Achievement: Agatha's Song
- Instruction: Completed "Agatha's Song".
- Points: 20
- See it done.
There's a cute sort of absurdity in having to trek across a post-nuclear wasteland in search of a priceless Stradivarius violin for an old lady. The instrument can be found in the depths of a pre-apocalypse recording studio (allegedly owned by one Rick Rubin), resting in a dusty violin case. Bring it back to the amiable Agatha and her melancholic strains will sound out across the wasteland's airwaves, a constant reminder that beauty can always somehow be salvaged from desolation.
4. Half-Life 2
- Achievement: Targeted Advertising
- Instruction: Pin a soldier to the billboard in chapter Highway 17.
- Points: 5
- See it done.
Valve knows better than most how to frame a good Achievement, and the developer's bumper game compilation, the Orange Box, is filled with ingenious meta-missions. Pinning a soldier to a billboard with the harpoon gun is one of gaming's most enjoyable visual puns.
5. Half-Life 2
- Achievement: OSHA Violation
- Instruction: Kill 3 enemies using the crane.
- Points: 5
- See it done.
How many times have you been sat at the controls of a 50-foot crane, just wishing you could tear off your safety helmet and start swinging its colossal steel arm around in wide arcing motions, like some sort of giant orange mace, flailing your co-workers in their faces until you achieve enough up force to take to the skies in your awesome crane-o-copter? Sadly, OSHA violation only lets us live out one of those fantasies.
6. Star Wars: The Force Unleashed
- Achievement: Worst Day-Shift Manager Ever
- Instruction: Kill 12 Stormtroopers as Vader during the Prologue.
- Points: 10
- See it done.
Darth Vader was never going to make for a good boss: too much mind control and distracting asthma to make working life pleasurable. But if you're the guy with the withered face under the mask, tossing your foot-soldier stormtroopers into nearby tree-trunks so their pathetic backs snap like your estranged son's temper? Well, that's another thing entirely.
7. Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock
Pacifism wasn't just the best Achievement for Geometry Wars, it was a blueprint for one of the sequel's best modes - not to mention the Achievement strategies of numerous other games within and without.
- Achievement: Tone Deaf
- Instruction: Beat any song on the expert difficulty with the game's sound options turned down to zero.
- Points: 5
- See it done.
Many Achievements require players to self-limit themselves in order to increase the challenge. Tone Deaf is king of this approach, requiring players to complete any song on the hardest difficulty with the music turned off, playing an audio game with just the visual cues. Sadly, you can cheat by turning the sound options off for the last couple of notes of the song only, but still, it's the thought that counts.
8. Half-Life 2: Episode Two
- Achievement: Little Rocket Man
- Instruction: Send the garden gnome into space.
- Points: 30
- See it done.
Not so much a fetch-quest as an escort quest. Carrying a garden gnome through the entirety of Episode Two is one of gaming's most delicious and yet infuriating challenges, as anyone who's tried to balance the blasted thing on the bonnet of the rickety car in the Hunter-Chopper pursuit can attest. But it's all worth it when you get to see his stupid hobbitty face light up as you stuff him in the hold of the space shuttle, right? Right?
9. Final Fantasy XI
- Achievement: Reach Character Level 75 (multiple)
- Instruction: Achieved level 75 as [insert job class].
- Points: 30 x 14
- See it done: N/A
Widely regarded as the hardest 1000 gamerpoints you'll never earn, this set of Achievements is reserved for the player who manages to level every job class in Square-Enix's sprawling MMO to a dizzying level 75. As it takes the average player anything from 12-18 months to level a single job to that level, the idea of doing so for 14 different job classes is, how should we say, a long-term project. As far as Eurogamer is aware, nobody in the world has earned the full set of Achievements legitimately yet, and nobody is likely to within the next decade.
10. Shadowrun
- Achievement: Shadowrun Fever
- Instruction: "Catch it!"
- Gamerpoints: 25
- See it done.
The only STD-based Achievement we know of, Shadowrun Fever is viral in every sense of the word. Based on the popular American online sport of tea-bagging, in which sexually-confused teenagers dip their virtual balls into the mouths of dead teenage boys, you'll need to "catch it" off someone who already "has it". Oh God. No. I just read that sentence back. What the hell am I doing with my life? Achievement Unlocked: Reached Epiphany RE: Indefensible Futility of Your Hobby.
