Gaming Achievements

Don’t know about you guys out there, but I feel a bit off every time Steam tells me I’ve  completed an achievement. I always open up the in-game overlay to see what I did to deserve a pop-up like that. Usually achievements fall under after completing part of a the game or the whole, then there are achievements which are very mundane. Some games are sensible with the achievements but there are are some that can be sinning against the purpose of achievements.

To me, a sensible achievements is story completions. It makes sense especially if you created a game that’s hours long. Another sensible one is when you collect an amount of objects. Makes sense to put a good achievement on a tedious task. If the game has some complex stuff in it, it’s even cooler if there is an achievement for it like saving someone from explosion damage or being able to react to a certain way. However there are a few achievements I don’t want to see even though I might have achieved these on my own account and accord.

I like a good achievements for a repetitive task. However a repetitive achievement for a repetitive task is overboard. As much as I can kill 100 bots, I don’t want to kill a million bots for an achievement. At that point, you’re just playing to kill and not necessarily enjoying the killing bots. This goes the same with FPS games which does the same thing but with a different weapon. I’ve played games which want the player to kill  a thousand with one weapon and a thousand with another. It’s a nice way to push players to try these guns and grenades, but there is no point aside from forcing players to play with weapons the developer is lazy to balance or the player does not which to play with for the duration.

Mystery achievements, as much as they are surprising they sometimes don’t provide any contextual information for their completions. Whether in the icon or description, they can be fairly vague. Most games I’ve encountered have been mysterious but able to convey a point where they want us to do. For most of the time, some of you developers have to give the player some sort of clue.

Then there are games I’m not even sure they’re really games anymore with over a hundred achievements. I have a game in my library which has over 500 achievements. Most of the are hidden since Steam has the courtesy to hide the massive list. I don’t think I have the patience for 500 achievements! Early on I had Team Fortress 2 as the only game with achievements. Looking at it now, it has a lot of achievements that look intense. I did achieve the “Pyromancer” achievements but it was an undertaking. To spent years on a game to complete the list of achievements is as agonizing as spending years in an institution. Which gets me into downloadable content achievements!

This generation of gamers seem to support DLC to games. Nothing wrong with that since some of them are like expansion packs of the past. Most of them would hardly count as an expansion pack, but I digress. I don’t like achievements related to DLC’s, especially on Steam since the service clumps all the game’s achievements. Which means you can’t “perfect” a game on Steam without buying their DLC content. Which sort of supports the argument of games are incomplete until all the DLC’s are released which sounds a cash grab.

Achievements should be an enhancement and not the objective for enjoying the game. I honestly hope more games can do less in achievements.

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Achievements.

At the time of this post, I’ve been playing a whole lot of Insurgency. Though there are a lot of boosters for the new Day of Infamy mod from the community, I’m staying close to the base game for the fact I spent over 800 hours to get to this very moment. The very moment: “Bodycount X (Co-op) – Kill 100, 000 enemies.”

In many games now, there are accolades for accumulated kills. Like many games, they award in increments. In Insurgency as the X suggests, it’s the tenth one in the line of Bodycount  achievements. As much as I dislike games with an achievement grind, this one I cannot ignore. I want to have it because I’ve spent so much time invested into the game to not complete all the co-op achieves.

I can’t help relating to my predicament to reality. Achievements in life, especially recognized by others, are the hardest to receive. Hardest are for those who seek them rather than doing what they’re doing. When I first starting playing Insurgency, I thought I would give up around hour 250. I’m now coming close to 850 hours and the last couple years feel like nothing. I would say it’s a blur since I’ve been playing the same maps and the same game modes repetitively. I’ve been more or less racking in about an hour or two a day and only recently I’ve been pushing it to gain more kills. Much to my surprise in the past week, I’ve inched closer and closer. Start of 2016, I needed about 20k kills; I’m now almost halfway with a an estimate of a month to finish. After that, I’m not sure if I would play PvP to complete all the achievements.

Much in life, you have to keep doing what you love and your will be rewarded with something meaningful.

In the interest of doing some good, do some evil…

Keeping up with what this blog is about; okay that might be a half truth, I would like to share some of my thoughts in terms of new games in old games. They may be just decades old; but with new tech going in, you’re bound to make games within games. No, I’m not discussing mods (though I’ll talk about it later…maybe) but just genuine ideas that pop into mind that sparks the curious phrase “can this be done?” or with someone in the room joining in declaring “challenge accepted.” So I thought I would share all the challenged I’ve completed or tried so far. Win or lose, these can give you a few more hours out of the game.

GTAIV – Get a 3 star wanted level or higher. Then travel from one side of the map to the other. Simple? Here’s the catch; no public transportation and no vehicle jacking. Just pure stupidity and quick reflexes.

GTAIV – Play the story in under 10 hours. No trainers and mods.

Runes Of Magic – Complete the first 20 levels with nothing more than your fists. No armour, no potions, no use of your class skills, no help. Just mano-a-creepo action.

NavyField – Play Great Battle with nothing more than the starting frigate. To win this, survive the match. That’s all, just if you live at the end with all ships sunk…you win. You may bring whatever you want into this, just survive at the end.

Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood – Start large fights and win them with only your hidden blade. You may run around to aggro more guard. No use of the animus to achieve this.

Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Vegas 2 – Campaign, weak pistol, weak armour, no gadget use…no need to say more.

NHL 09 (any NHL game would do too) – “Keep away” for a whole game. The other team should never intercept or receive the puck in any way. Do this on normal or hard difficulty, standard NHL rules and you must also win the game. Stupidity mode for this: Do this but for a whole season, also get into the playoff and you MUST play every game.

Armed Assault (Any in the series) – Walk from one side of the map to the other. No rigging your keyboard to auto walk either. Running allowed and you must carry a weapon and 5 magazines. Yup, that simple.

Half Life 2 – Story meet crowbar, crowbar meet story. Stupidity mode: Episode 2 as well. Also you can allow no dying if you want.

Alliance of Valiant Arms – Spend the whole day farming money. Full 24 hours and note, this is going to make your brain melt.

Global Agenda – As a free agent, play all 50 levels and do all missions with basic gear. You may mod and may add “no dying” to the list to do along with “100% win.” Hardest so be prepared to really enjoy failing.

Battlefield 2142 – I call this one “Unwavering Defence”. In a multiplayer Titan match, you must stay on the titan and defend it no matter what. You may want to do this without dying, can’t choose engineer, pistols only, and solo defence.

Battlefield 2142 – Play on the ground without dying can cannot resupply with your team’s kit including the previous and current kit you used. That means if you have the medic kit to heal yourself, you have to pick up a different medic kit to heal yourself again. That goes the same with bullets and gadgets. Let the madness begin!

Alien Swarm – Melee the all the aliens in a campaign. That is all.

Call Of Duty and Battlefield (any) – Like Alien Swarm.

Bonus challenge I would give to you all. Complete all 15 in under a month.

Congratulations, Achievement Unlocked: “Got no life, got no job, got no brains.”

Share your stupidity by leaving a comment. If you actually did a few of these, please share your experience…or ordeal. Have fun, happy hunting!

Achievement Unlocked: Trilogy Prodigy

Last night, I finally completed Episodes Of Liberty City; which is the two DLC sequels to Grand Theft Auto IV.A month back I finished The Lost And Damn which took about 2 days.

Probably the most easy DLC I’ve played but Lost and Damn was pretty anticlimactic on how it ended and how the game made you drive a chopper all the time. Whenever I could, I opted for a car for straight cruising around from area x to area y. Also surprised how the Hot Coffee mod was removed from San Andreas but the nudity isn’t censored here, pretty damn surprised to know that the people on this stuff are either enjoying the penis or really misogynistic when revealing lady bits. Anyways, it was really straight up hardcore where you really had to run into a prison and kill the boss. That was intense, but pretty sad at the end since you lose a lot of great stuff like a hangout and some abilities.

Just last night, I finished The Ballad of Gay Tony. It was pretty thrilling to see all three storylines hook up in an ironic twist.Looking back on it, the protagonist was very relatable and more down to earth than the other 2 main protagonists. The most appealing part of the whole DLC was the two new weapons which were never featured in the whole series; the FN P90 and the DSR-1 (they didn’t use those names, but the resemblance is amazing). I don’t know why, but P90’s are really the selling point for me. Probably because of the design, but then again this is suppose to be about a video game and not the guns. Overall it ended pretty well with a long shoot out and a heavy parachute scene. By heavy I mean extremely long since you have to either land it right or you have to steal a car to get to the end. The end pretty much sums up the trilogy with a bit of leverage for a fourth or fifth. I doubt Rockstar would really want to make more DLC’s but it would be nice to have the fourth be the longest running game in the series.

Definitely for fans of the series, I would recommend it if you haven’t gotten a copy. It doesn’t require the original game and you get two games in one (sort of). For the price it wasn’t that bad, at 20-ish bucks; it’s really a good find for a game of this calibre. Though I did go through the story mode, I think the side missions would yield great gameplay.