What Makes A Good Achievement?

I just finished reading x360a's Achievement Awards of 2009 (as I always do every year) and I must say I did enjoy reading it. The problem however is that I seem to disagree a lot with the views of Dan Webb and potentially many more gamers.

To me an achievement needs to be what's in the name, an actual achievement. There are of course lots of different types of achievements that have variety but ultimately I believe that the gamer needs to be achieving a feat that they are proud of when they hear their achievement pop. With this in mind I can pick out various points throughout the article that I have a problem with, mainly the choice of Fable 2 as best DLC achievements. So apparently you need to shoot some gamers in the groin, yay? Correct me if I'm wrong but I don't see a challenge there and instead an achievement that is easy to do and anyone can get. I got the original 1000 in Fable 2 and I remember that the getting villagers drunk achievement was not fun. It just didn't work and I found myself getting frustrating, asking myself "why am I actually doing this as there is pretty much no skill involved, just luck".

I also think the article is too critical on generic based achievements. I personally don't see the problem in Terminator Salvation giving you the full 1000 for just completing the game. I won't compliment the developers for the list as I do believe a few more types of achievements could have been added such as completing a mission without dying or only using one weapon throughout, this however doesn't mean the game needs to be ridiculed on. I haven't played the game yet but when I do I'm sure I'll enjoy earning the achievements by using my skill of FPS's to complete the game on Hard, much more of a worthy achievement in my books than punching a horse in the face which requires no skill but nets you 100G, get what I'm saying?

Ultimately I think people are getting too wound up in the easy gamerscore world, wanting all games to be nice and easy so that they can net their 1000 points and move on. A great example of this is in the Guitar Hero and Rock Band games. I personally love the Expert achievements as I am aware that people which can play the instrument on that difficulty will unlock the achievement whilst others don't, the people that did make the achievement pop will now get recognition they deserve instead of those that 1000 Guitar Hero 5 or Band Hero. There's a reason why I played Guitar Hero 2 and 3 the most on my 360, it's because their achievement lists pushed me the most to go and 5 star every song on every difficulty, a feat I one day dream of being able to do.

Don't get me wrong I'm not completely against having a few various random achievements, I just think they should be skill based and not based on awe factor all the time (that must be the reason why people enjoyed punching a horse in Darkest of Days, right?).



Let me know what you think by posting a comment. I hope I haven't sounded critical on Dan from x360a, he's just a good example for me to use right now in order to vent my feelings on this subject.

Bought Fantastic 4 & Shrek The Third for £7

As I was going to strawberry fair yesterday (a local big festival where thousands of people do drugs, drink and listen to music) it meant I would be venturing into Cambridge. As I still had £10 on my HMV Gift Voucher I thought today would be a good time to make use of it as it was a Christmas present I've been meaning to spend. I ended up putting that £10 towards One Tree Hill Series 5 for my girlfriend but the temptation to get Fantastic 4 for just £3 meant I also bought that. After leaving the store I decided to go back and get Shrek The Third too for £4. So why did I buy these games when I've played them before...?

Fantastic 4: So I rented this game a year and a big ago and got every achievement except the last one which needed you to complete the whole game again but on hard difficulty as the two difficulty achievements are not stackable. At the time I was sick of the game and just couldn't be bothered to go through it again for the 160 gamerscore the achievement offered. I've now changed though and become more of a completionist which meant I knew this game should be finished off. As of right now I've finished the first 2 acts again and started on the third meaning I'm already nearly halfway there after a few hours of play. This achievement could be gotten tonight and most likely will be as I'd love to trade it in tomorrow.

Shrek The Third: If you read the first paragraph of this blog you'd have realised I left the shop and then came back for this game. I did this because I was already aware that CEX will give me £4 cash or £6 trade in value for this game which meant I had nothing to lose and the potential to gain £2 in store credit at CEX plus the chance to finish off the achievements in this game before hand. I am not sure if I'm going to bother to do these though as I can't remember the game very well, all I remember is getting frustrated that I kept dieing at this one point on the hardest difficulty and ended up giving up. As I can't remember the game I'm unaware of how hard/long it will be to have to achieve a Perfect on every level so it does put me off wanting to put this game back into my console. I'll check out the guide on X360A later and hopefully the game will have a Road Map, back when I played Shrek they didn't exist.

So there you have it, the reason why I spent £7 on these two games yesterday is to hopefully finish the achievements off on them. Fantastic 4 will definitely be done and it would be nice to do Shrek however I can foresee me simply using it as a tool to help me get a better game when I trade these two in at CEX. With the likes of Overlord and the newest Tomb Raider being sold for £12 it's very tempting to trade my games in and get one of these. Tomorrow might be my last day going to College though which will mean it will be months until I get the chance to go CEX so there's a good chance I'll end up keeping the games until September. Just have to see what happens.