I’m a gamer. Once the princesses go to bed, and the Queen has realized that my stare has that glassy look to it, I’m left to my video games sometime between 9pm and midnight. I play because I enjoy it, and when I discovered that the Xbox games have all those wonderful achievements, I quickly entered the ranks of the achievement hunters.
Some of you may not be aware of these achievements, so I’d like to let both of you know that most of the achievements have been related to actually achieving something, such as beating the game, tracking progress, accumulating collectibles, and outscoring other people on Xbox Live as well as highlighting facets of the game you might otherwise miss (would not have caught that you could throw sand in an enemy’s face in Assassin’s Creed II without them), but in other cases, achievements feel like the developers have run out of ideas or were simply high when they made the list. Accomplishing these tasks in game are worth something called Gamerscore, which is little more than bragging rights, though Xbox has had a rewards program that gave you a little 2% discount if you hit 25,000G along with a couple of other very minor perks.
This is not a comprehensive list of the best or worst of these achievements gone weird, but more or less those that I’ve run across in my own gaming that I thought were just strange or really pointless.
Skylanders: Spyro’s Adventure: True Portal Master
Unlock all other achievements
The first Skylanders game brought some piece of the video game into the real world in the form of $10 figurines that everyone had to have to the extent that stores were sold out of them for months after the Christmas of 2011. The game had the usual achievement fare of completing levels, opening bonus areas, and completing the final with a single Skylander, but then there was this rather pointless one. The game has 38 total achievements, and no one who plays the game will ever have 37 because the final achievement, worth a whopping 80 Gamerscore, is to accumulate all of the other achievements.
What’s wrong with this is that the point of accumulating achievements is to get them all, so having an achievement whose sole purpose is to count the other achievements is a waste of space. Why not just spread those points out to the other ones?
Batman: Arkham City: Storyteller
Have 12 murderous dates with Calendar Man
Arkham City was the follow-up game to Arkham Asylum, and both of them are really exceptional to play. Because the game is a open world sandbox environment, the achievements are generally related to gathering collectibles, hitting milestones, and completing the myriad of missions that are presented. This is one of those missions (sort of).
Calendar Mar is located in a jail cell under the police station, and to get this achievement, you have to visit him on some very specific days – 12 of them, obviously. Which days, you ask? A holiday in each of the 12 months of the year, of course. This means to properly acquire this achievement, you have to interrupt your holidays to see Calendar Man and chat over the course of an entire year. Miss the holiday? Well, there’s another one next year.
Or you can do what most people do: disconnect the Xbox from the net and change the date. It honestly makes more sense.
Portal 2: Professor Portal
After completing co-op, complete Calibration Course online with a friend who hasn't played before
The first Portal game was genius, and the second took it to new heights with a hilariously involved storyline and some mind-bending puzzles along with an ingenious co-op mode. Not only that, but you could play this co-op mode over Xbox Live and lose that annoying split-screen. Then you look through the achievements and after you chuckle at hugging three people over Live, you get to this one.
After you complete the co-op game, you have to locate someone who has never played co-op and complete the Calibration course. This is not as easy as it sounds. The achievement site I frequent has an entire message board dedicated to finding Portal 2 co-op virgins whose “cake has not yet been tasted.” I get that they wanted to highlight the online aspect of the game, but randomly finding someone who bought Portal 2 and never played the co-op is no small task.
I found a friend of mine at work who had just started the campaign portion of the game, and commanded him to not start that co-op without me. Yes, I said commanded. What?
Rabbids: Alive and Kicking: 3 of them
The Raving Rabbids series is supposed to be stupid humor. They don’t pretend to be anything else. It’s all about burping, farting, and slapstick, and the Kinect version of the game holds true to that. In fact, this particular game should have been bundled with the Kinect since it uses the peripheral to an extent that no other Kinect game I've played does. It would stand to reason, then, that the achievements would have some silliness to them. In fact, a lot of the achievements involve doing exactly the opposite of what you’re supposed to do in the mini-games. Silly digresses into pointless, however, when the first achievement anyone gets is this one.
Launch the game for the first time
Yes, that’s an achievement for managing to start the game. Well done, soldier, you found the word “start” on the screen, and dutifully followed its instructions. Why might this be here? Oh, there is a possible, quite diabolical reason, for it. You see, when you start a game you can remove it from your list of game sin Xbox Live provided you haven't acquired any achievements. Once you get even one achievement, you're stuck with it forever. This is why I have The Michael Jackson Experience in my game list. One stupid achievement, and there is no deleting it...ever.
Anyway, if you managed to start the game, and forget to quit, you might just come up with this one.
Play for 2 hours, 3 minutes and 59 seconds in one session.
The joke, of course, is that at the time of the game’s creation, the best marathon time was 2:03:59, so they decided to tell everyone to play a physical video game for over 2 hours in one session. Still, that one isn’t as good as this one.
Play 6 months after your first game
Like in Arkham City’s storyteller, one is tempted to fiddle with the dates.
Most Lego Games: Use One Character to Defeat Another
The Lego games have always had a wonderful sense of humor that they inject into culture’s biggest franchises, and along with that humor, they throw in some achievements that make you feel led by the nose to do something that you would never do in the course of playing the game. These involve choosing two specific characters, loading a specific level, and then using one character to kill the other. Sometimes, as in the case of Harry Potter: Years 1-4’s Role Reversal, doing this involves finding a very specific character only available very late in the game, such as Voldemort, who is only available after you've completed the game to 100%, but most of the time, the characters are just match-ups the creators thought would be funny. Normally, you tend to be respectful of your pathetic AI sidekick and just leave him alone to chase butterflies, but to grab that low-hanging Gamerscore fruit, you have to get violent on your sidekick, such as with:
Crossover: Destroy Jango Fett with Boba Fett.
or
Defeat Sinestro as Green Lantern
And while we’re on the subject of Lego…
Turn the sound and music down to 0 in the options menu whilst in the library
I want you to read that very carefully. The developers want you to be aware that you can turn down the music and sound effects from the options menu. Normally, they include that sort of information in the manual no one ever reads, or that they stumble across exactly one time while looking for the red brick menu and accidentally hit options instead, but this one decided that turning down the internal game volume was so important, it warranted a special achievement to have you do it...in a very specific place in the game.
Fable 3: We Need Guns, Lots of Guns
Collect all 50 legendary weapons. They won’t all appear in your world, so trade with other Heroes!
Oh yes, the exclamation point is part of the wording on this one. Fable III has some wacky achievements anyway, such as marrying a friend’s character over Xbox Live and having a baby with them, but this one is especially warped. The game, itself, only contains 24 of these legendary weapons, and they appear randomly meaning that your playthrough and your friend’s playthrough might gather different weapons, and the social aspect of them game allows you to trade these things. But do the math there and understand that everyone else is working to get these together. In addition, you have to have all of these in your possession, not having simply owned it at one time or another, so you have to hoard them until you have the achievement.
Sure, marrying your buddy is weird, but collecting an item that doesn’t exist in your own game is beyond that, in my opinion.
Dance Central 3: We’re Friends, Right?
Link Dance Central 3 to your Facebook account.
This is another one of those achievements that is intended to highlight an aspect of the game that you might have otherwise overlooked, and I picked it over a couple of other achievements that are also a bit silly such as skipping songs and playing for three weekends in a row because it involves the world outside the game. Sure, Facebook is the world’s largest social media platform, and the chances that your average player has a Facebook account is almost guaranteed, but to require someone who is playing a game to have an account there seems over the top to me.
Yoostar 2: Red Carpet Superstar
Achieve 2,500,000 Fame.
I throw this one in last because when the game came out, it was an achievement in the vein of the Gears of Wars franchise’s “Seriously” achievements (no, just kidding, nothing is that crazy), but what happened with Yoostar made this one much, much worse. Fame on Yoostar was supposed to have been acquired through posting the crappy movie scene remakes you made on your Kinect to their servers and people vote on them or something like that. I don’t really know because the Yoostar servers are down, never to return, so this achievement, and the others from the game that have to do with the social aspect of the game, have the worst categorization an achievement hunter can come across: Unobtainable.
I’ve searched for a reason as to why this happened, but never came across anything. If anyone ever played this game, they’ll never have 100% completion in their game lists.
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