The risks of achievement whoring.

I’ve considered myself an achievement whore the entire time I’ve owned my Xbox 360, and on the whole I enjoy the idea of my wacky gaming adventures being immortalized in a clear-cut number that is exactly equal to the size of my epeen. Just playing a game to completion will usually get you a fair amount of achievements, and getting most of the rest is a matter of completing cool or fun things you might have done anyway just for the hell of it. For example, you get an achievement in Crackdown if you launch a car more than 500 feet into the air. Nobody who plays Crackdown is going to not do that.

Some achievements, though, seem to be specifically designed to make you hate a game. The 51st or 52nd time I re-started “Dear Prudence” to clear the “hit all the hammer-ons without strumming them” achievement in The Beatles I was pretty sure I didn’t want to ever hear the song again. Games with missable stuff like Blue Dragon force you to either play from an achievement guide from the get-go or re-play all 70 hours of game. My initial playthrough of Bionic Commando, a game I should by all rights have enjoyed the pants off of, stalled out because of the almost draculonean nature of its “collect everything” achievement.

And honestly, what kind of neanderthal doesn’t want to collect everything?

Then you have the achievements that serve to remind you how good you will never, ever be at a game. Kill three guys with one shot from the Spartan Laser? Complete the entire game without taking damage? Level a job to 75 in FF11? Get 100% on anything on expert drums? What am I over here, Superman?

Still, I’ve done things I’m not proud of in the name of padding my gamerscore. I leveled everyone to 99 in Blue Dragon. I’ve bought games on XBLA I already owned on other platforms. I’ve formed Live parties with other people specifically for the purpose of earning achievements rather than, you know, play an actual game just for the sake of it. I’ve even picked Xbox games over other, more fun games on other platforms because my crazy head somehow rationalized that those other games “didn’t count” since they weren’t increasing my gamerscore. My psyche has somehow managed to concoct a universe in which building LittleBigPlanet levels is a waste of time compared to abusing the tacked-on save game feature in a shitty port of Sonic the Hedgehog.

I wish I could get retroactive credit for my past years of utterly insane gaming triumphs. I’ve completed photo albums, stockpiled dogtags, soloed unsolo-able RPGs, defeated staff ghosts, hunted down skulltulas, dodged lightning bolts and collected 120 stars with the guy you can’t unlock until you collect 120 stars. Surely some of that is worth something, right? Right?