On November 9th, 2010, I was awarded my 10,000th Xbox Achievement point. The task that pushed me over the 10k mark, you might ask? Pushing down poor people in the original Assassin’s Creed. This got me thinking about all the other achievement points that I earned over the course of the last 4 years. How many other virtual people did I destroy on my way to 10k points? How many hours of my life did I waste playing garbage games for online bragging rights? Luckily, Microsoft is keeping track so I can go back though some favorite achievements through Xbox.com.
Oddly enough, my journey to a 10k Xbox Gamer Score started by waiting in line at Wal-Mart until midnight to get a Nintendo Wii on launch night. The first Gears of War game had just been released and a couple of my friends decided that the Wii simply wasn’t going to cut it. This brand new father didn’t have the extra coins laying around to pick up both, so they gifted me a used Xbox 360 along with a copy of Madden 2007 a couple of weeks after the Wii release. A quick trip to Best Buy later and I was ready to rock with Madden, Gears of War, and Halo: Combat Evolved for the original Xbox.
Achievement points came cheap and easy in early days of the Xbox 360. Although I only got a few of the points for Madden 2007, you can get close to 600 out of 1000 points by playing just one NFL season. Gears of War was almost just as easy to get points. Hell, you got 10 points just for completing the tutorial level and 10 more just for playing your first online match. Call of Duty 2 was one of the few launch games that I played and is one of the best examples of getting easy points. Completing the game on the hardest difficulty setting will get you 1000/1000 points. This is how the phrase “Achievement Whore” was born, children.
These launch games didn’t really reward you for going out of your way to explore the games content. Part of this was that the developers were still getting used to the idea of putting achievements in their games and, looking back on the achievements I got from these games, nothing really made me say “Holy crap that was unbelievable!” The other part of this was my fault for not getting Xbox Live in time to enjoy the online content Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter 2 and Gears of War offered in their prime. The same goes for Castle Crashers and The Orange Box. These were four great games with a good amount of online achievements that I didn’t get a chance to play, since I was late to the Xbox Live table.
I eventually got Xbox Live as well as three red lights on my console. In the meantime, some of the games I started playing were downright mean when it came to gaining points. The Guitar Hero games really made you earn your points, and the ones you got were memorable. I have never been good enough at Guitar Hero to earn a lot of those achievements, but I bet it would be awesome to score 500,000 on one song or to get a 1000-note streak. The hardest cheevos to earn would have to be for 100,000,000 lifetime points, or 5 stars on every song on expert difficulty in Guitar Hero 3. I would also like to see the stats on the number of people that have earned the “Seriously 2.0” badge from Gears of War 2, which is rewarded for killing 100,000 enemies in the game.
There were some achievements that I earned that were a lot of fun to get, too. My favorite Halo: Reach achievement had to be “Lucky Me” for getting a triple kill while jetpacking. This was a lot of fun, although I got super lucky to get this one. Another one that was really hard to get but was totally worth it was the “Walk Free” badge from Grand Theft Auto IV. This one was awarded for successfully escaping a 4 star wanted rating from the cops. This was one of those moments that I will remember for a long time to come. The airport was a great place to get the warning up quick and had good freeway access to break away far enough to start ditching the cops.
Needless to say, I am a fan of the achievement system. It is the best way to brag to your friends and have the proof to back it up. I wish there were achievements for the NES back in the day so that I could prove to everyone that I beat Battletoads without dying a single time. Ok, so I didn’t finish Battetoads, but that would be a good mark to have on your record. I would like to see an achievement for Super Mario Bros for beating the game without using a warp pipe or for doing a speed run on just about every beat-’em-up released for the NES, Genesis, or SNES. The Live Arcade having old school games like Castlevania: Symphony of the Night and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Arcade is a nice step in the right direction though.
Sadly, this story ends with where it began. I am without an Xbox at this time, as I have earned the ultimate achievement: the “E74 Please Contact Customer Support” achievement. I am at 10,250 points and not sure I there is another Xbox in my future. Either way, I don’t think there is going to be a sequel to this story about the road from 10,250 to 20,000 points. Maybe that’s a good thing for the poor people of Assassin’s Creed who got pushed and shoved for a measly 5 achievement points.
