Achievement Unlocked 03.21.08: Narrowing Things Down

Posted by Rod Oracheski on 03.21.2008

How do you clear out that stack of games that you just never got around to?



Well, when you put in a request to development teams who are hard at work trying to finish up games you have to expect them to put their work first. So yeah, the bit on developers and how they're making adjustments to include Achievements in the planning and development process? That's going to have to wait yet again, and unfortunately I'm a day behind because I waited too long.

It's not all bad news, as I got another set of questions in this week, but I also got a few "the guys just can't get to it yet, but they'd love to take part" e-mails as well. Maybe next week? Here's hoping.

So the theme of this week's Achievement Unlocked is the thought process involved with looking through your older games and deciding which to play - something I did this week.

While I waited for e-mails to flood in, I was looking over the stack of Xbox 360 games that I still need to get through - and it's a sizable stack. It's not that I'm buying games just to have them, these are all games that I was interested enough in to pick up, but became busy with other things and never got around to finishing them off.


Superman Returns, for example, a game that I picked up at EB Games "new" and found it was scratched and obviously used once I'd gotten home. It had cookie crumbs in the case and someone had written on the instruction manual, for crying out loud - I'm not buying into the "it was a display box" line of bullshit on that one.

I took the game back and exchanged it for a new - and properly sealed - copy. A copy that I never got around to opening because of other games arriving that I needed to review, pushing 'games for fun' to the back burner.

Having played only a minute or so of Superman's adventure, and being a huge Superman fan, that one was obviously on my list. Looking over the rest of them - how was I going to decide what to play and what to leave for another day? Well...it's an Achievements column, right?

Let's start off at the beginning, the list, narrowed down from the much larger list, of games that I still want to either finish, or just play more of:

• Gears of War - still have a burning desire to finish the game on Insane, along with finally dedicate some time to the online mode


• Blue Dragon - ran out of time on this one, busy with work and buying a new house


• Oblivion - I still haven't finished much of the storyline, continually getting distracted by the million and one things you can do. I mean to go do missions, but wind up running naked through the woods, punching out deer.


• The Orange Box - I beat Portal, but had trouble getting into the Half-Life experience again.


• NHL 08 - Love the dual-stick controls, but have almost no Achievements out of this game.


• The Godfather - I kept skipping over this as 'just another EA port' but friends keep telling me it's good...


• Rainbow Six Vegas - Yeah, the original. I always wanted to get into the online, and with the sequel out (and a hell of a lot of fun in co-op) it's time to play or move on.


• GRAW 2 - Really like the single player, but have to get going on co-op before nobody wants to play!


• EarthDefenseForce 2017 - One of the best bad games ever. I still want to beat those harder difficulty levels.


• Chromehounds - A lot of fun if you're playing with friends and there's a real drought of big angry mech games.


• Superman Returns - Sure, the movie wasn't stellar but I really liked the demo and hadn't played it for more than a few minutes.

I've got things I want to do in each game, and I find them all fun to play...so I figured I'd use Achievements. If a game had some cool Achievements that I hadn't gotten, I'd put that ahead of another that didn't.

I wound up with Superman Returns at the top of the list, largely due to its 0/18 Achievements stature. Chromehounds and Gears of War (and that's likely the ONLY time those two are mentioned together) are both sitting high on the new list of 'must plays' with 22/49 and 19/57 Achievements, respectively.

Chromehounds has Achievements that are pretty typical of early releases, with the standard 'do [X], [X] times' ones in there a few times, but it works for me in that case as it's encouraged me to try out several different Hound builds. Gears of War, on the other hand, has an excellent set of Achievements - great names, great challenge, and great artwork...and I'm still missing some of the coolest ones. I'm never getting Seriously (10,000 kills in online battles) but I want to get some of the others.

It seems a small thing, but taking a few games out of the pile - however it's done - means I'm more likely to actually get around to those games. I even played Superman Returns and Chromehounds this week.

Of course people, including myself, used to pick through piles of old games to find something to play before Achievements came around, sometimes even successfully. The Achievement system just gives us another metric to use - and it's a great way to track how much you've 'beaten' a game. Take Gears of War, for example, which I would have sworn I played on Insane had my Achievement history not been proof otherwise.

That history also serves as a reminder - something I discovered while looking for Achievements I'd unlocked in these games. I was surprised to note that I haven't played Kameo since September 19, 2006 - or at least played while connected to Xbox Live.

Great, another one for the pile...

I also noticed Command & Conquer 3 - last played in January and I didn't manage to get through the single-player campaign. That was another one that wound up tossed aside because of a lack of time - though that was work-related, so I can't complain - it pays the bills.

And the pile grows one more...



Rainbow Six Vegas 2 hit stores this week, and it's one of those games that people without Xbox Live aren't going to get all the Achievements in. More than 20 of the 47 Achievements (over 400 Gamerscore worth) require playing online - though it's nice to see that co-op play is still a go via split-screen, something a lot of games are abandoning.

Still, while Ubisoft might not have learned much about Achievements, they did a pretty good job of upgrading the core gameplay. Had a blast playing through the campaign with a friend - hitting it up split-screen style.

So what's your method for picking games out of your stack, or do you even have a stack of games to get through?