Achievement Unlocked 01.30.09: Frustation Incorporated

Posted by Rod Oracheski on 01.30.2009

Frustrating Achievements are on tap this week, with 411's Rod Oracheski taking a look at two games he'd like to have 1,000/1,000 in, but isn't sure he has the patience...



  I've spent my single-player time in the last week trying to finish off the Smackdown vs. Raw 2009 Achievement list and get some of the Achievements I'm missing in Call of Duty: World at War. I was completely successful in neither pursuit, though I did bag a few of the 30-point Veteran-level Achievements for CoD along with scattered 'special requirement' ones like destroying all the structures in the tank-driving level or killing three enemies with a single bullet.

  Trying to 1,000/1,000 those games did highlight how frustrating it can be to 'finish' out some games, however - something I figured I'd talk about this week.


  Balancing out a game's Achievement list is obviously a tricky thing for developers, with a wealth of opinions to consider. Some want to give them away like candy (Avatar: The Burning Earth, for example) while others give you the bulk of them simply by finishing the game (Red Alert 3) and still others decide you shouldn't have 1,000/1,000 in their game (Devil May Cry 4 and Ninja Gaiden 2...I'm looking at you).

  Personally, I'm all for making them difficult but doable - they are called "ACHIEVE"ments after all, so setting people up for failure is just unkind. Achievements like Devil May Cry 4's King of the Palace, for example, earned by clearing all Bloody Palace stages with an S ranking. I checked the listing of the top guys on the game at MyGamerCard.net and found a ton of people who'd completed the game - including that Achievement, but when I actually went to the Gamertag of a handful of them on xbox.com I found several who now had zero Achievements - this guy for example. I really doubt that everyone cheated to get it, but it did make me wonder how many had legitimately earned that Achievement.

  I'd love to see Achievement lists continue to land somewhere in the middle of that triangle of basic considerations, so that when you've finished the game's single-player campaign you'll have gotten somewhere over 600 Gamerscore from the storyline plus 'bonus' Achievements that come in the course of normal play - exploration ones, combo-based ones, etc... The remainder of that would come from difficult - but not impossible - Achievements that are all achievable offline.

  At least both of the games I'm trying to 1,000/1,000 did that much right - neither one has a glut of online-based Achievements. Smackdown vs Raw 2009 doesn't have any, and the cheapness-filled online matches make that a good decision. Call of Duty: World at War has five - though two are zero-point Achievements - and the other three (playing co-op online) are relatively pain-free to get. However, both games have one thing in common - frustration, though for different reasons.

These ones have me on the ropes.

A Problem to Wrestle With
  Smackdown vs Raw 2009 (okay, henceforth called SVR since that's way too long to keep typing out) has a fairly weak Achievement list compared to other games - sitting at 18 Achievements it's damn near in 'budget game' territory, but at least the Achievements themselves aren't bad. Three holdout Achievements are frustrating me in this game: Bonus Collector, A year in the life, and 5 Hall of Famers.

  The problem isn't that these three Achievements are particularly hard - 5 Hall of Famers, for example just requires some time and I'd have that one already if I really wanted to push for it. It's those other two - a pair of Achievements that the game seems to work against you getting. 'A year in the life' requires you to play through a year of the Career mode, playing every match. So I did that, but didn't get the Achievement. It turns out that by 'playing every match' it means every single match in every single week of the year. So the first time I got a title shot and chose to go for it, which made the calendar skip ahead to the PPV, I lost my chance at that Achievement.

  There's nothing really wrong with that. The Achievement is worded correctly, it's just the way that the system works that winds up screwing gamers over. There's no warning, at least that I can recall, that choosing to use your title shot skips weeks - it simply does it when you choose to challenge. With that available to gamers, I'd probably have allowed that exemption to still award the Achievement - or at least clearly warned that choosing to challenge would skip the remaining weeks to the PPV. How much could it hurt to warn players? After all, it takes something like five button presses to save the game, for crying out loud - having to choose your storage method, then confirm you want to save in a slot, then confirm again that you want to save over that file.

  'Bonus Collector' has given me the most grief, however. It's awarded for getting all the bonus content, available via the Road to Wrestlemania mode's optional objectives. Unfortunately there's no tracker for this Achievement, which means I'm finished all the missions but can't figure out what I missed. Going through the menus I've found that I have both Locker Room and Backstage areas unlocked, have all the locked wrestlers available, and appear to have all the moves and entrances. So what am I missing? I have absolutely no clue whatsoever. It would have been nice to have a checklist for this Achievement - even if it's just a simple listing of each wrestler and a check mark appearing when you've completed their run to the title. If games like Gears of War 2 or The Orange Box can do this for tracking kills, why can't it be used for this as well?

Just then 15 grenades fell from the sky

Potato-mashed
  Trying to get the Veteran-level Achievements in Call of Duty: World at War really killed my enthusiasm for the game's single-player mode, though as you'll see in TWiA it hasn't killed my love of the multiplayer action. It's not the way every enemy becomes a perfect marksman, that's expected from the FPS genre. It's not even the outdated '250 enemies in a broom closet' eternal spawning system, though if that's in the next game I'm seriously going to freak out. It's the grenade spam...

  Now I can accept that grenades, whether they be sticky, plasma, incendiary, smoke, flash-bang, or plain old explosives, aren't going to disappear from the FPS genre entirely. Not having them would be ridiculous, as they're an important tool for soldiers in battle. It would be nice, however, if cranking the difficulty to Veteran didn't simply mean that I'll die in two shots and every enemy on the map has a pocketful of grenades, knows exactly where I am, and has Tom Brady's arm.

  I can accept that advancing through a level on Veteran is akin to Hide and Seek - you move forward until enemies spawn and then duck and cover until your allies have killed everyone. Wait...that's not how you play Hide and Seek - bad analogy perhaps, but that is how you play Call of Duty on Veteran. You pop smoke, move forward to cut off the infinite respawns, and find somewhere to hide until your squad members cut down everyone else. Usually you find yourself lying on your stomach behind a crate, car, or barrel - praying no enemy is behind you and hitting the Right Bumper as fast as you can.

  That last part is so you'll throw back grenades as soon as they land on your lap - and they will, from all sides. The worst I can remember is taking cover behind a barrel and hearing the *tink* sound that grenades make when they hit the ground nearby...four times. I threw three back towards enemy lines before the fourth blew up and killed me. I've even moved forward to where I know an ambush is going to happen, then ran back around a bend after it triggered. Though there were no enemies with a clear shot at me, grenades were still landing at my feet. Is that challenging? Sure - but is that a fair and honest challenge? Hardly.

  My Call of Duty complaints aren't really about the Achievements, but about the gameplay design making those Achievements almost punishing to get. I shouldn't wind up hating your game on the pursuit of a few Achievements, something that may well happen with World at War. It's not like I'm terrible at the game either - I wrapped up every Achievement in Modern Warfare aside from the final one on the plane and never had half the trouble I've had this time around. Maybe it's because I feel the sting of cheap gameplay more these days...but I doubt it.

  What about you - what's the Achievement driving you nuts these days, or what ones have you abandoned knowing you'll never get those points no matter how much time you spend on them?

Want to play some MP?

  As I believe I mentioned last week, I've been using a new piece of software for tracking Xbox 360 usage. I can't give specific details on it at the moment, but I'll post a couple screenshots of the UI so you know what I'm talking about. It's been pretty handy for relaying back to me the specifics of how much I've used my 360 over the course of a week, with in-depth analysis on games that helps showcase how much I've played when I couldn't otherwise remember.

  Lord of the Rings: Conquest (link goes to image) for example, I would have sworn took longer than a trifling five hours to finish - but my time-to-completion was five hours, three minutes - and that included a few games of multiplayer.

  Then there's the Call of Duty stats, which shows (at right) that multiplayer has proven to be a considerable draw that brings me back day after day. It also helps that a dedicated group of friends plays and keeps calling/messaging me to come help them out, and that I know the Party invites won't stop until I do...

  With word of a future Burnout Paradise update bringing police chases to the city of non-stop crashing, I might give that one another shot. Between that and bringing back 'teleport restarts' for races, only one major complaint about the game remains - NO CRASH MODE.

  Seriously guys, with the engine you've got allowing great physics and outstanding damage modeling, why in the world would you continue to leave Crash Mode on the shelf? Everyone I know absolutely loved it, and I can't imagine we're the only ones. Why leave us hanging on this one issue, when you're willing to backtrack on earlier 'that's the way it was designed' comments concerning teleport restarts?

  Until next week, I'm out.