Achievement unlocked?

There are some Xbox Live Achievements that I look back on with humongous pride. I cherish those little digital rosettes because they’ve charted great successes and memorable gaming moments, marking a permanent record of skill or awesome memories.

Take the unimaginatively named “Locks (Co-op 3) Perfect”, and its cohorts, on thoughtful military tactics-em-up Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2. The handful of black and blue icons give me instant, lucid memories of taking on seemingly impregnable bunkers, plantations and locks, teeming with bad guys, alongside my brother and dad over Xbox Live.

To get the “Perfect” achievement, you had to play on the uber-hard difficulty setting, where each player only had one life and getting shot was getting got. It was feisty military realism at its most fearsome, requiring plenty of practice runs on lesser difficulties, and plenty of fuck ups and failures. We’d have complimentary load-outs and know the levels like the back of our war-torn hands, before plunging head first into a strategic, one-shot-one-kill warzone.

When someone died, as they invariably did, their Xbox headset would instantly snap silent (this was, thankfully, before the days of Xbox Live Party Chat). Eventually, you’d be left as the last remaining soldier, alone and with your heart beating out your god damn chest as your recently departed comrades could watch your nervous on-screen progress, and shout futilely at your careless play, but not say anything to you.

Being the last man standing, and having to clear out just one last enemy and get to the LZ (that’s how cool dudes say landing zone) as your family watches on in silence is one of the most heart wrenching and frightening moments in my entire gaming career. I was dripping with sweat, my hands were shaking and my heart was racing. But, god dammit, I made it. The helicopter takes off, my brother and dad are able to talk again, and we laugh and cheer as we nervously anticipate the echoey kerplink of the all important achievement. Ding.

And there are other, more solitary achievements that I hold near and dear for showing my prowess. I like to play the self deprecating loser, but it’s nice to have a public record of my skill. I cherish “Total Bone-Head” for getting all the gold medals in Wet’s addictive and enjoyable boneyard challenges, awards like “Watery Grave” and “A Crate Effort” for completing levels on The Club on Insane difficuly, “True Elite!” for getting perfect in every single Burnout Revenge stage and “Race Wizard” for completing the brilliant Flatout 2 with all gold in all cups and events

And call me crap, but the “Most Likely to Succeed Award” in Guitar Hero 2 - for nailing five stars on all medium songs - was a pretty big deal at the time, ending in a show-stopping, finger-blistering final run on Buckethead - Jordan, before the achievement landed.
 
But there are other achievement that instead permanently and irrevocably chart my compulsive, obsessive, shameful time wasting. Grand Theft Auto IV’s “Endangered Species” doesn’t give me good memories of explosive, bombastic sight seeing across a New York pastiche. It reminds me of inching slowly around Liberty City, a Prima Strategy Guide splayed across my lap, listening for the coo of a polygonal pigeon. And for what?

Well, for about a hundred quid, to be truthful. Long story short: being one of the first people in the UK to 100% complete Grand Theft Auto IV netted me a faux-silver “Key to the City”, a physical lock-opener with IV stamped on the handle, complete with suede box and certificate. I flogged it on eBay for a cool £120.

But I didn’t get any real world loot for getting all the Orbs in Crackdown, all the skyscrapers in the abysmal Spider Man 3, all the cog tags in Gears of War, all the target marks in Lost Planet and all the hidden CDs in Saints Row. All I have to show for those pointless pixel trophies is an intense slab of shame.

Still, I’ve moved on from my hidden-object-hunting days, I ignored the seagulls in The Lost and Damned and quite happily avoided the orbs in Enslaved. I didn’t even get the sparkly ancient loot in Uncharted 2 or the Intel in Black Ops. My new rule says a game has to make finding this stuff interesting and worthwhile (like the puzzling mind benders of Arkham Asylum’s question mark hunts or the masterfully hidden relics in Tomb Raider: Anniversary) or I won’t bother.

In fact, I’ve since become so soured on achievements that I’ve turned them off. My Xbox 360 no longer plinks, flashes and pops-up upon the 50th headshot or other arbitary task. And I’ve found it ever so liberating to play a game just as a game. To play purely for fun and not for achievements.

I mean, I still check the list and go out of my way to grab some - I’m gunning for DJ Hero 2’s “5 star every track” award and I’m cautiously eyeing up some of Tomb Raider Anniversary’s speed run achievements - but that’s because those sound like fun things to do, to persistently and doggedly train for and hopefully accomplish. And it would be nice to have a permanent record of my achievement next to my gamertag.

Which is exactly what achievements were supposed to be, and why I fell in love with them in the first play. Not so much this obsessive, time-sinking, pigeon-hunting mutation it so quickly became.

< Thanks for reading, and Happy New Year!!. This is also the start of my “One a Day” blog - a community project where “a variety of prolific creative types aiming to post something regularly and express their creativity consistently for the whole of 2011”, says the valiant leader Pete Davison. I miserably failed daily posting last year, so I’m going weekly for 2011. Wish me luck! >