Creepy’s Tavern

I’d like to promise the next time i update this i wont talk about video game related matters but sadly Bioshock is coming out in 4 days time for me and i wont be able to resist blabbering on about it.

For now though i wanted to talk about Achievements. Everyone seems to think the Wii has revolutionized video games and changed them, a step into the future. I disagree, all the Wii has done is rework the controls. It’s no different than changing the buttons about on a controller.

You still play the game the same. Look at Zelda, take a look at metroid when it comes out in a few days see if it plays any different from the older ones. It wont. All they’ve done is change the controls. Isn’t all that impressive once you get over it.

Achievements though? They’ve changed how many people play. In many different ways. People no longer play a game to complete it, to get to the end level or beat the last boss.

Oh no, now people load up a game in order to Nail people to cars or push there skills in that game to see just how good they are.

Even i couldn’t resist the charm, i never even knew about Achievements till i brought a 360 and i got the message come up for completing chapter 1 in gears of war. There just such a basic, minor thing but they change so much, they add so much value to a game.

I don’t buy games anymore without first checking the achievements - I brought Dead Rising the other day, a game I’d usually pass by cause lets face it, stuck in a mall with thousands of zombies? How repetitive is that going to get? Not at all anymore. And it in fact has a fucking great story line going for it, very complex game a lot more than just mindlessly killing zombies like i originally thought.

But what swung it, what made me buy it was because the moment i saw the achievements they was exactly what i like. And while ironically some of them are exactly what made me avoid the game in the first place there also what attracted me the most.

Some people play there games now purely to boost there gamerscore. They’ll Rent game after game, it doesn’t matter if it’s a crap game they’ll rent it in order to boost that number up some more. Even if they hate the game, if it has easy achievements they’ll rent it.

Why they do this i can’t say, perhaps they like to compete with others, perhaps it’s just an ego boost. I don’t know why as my reasoning for collecting achievements are different.

I collect achievements not for the number, i don’t care about that nor do i do it for bragging rights. I do it purely for the challenge. Kill 50k+ zombies? That’s fucking insane, think of the dedication it’ll take (admittedly, it isn’t actually all that hard compared to others.) why on earth would someone bother?

Well i would bother and as I’ve said, that’s one of the easier ones compared to other such games but then it does have various ones that are nothing short of mentally challenging

For those not in the know, a day in Dead Rising is exactly two hours real time. So to survive for 7 days? That’s 14 hours. Total. Not to hard right? That’s what you think, you have to play 14 hours straight. No breaks, if you die within those 14 hours you lose. If you turn your console off you lose. If you go away from the console and leave your character in a “safe spot” he will starve to death.

Oh and if it wasn’t hard enough, what with needing to stay alive for 14 hours in a mall full of zombies, having to sit there and play for 14 hours none stop, if that wasn’t enough of a strain on your mind you also do need to feed him but to make it worse, theres limited amounts of food. So you need to figure it out before hand, plan the entire thing out and get yourself organized, ration it out properly cause if you fuck up you could fall short at the 12th hour and die and i don’t know about you but I’d be pissed off.

So -why- would anyone do that? I can already imagine the amount of “no lifer”thoughts i just got but when you consider it, you probably sit in front of your pc for a stupid amount of time each day. And i probably wont play a game for a couple of days after pulling that one off. XD I’d usually only play a couple of hours a day at most anyway.

But on with the point of why? Well, for the challenge. Can i do it? It’ll push you, it’ll drive you up the fucking wall and it’ll be nothing short of bloody hard. But if i can pull that off, if i can unlock that achievement, if my planning and work falls into place and i manage it then i can’t help but feel a sense of satisfaction from it.

The way i see it, an achievement is the developer, the maker of the game coming out and saying “Hey, i bet you can’t do this.” and i like proving him wrong on that. But most importantly i love the challenge, the more challenging the achievements are the better.

In my opinion, the greatest thing to come out of this new generation of video games is the achievement system and i hope to god Sony and Nintendo follow suit and get there own versions of this. As a matter of fact, i hear a rumor Metroid Prime 3 will in fact have it’s own achievements, if it’s  the same as the 360s i don’t know, I’d hope so because while there such a small thing, they add so much to games.

From fun wacky things like nailing people to a car, to extreme ones that take planning, organizing and hard work like surviving for 7 days. Now that i have them, i couldn’t go back to playing games without them.

How does everyone else feel about them?