Achieve What Now?

I love video games, I really do. I’ve been playing them my whole life, and they constitute a lot of my best memories. However, I’ve found that in recent years, I’ve needed a little something more from games.

I found this more in the form of achievements, which are these little challenges you can accomplish in many games. Achievements can range wildly in difficultly; some are incredibly easy, taking only a few minutes or even seconds; some are unbelievably difficult or time-consuming.

Obviously, for bragging rights, the harder the better. I think I was physically changed as a person after finishing the LASO campaigns for the Halo games.

Why the Hunt?

This is probably a good time to bring up the different systems of achievements throughout gaming. There are quite a few, actually, but the main ones that most people use would be Xbox’s Gamerscore system, which is great; Playstation’s trophy system, which I admittedly know nothing about, but I hear it’s pretty cool; and finally Steam achievements, which doesn’t have a system of score or anything like that — you do get a blue ribbon for completing a game though.

Ask a lot of achievement hunters why they do this stuff, and they’d likely tell you, “It’s the numbers, man.” This is likely referring to Xbox Gamerscore, and is definitely the most widely used achievement system, due to how well it works and because it actually gives you something for achievements, a number, a score. And if there’s anything people love, it’s arbitrary numbers.

Unfortunately, the sad reality is that if you game on PC like me, then the actual value of achievements is a bit up in the air. Steam has by far the worst achievement system I’ve ever seen, with zero scores of any kind being attributed to achievements (seriously, how cool would it be to gain profile XP for completing games? Just something better than a blue ribbon would be nice), so it’s up to individuals how they value their achievements.

Personally, I like going for achievements because I feel like it allows me, or forces me, to experience certain games in ways I would never have thought of. Being forced to walk through levels like the Ark from Halo 3 allowed me to notice little details I’d never seen before, since you’re meant to speed through a lot of it.

I think it’s also a great way of ensuring you get your money’s worth from a game. Nowadays, when games can be so darn expensive, it oftentimes simply isn’t worth it to play through it once. Think about it, if you pay $80 for a new AAA game (That’s a generous price, it’s more like $90 for us here in Quebec), and your single playthrough comes in at around 30-40 hours, is that really worth it? Achievement hunting is a great way to get that hour/dollar ratio up.

That being said, there are actually a number of websites that offer their own scores and rankings for Steam achievements. My personal favourite is a site called Steam Hunters, which I find has the most appealing user interface. Completionist.me and Astats are some others worth checking out. I still don’t think these sites actually make up for a lack of basic achievement features on Steam itself though, but they provide a decent method of coping with the inadequacies of Valve.

Begging the Achievement Gods

One of the lamest thing’s about achievement hunting on Steam is the fact that many older games tend to not have achievements, despite having them on other systems. Here’s a quick little list of games I would appreciate achievements in:

-    The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion — You know what? Get Morrowind in here too, while we’re at it. Oblivion is my favourite Elder Scrolls game, and as an open-world game, I feel it only suffers from a lack of achievements.

-    Dead Space 1 and 2 — Great, classic horror games that for some reason were given steam trading cards a while back, but not achievements? Thanks for that one, EA.

-   The GTA Trilogy — Because I will likely not be touching the gangrenous stain that is the Definitive Edition, achievements in the original versions would be nice, even if I know it will literally never happen.

Please and thank you.

Kyle Michaud

Kyle is an aspiring writer at Algonquin College’s Professional Writing Program. Bad (but great) at Halo, comedian, and plays guitar sometimes.