I'm an achievement hound - I admit it. I love to compare myself to others in statistically confusing ways to prove myself superior to random gamers from Argentina who have no idea who I am.
This weekend I experienced both sides of the considerable sliding scale of Achievement-ness: College Hoops 2K6 and Blazing Angels.
There is no standard for achievement lists - You can find some games, such as King Kong or virtually any sports game, where you can gain all 1000 points in a single game. Or you can find games where the achievement developers obviously went overboard. Games like GUN, Perfect Dark, DOA4 or even Project Gotham Racing III where we may NEVER see a player with a complete 1000 points.
In anticipation for the forthcoming release of Contra on XBLA, I picked up a 1600 point GP card and invested in two games that my son might like: Frogger and Galaga. Both were true to the original, but Galaga's playability is MUCH higher than Frogger. Both have the disadvantage of being vertical scrollers in a widescreen HD world, so that there can be as much dead space on either side of the play area as there is game itself. However, the simple graphics and game design of Galaga lend itself to this format, where the earth-tone-ness of Frogger do not. Particularly to a colorblind person such as myself.
Anyway, by the next day I had maxed out Galaga (200 GP) and fully intend to keep playing it. I've got a few GP on Frogger, but if you see me signed on and playing it, it will probably be my son, rather than myself.
Back to retail games:
So I picked up College Hoops 2K6 and fired up a quick game between two random teams. I left all the settings at default and played through, finding that I had an excellent 3-point shooter on my team and enjoying the fun of throwing up the bombs, Rex Chapman-Style, every trip down the court. When it was over, lo and behold, I had an achievement. When I looked to see what it was, I saw that I had actually earned every possible achievement in the game, save one. What did I do? I booted right back into the game and found a shot blocker so that I could get that last achievement, of course. And now, less than 48 hours after getting the game, I'm sitting on 1000 gamer points and thinking that I might not play it again. It just doesn't have the replay value of some other games. I will probably list it here at work for trade later today.
On the other hand, we have Blazing Angels, a game I picked up with my friend Eggs 66 more than a month ago. We had an evening to kill and wanted something beautiful to play on his 70-inch HDTV, so we headed down to Freddies to wander the aisles. I had heard good things about BA, so we picked it up, and boy were we surprised. Great graphics, excellent gameplay, this is a great game. We played it for 6 hours straight at his place, and I've played it many times since then - enjoying every moment. The downside? I just earned my first achievement last night, with quite a bit of help. The achievement list is set up so that you have to finish the entire story mode first before any other additional achievements are even possible, and the final level of BA is so amazingly difficult (particularly when compared to all other levels) that it seemed I would NEVER finish it.
The final analysis? I'm glad to have 1000 GP from College Hoops, but won't play it again. I've got the full 200 GP from Galaga and will play it again often. I don't have much from Frogger and don't think it will get much of my time. I've only got 1 achievement from the very difficult Blazing Angels, but I could see myself playing this even after I got all of them.
The Achievement feature of Xbox Live was a genius stroke of those crazy ninjas over at Microsoft. Kudos to them.
Anybody want College Hoops 2K6? I'll trade it for just about anything...
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