Achievements/Trophys

[twmac]

That was the point.

You can almost always make words mean what you want them to mean.

[DanJW]

I like achievements/trophies for peripheral stuff. I tend to go and look at them on my second playthrough of the game, as suggestions for stuff to try and further challenges.

What I hate is trophies for the main arc of a game. Having a 'ding' sound and a popup when I have just beaten a boss, say, competely destroys my immersion. And that's just one of the less egregious examples. Ding! You have earned 'Lose a Loved One'. Ding! you have earned 'Make a Tough Choice' and 'Feel Emotional Turmoil'. Ding! You have earned 'Shed a Tear on Level 7'.

Acheivements are fine for gamist sandboxey and arcade stuff, but they don't belong anywhere near a narrative.

[JonCole]

I've been playing the Orange Box on Xbox 360 and it's definitely cranking out some of the best achievements I've earned in recent history. Yesterday I got "Targeted Advertising", which was earned for shooting a guard on a billboard with a crossbow, suspending his corpse for everyone to see. That's some funny shit! In a similar vein, hitting a dude with a toilet from the Gravity Gun is another achievement.

Valve also figured out some rad challenging achievements to throw in which kinda force a particular intensity of gameplay... the last one I finished in this light is completing Ravenholm exclusively using the gravity gun. It certainly wasn't easy, but it actually made me use all of the traps that Father Gregori set and practically every gas tank/exploding barrel/circular saw/screwdriver/paintcan/concrete block/shard of wood that I could get my hands on.

[ThunderPeel2001]

You can almost always make words mean what you want them to mean.

Hmmm. And my point was that you can't... but Ok. I agree "Boosting" can be interpreted in many different ways, though.

For example, there's some GTAIV achievements that you're never going to get without outsite help. Such as the ones that require you to complete the missions in record time -- If the people you're playing with don't know precisely what to do, and precisely when to do it, you're never going to get the achievement. It requires serious coordination.

[twmac]

Well the thing is, that is looking at the sentence from a Hetero centric view point:

'Thou shalt not lie with a man as thou woudst with a woman'.

To assume that this is from the view point of a man, who is heterosexual (or who believes all men are heterosexual) is to then make the assumption that Homosexuality is outlawed.

However, if we look at it from the point of view that Homosexuality could exist all that sentence is inferring is that you should not 'lie' (share a bed) in the same way with both sexes. So, having sex with a man would be okay as long as you don't have sex with women. The 'lying' would be different and so fine.

It is wild interpretation, granted, but really you could take it to mean that the bible does not support Bisexuality. Bastards.

Or it could mean it would be fine to perform certain sexual acts on one sex and not on the other, just so long as you don't overlap those types then you'd be fi-

Anyway, Achievements.

[Erkki]

Yesterday I got "Targeted Advertising", which was earned for shooting a guard on a billboard with a crossbow, suspending his corpse for everyone to see. That's some funny shit! In a similar vein, hitting a dude with a toilet from the Gravity Gun is another achievement.

This is a perfect example of achievements that I do like. Do they have those in PC Half-Life ep 2? I don't remember.

[syntheticgerbil]

What I hate is trophies for the main arc of a game. Having a 'ding' sound and a popup when I have just beaten a boss, say, competely destroys my immersion. And that's just one of the less egregious examples. Ding! You have earned 'Lose a Loved One'. Ding! you have earned 'Make a Tough Choice' and 'Feel Emotional Turmoil'. Ding! You have earned 'Shed a Tear on Level 7'.

I don't have a problem with the boss ding, but definitely anything that ends after a moment that benefits from a fadeout for emotional silence or whatever is really unnecessary. Problem is, if you have a game with chapters or parts that give a trophy for completing each one, many will end on that sort of note or fadeout with the unfailing ding.

Also, although a trophy ding is appropriate upon finishing a game, many games seem to just start popping up trophies upon finishing whatever gameplay sequence before the final cutscene. Why doesn't everyone just uniformly wait until finishing the credits?

I guess that's all the developers fault? Not sure how much control they have over when certain trophies pop up. Sometimes they come in a weird delay while other times the trophy is instant.

[Patters]

This is a perfect example of achievements that I do like. Do they have those in PC Half-Life ep 2? I don't remember.

They've been put into all PC HL2 games now!

[ThunderPeel2001]

Well the thing is, that is looking at the sentence from a Hetero centric view point:

'Thou shalt not lie with a man as thou woudst with a woman'.

To assume that this is from the view point of a man

-- snip --

Well, it's from the point the Bible, and therefore the voice of God (if you believe in the guy). The actual quote is: "Thou shall not lie with mankind as with womankind".

How about this, as a possibly better way of deliberately misinterpreting this abominable bit of homophobia: "You can sleep with many women at once (womankind), but only one guy at a time (i.e. not mankind)."

Or you could just go with interpreting the world "lie" as being deceitful.

Anyway, achievements.

Edited February 2, 2011 by ThunderPeel2001

[ThunderPeel2001]

It's funny because Portal's Steam achievements are some of the worst I've ever seen. They make perfect sense, they're just WAY too hard (and the camera one is really boring).

[twmac]

"Thou shall not lie with mankind as with womankind".

How about this, as a possibly better way of deliberately misinterpreting this abominable bit of homophobia: "You can sleep with many women at once (womankind), but only one guy at a time (i.e. not mankind)."

Anyway, achievements.

Or God meant Mankind, the wrestler. He is omniprescent and omnipotent so he could have foreseen that Mankind shouldn't be getting any.

The achievements for Portal on Steam must mirror the ones for Portal: Still Alive, which are a great deal harder than the Orange Box version.

[ThunderPeel2001]

Or God meant Mankind, the wrestler. He is omniprescent and omnipotent so he could have foreseen that Mankind shouldn't be getting any.

Haha! I like that explanation

[Kolzig]

I've never been a fan of trophies or achievements in games. I've always thought those are pointless as I'm there to play the game and not score some extra "credit". I don't care if I get achievements or not.

Granted if there are some tongue in cheek stuff like JonCole wrote about the crossbow and gravity gun in HL2, then that's fun. I get why some people like that.

That's one thing that I still admire Nintendo about, they openly don't give a shit about Steam/Xbox/PSN style achievements and do not plan to put such in 3DS or Wii.

Hmm... after all the achievement-praising, I wish I had said "I do hate them" to balance things out

But if most of you like them... remember when I was working on a new forum software? (sorry for getting some of you to try it out and then not finishing it) I was looking into if Steam/XBLA/PSN, including achievements, could be somehow integrated into a forum and found that there are plug-ins that do it for vBulletin (or was it gamerscore only..., can't remember). I'm not sure if the admins would want to install something like this though, or if the plug-ins work with Idle Thumbs' version of vBulletin.

The only forum where I've seen achievements being in use is Irrational's forum.

[Hermie]

Like I said before, I don't care about the actual points, but I am pleased that I now have an even 10 000. Should I stop playing forever?

(Side note: I don't like describing myself as "OCD" since it's obvious I don't actually have it, but what IS a good word to describe it when you care an unnatural amount about symmetry, ordering and organization, for example? <.<)

[toblix]

Maybe just OC?

[JonCole]

Eccentric?

[twmac]

Bumping this thread a little as the site I work on has just done a piece on achievements.

The main consensus seems to be Achievements aren't a bad thing... Sort of.

[syntheticgerbil]

I think the first two guys in the article get it, but I really don't agree with the not dying more than five times Limbo thing. I have not played Limbo but will definitely get it when I finally get around to buying myself a 360. How hard the game is or how long it takes and whether or not you can save and retry certain parts without your deaths counting probably makes all the difference, but often those are very torturous achievements.

Earthworm Jim HD had the not dying once trophy on hard mode (normal in the original game), which is a painful trophy I don't look forward to repeat. It all came down to luck basically as I had already known the game inside and out from my childhood. When someone who knows the game well has serious trouble, it just shows me that some dickwad at Gameloft assigned the trophy to some arbitrary task without even thinking.

Then there's Prince of Persia Classic which thankfully comes without trophy support on PS3, otherwise I would have another unachievable trophy that severely bothers me: finish the original Prince of Persia without dying once.

I actually probably could finish certain versions of the original game without dying as I know the classic portions inside and out as well, alongside things like the Sega versions have a broken combat system where you can just win by repeatedly pressing the slash button. It's possible even the original PC version could be figured out.

Classic could hypothetically be finished without dying, since it has all the extra life saving moves where falling into a pit becomes very difficult, except for one thing: Prince of Persia Classic revamped the combat system to a bunch of flowery idiocy with quicktime events and all sorts of silly moves. It seems the enemy AI is a bunch of random elements like aggression, defensiveness, and swiftness are combined in different ways each time. I tried looking for ways to efficiently finish off guards just playing the regular game, but I could not find a sure method.

I'm assuming this is just an impossible achievement, but if someone finished it, I would love to hear about their struggle or possible lack thereof.

Go figure, Gameloft did that one too.

[twmac]

Man, Prince of Persia remake... I've never finished it due to the combat being so atrocious. As soon as that became a major feature of the game I stopped playing.

I didn't realise that the Earthworm Jim HD had been made easier... That would explain why I am so much better at it.

As for the comments on the Limbo thing, it can be accomplished. Unlike Gameloft, the devs were very much into their game.

Maybe Dylan doesn't make his argument clear but for me he was using anecdotal examples of an achievement list broadening his enjoyment of a game.

[ThunderPeel2001]

Classic could hypothetically be finished without dying, since it has all the extra life saving moves where falling into a pit becomes very difficult, except for one thing: Prince of Persia Classic revamped the combat system to a bunch of flowery idiocy with quicktime events and all sorts of silly moves. It seems the enemy AI is a bunch of random elements like aggression, defensiveness, and swiftness are combined in different ways each time. I tried looking for ways to efficiently finish off guards just playing the regular game, but I could not find a sure method.

Yep. That's the one achievement I don't have for that game. Shame because the original PC/Amiga/ST combat was actually fair. According to TrueAchievements.com, only 3% of players have this achievement.

There's a guide for combat on there, too. But it's far from watertight:

For the fighting, the only hint I can give you is this: after each hit (X) do always a parry (A), and vice-versa, so if the enemy hits back, you’re already on your guard. But don’t wait for him to strike, just press A after the X! Otherwise you’ll be late for the parry! You should ALWAYS do X, A, X, A, X ‘til you hit the enemy, or he stops swinging, or you two end up in a lock (in this case you should hit X as fast as possible). Then start over again.

If you’re cornered (ie: with spikes, slicers or chasm on your back), try to swap position with your enemy: stay as near as possible to him, and when he strikes, hold A to parry. If done right you’ll switch.

[syntheticgerbil]

As for the comments on the Limbo thing, it can be accomplished. Unlike Gameloft, the devs were very much into their game.

Maybe Dylan doesn't make his argument clear but for me he was using anecdotal examples of an achievement list broadening his enjoyment of a game.

Oops, I suppose I should have realized the first part, that would make complete sense. I'm definitely going to be up for that challenge when I play Limbo, it looks enjoyable overall and I can't wait.

I guess in a way, I automatically get the sense that the achievements and trophies are almost set by a different entity sometimes. The way Brutal Legend's were written with the aside comments and all make it seem like Tim Schafer himself set them all up.