Over-Achievers
Gaming's greatest achievement (points).
1. Dead Rising
- Achievement: 7-Day Survivor
- Instruction: Survive for at least 7 days.
- Gamerscore: 30
- See it done.
As if being set upon in a mall by fifty thousand zombies at the end of the world wasn't enough of a challenge, the infamous 7-Day Survivor achievement requires you to play the game for 14 hours straight, while everyone and everything in the game is turned against you and, just to top it off, while having your health constantly deplete. Sure, it's a challenge of endurance, as much as skill, but this is the longest day for the Achievement whore rivaled only by Rock Band 2's Bladder of Steel achievement for an act of sadistic endurance.
2. Crackdown
- Achievement: Body Armor
- Instruction: Use the Harpoon gun to attach 5 gang member corpses to a single vehicle.
- Gamerscore: 10
- See it done.
More fun than using a rudimentary map printed out from Gamefaqs to locate that bastard last hidden orb, Body Armour has you using the DLC-exclusive harpoon gun to impale five gang members to a car of your choosing. The harpoons disappear after around 60 seconds, but that should be more than enough time to get the set. Brings new meaning to the phrase Pimp My Ride.
3. Fallout 3
- Achievement: Agatha's Song
- Instruction: Completed "Agatha's Song".
- Points: 20
- See it done.
There's a cute sort of absurdity in having to trek across a post-nuclear wasteland in search of a priceless Stradivarius violin for an old lady. The instrument can be found in the depths of a pre-apocalypse recording studio (allegedly owned by one Rick Rubin), resting in a dusty violin case. Bring it back to the amiable Agatha and her melancholic strains will sound out across the wasteland's airwaves, a constant reminder that beauty can always somehow be salvaged from desolation.
4. Half-Life 2
- Achievement: Targeted Advertising
- Instruction: Pin a soldier to the billboard in chapter Highway 17.
- Points: 5
- See it done.
Valve knows better than most how to frame a good Achievement, and the developer's bumper game compilation, the Orange Box, is filled with ingenious meta-missions. Pinning a soldier to a billboard with the harpoon gun is one of gaming's most enjoyable visual puns.
5. Half-Life 2
- Achievement: OSHA Violation
- Instruction: Kill 3 enemies using the crane.
- Points: 5
- See it done.
How many times have you been sat at the controls of a 50-foot crane, just wishing you could tear off your safety helmet and start swinging its colossal steel arm around in wide arcing motions, like some sort of giant orange mace, flailing your co-workers in their faces until you achieve enough up force to take to the skies in your awesome crane-o-copter? Sadly, OSHA violation only lets us live out one of those fantasies.
6. Star Wars: The Force Unleashed
- Achievement: Worst Day-Shift Manager Ever
- Instruction: Kill 12 Stormtroopers as Vader during the Prologue.
- Points: 10
- See it done.
Darth Vader was never going to make for a good boss: too much mind control and distracting asthma to make working life pleasurable. But if you're the guy with the withered face under the mask, tossing your foot-soldier stormtroopers into nearby tree-trunks so their pathetic backs snap like your estranged son's temper? Well, that's another thing entirely.
7. Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock
- Achievement: Tone Deaf
- Instruction: Beat any song on the expert difficulty with the game's sound options turned down to zero.
- Points: 5
- See it done.
Many Achievements require players to self-limit themselves in order to increase the challenge. Tone Deaf is king of this approach, requiring players to complete any song on the hardest difficulty with the music turned off, playing an audio game with just the visual cues. Sadly, you can cheat by turning the sound options off for the last couple of notes of the song only, but still, it's the thought that counts.
8. Half-Life 2: Episode Two
- Achievement: Little Rocket Man
- Instruction: Send the garden gnome into space.
- Points: 30
- See it done.
Not so much a fetch-quest as an escort quest. Carrying a garden gnome through the entirety of Episode Two is one of gaming's most delicious and yet infuriating challenges, as anyone who's tried to balance the blasted thing on the bonnet of the rickety car in the Hunter-Chopper pursuit can attest. But it's all worth it when you get to see his stupid hobbitty face light up as you stuff him in the hold of the space shuttle, right? Right?
9. Final Fantasy XI
- Achievement: Reach Character Level 75 (multiple)
- Instruction: Achieved level 75 as [insert job class].
- Points: 30 x 14
- See it done: N/A
Widely regarded as the hardest 1000 gamerpoints you'll never earn, this set of Achievements is reserved for the player who manages to level every job class in Square-Enix's sprawling MMO to a dizzying level 75. As it takes the average player anything from 12-18 months to level a single job to that level, the idea of doing so for 14 different job classes is, how should we say, a long-term project. As far as Eurogamer is aware, nobody in the world has earned the full set of Achievements legitimately yet, and nobody is likely to within the next decade.
10. Shadowrun
- Achievement: Shadowrun Fever
- Instruction: "Catch it!"
- Gamerpoints: 25
- See it done.
The only STD-based Achievement we know of, Shadowrun Fever is viral in every sense of the word. Based on the popular American online sport of tea-bagging, in which sexually-confused teenagers dip their virtual balls into the mouths of dead teenage boys, you'll need to "catch it" off someone who already "has it". Oh God. No. I just read that sentence back. What the hell am I doing with my life? Achievement Unlocked: Reached Epiphany RE: Indefensible Futility of Your Hobby.