Best/Worst Achievements you've seen

[gunrock]

So glad I ignore this kind of ****. Sounds like a waste of a life, being pissed that a game can't be completed with 1000 points.

[VR46]

Another option might be to post your highest ratio achievement from TrueAchievements if you want ot go on skill alone - well as close as you're going to get to it being skill based.

[QualityChimp]

I got a great achievement last night in Deus Ex. I was just about to leave this secret facility when I stumbled across a hidden room with a computer terminal in it. The user name was MSTAINE and it the hardest computer to hack with every junction at 95% chance of triggering an alarm. Luckily I had a load of viruses to sledgehammer my way through and unlock it.

The achievement pops up, HANGAR 18, and a secret message says:
">TRANSLATION FOLLOWS
>
>breaker nine begin
>subject witness
>prognosis seen too much
>site eighteenth hangar
>inventory foreign life forms
>state suspended cryogenics
>risk nominal
>solution selective amnesia
>bravo kilo actual
>end transmission


The curtain is failing. Soon they will know too much. I know too much.


Dave One"

Anyone who's every headbanged or played Guitar Hero 5 DLC will know this is a reference to Hangar 18 by Megadeth!

I had a real chuckle at its inclusion last night!

Here it is live, just because:
[hide][/hide]

[Golgo]

Nothing shows up the utter silliness of trophies as well as Noby Noby Boy (got all of these!): Take the Prince for a ride.
Eat the words NOBY NOBY BOY within the manual or in the staff credits.
Report a length of exactly 765m to GIRL.
Make BOY's body grow thicker while keeping his head small.
Create a combined character by eating an animal and a human or a fruit and a human.
Take 10 inhabitants for a ride.
Eat 20 inhabitants.
Stretch BOY to a length of 100m.
Meet up with Bye-Bye BOY.
Rotate the roof of the BOY House.
Find the Space Squirrel.
Answer all questions correctly in the BOY Quiz.

[Jay]

I enjoy achievements. Sure there are silly examples but you don't have to try for every achievement. Lots of games have their own in-game version of achievements, so I don't really understand this argument:

The best achivements are ones you set for yourself and work to achieve. I don't need some arbitrary checklist telling me how to play my games.

Surely unlocking stuff in games and completing challenges, or collecting all coins/rings/whatever is no different?

The achievement I enjoyed the most was probably C to shining C in SFIV as that forced me to use every character online and learn how to with them. Really enjoyed completed that.

[noobish hat]

The stupidest trophy I recall getting was in Sly Cooper (the first one I think), a famously easy platinum. You get the first trophy just for seeing the Suckerpunch logo before the title screen even comes up.

[Asura]

The stupidest trophy I recall getting was in Sly Cooper (the first one I think), a famously easy platinum. You get the first trophy just for seeing the Suckerpunch logo before the title screen even comes up.

Early on, these trophies were very prevalent in games - ones that everyone would get within an evening's play (99% of people).

They were used as an analytics event - i.e the start of measuring & tracking what the player is doing for back-end analysis purposes.

Ever wonder why people like Quantic Dream kept saying "we only sold 250k copies, but 2 million people have played our game"? This is the data-point they used; the "free" achievement. Which of course is daft.

[Darwock]

I hadn't realized, but if you look at trophies on the vita it tells you how many people have it. Presumably a percentage of all users that have played that particular game. I guess PS4 does this also?

On a quick check, and most surprisingly, my rarest trophies were the platinum for LBP1 and then the 'unlock all skins' gold in Lumines Supernova - 0.3%, 0.7% respectively. I can't check all of mine because of the profile restrictions on the Vita (I use it with a sub-account so not all games are listed).

I don't see any trophies that have 100% achievement rate. The two nasty TxK trophies both have 0.0% achievement rate.

[Deuteros]

I take it you're not familiar with TrueTrophies / TrueAchievements? They're great if you're interested in that kind of information.

[Darwock]

I always figured sites like that only went by statistics of their own registered users.

[noobish hat]

I use PSNprofiles.com. I still have no idea how they calculate their rarity stats. I have some trophies that are very rare according to the Vita/PS4 page (like beating Resi Remake in under 3 hours), but on PSNprofiles, it's about 16% rarity. I like the site though because it tells you your average completion (which I try to keep around 70%), which for some insane reason Sony doesn't tell you.

I did read an article somewhere about the use of trophy data to determine how many people play the games and percentage of people who actually finish, or quit before even getting the first trophy. Interesting stuff.

[Asura]

I did read an article somewhere about the use of trophy data to determine how many people play the games and percentage of people who actually finish, or quit before even getting the first trophy. Interesting stuff.

PGR3 was the first game to do that. They used all the data XSN gathered about players in PGR2 (the precursor to the achievement system), and realised that a surprisingly large % of players only unlocked 1 or 2 cars. That's why PGR3 gave you so much more right at the start.

[Deuteros]

I always figured sites like that only went by statistics of their own registered users.

That's true, though given how popular those two sites are, I'd say they have a large enough number of registered users for their sample to have some significance. Of course, one could also say it's a heavily skewed sample composed of individuals who care enough about trophies / achievements that they bothered to register on a site that tracks and analyses them.

[wakka]

I don't mind achievements, in that I just ignore them for the most part (although I like it when they have amusing puns in their name so you get a little bonus gag).

But I think the analytics they've allowed game developers have probably been a contributing factor to some mass market games becoming easier and more hand holdey, as games publishers started to realise that the percentage of people who got stuck on level 3 (or whatever) was actually huge.

[Golgo]

PGR3 was the first game to do that. They used all the data XSN gathered about players in PGR2 (the precursor to the achievement system), and realised that a surprisingly large % of players only unlocked 1 or 2 cars. That's why PGR3 gave you so much more right at the start.

I think Valve did the same thing via Steam, slightly later. Fixed that rubbish bit in HL2 where you're waiting in the dark for ages for the lift to arrive and getting mugged by headcrabs, etc.