Video game achievements have been around for much longer than most players realize. They started as physical patches awarded by Activision to players who achieved high scores in arcade games in the early 1980s. From there, they evolved over the years, but didn’t become more mainstream until the Xbox 360 included digital achievements in its games. The concept exploded from there, testing players’ ability to accomplish complex challenges, beating their friends, and amassing large gamerscores or trophies on PlayStation systems. Most achievements are fun and exciting, while others are incredibly challenging to obtain. There’s another category in the middle, and it’s the achievements that are so mind-numbingly idiotic, they should never have been coded. These three fit within that category, and they’re some of the worst ones.
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1) “Chain Smoker” – The Saboteur
The Saboteur is an oft-forgotten action-adventure game released in 2009, and it’s a well-written game with interesting gameplay. Players take control of Sean Devlin, a race car driver and mechanic who moved to France to escape his legal troubles back home. Sean is a heavy smoker, and that aspect of his character influences the achievement “Chain Smoker.” To earn it, a player must stand around doing nothing for long periods, as it’s awarded after Sean lights up 100 cigarettes. You can do this in one of two ways. Either mash the correct button over and over again until your fingers bleed, or simply wait for the character to randomly do it while he’s left standing there. Button-mashing to victory is boring and a waste of time, while allowing it to happen is similarly odious and entirely unnecessary.
2) “Remember September ’44” – Brothers in Arms: Hell’s Highway
Brothers in Arms: Hell’s Highway’s most annoyingly unnecessary achievement is the result of something that could have been handled better. The 2008 FPS title is the third in the Brothers in Arms franchise, and follows the soldiers of the 101st Airborne Division during Operation Market Garden in World War II. The achievement “Remember September ‘44” is in honor of the fighting force of the conflict. Unfortunately, the programmers’ best intentions in coding it were thwarted by delays that pushed the game beyond the point of being obtainable for nearly a year. It’s a date-based achievement, requiring players to fire up the game on September 17th, but you can’t get it by changing the date settings on your Xbox. You had to be connected to Xbox Live on that date, and because the game was pushed back to September 23, 2008, players had to wait until September 17, 2009 — a full 359 days — to complete it.
3) “Seriously” – Gears of War
When 2006’s Gears of War dropped on the Xbox 360, the new IP was a massive success for Microsoft Game Studios and Epic Games. The storyline, characters, enemies, and settings are all engaging, making for a lot of fun in both single-player and online multiplayer. It had a lot going for it, which unfortunately, also included one of the worst achievements in gaming history. It’s achievable, but only if you’re willing to make significant sacrifices to obtain it, as it requires a lot of hard work. “Seriously” isn’t a huge challenge in that it’s difficult. Instead, it’s one of those achievements that should never have been coded. To earn “Seriously,” gamers had to kill 10,000 players in versus ranked matches. That’s it, but getting to that number took so long, it drained all the fun out of playing the game.
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