Berzeger's (Mostly) Steam Achievements

OK, this game is weird. It’s all about connecting falling nodes of the same colour. After connecting a few nodes, you are awarded a note node (yeah). The game is divided into a few levels (9, me thinks) and to beat each one of them, you have to collect specific amount of the note nodes, which would be perfectly fine, if… that would not be the only game principle… AVSEQ would not have a weird kind of mouse acceleration cleverly preventing you from pinpointing the nodes… the game rules were explained better… I mean – for example, if you miss a node, you lose a note node. Sometimes. Sometimes you lose two at once and sometimes you don’t lose any. When that happens, I don’t know.

The another thing broken is achievements – you have to do them all in one sitting, because the game does not remember your achievement progress. Luckily for us, achievement hunters, it takes only about 2 hours to get them all. There is no other advice than to just beat all the levels first and then to repeat the very first one (the easiest, obviously) until you get all the achies. Oh, and more thing – don’t play infinite mode. The game loses your progress after exiting infinite mode, too. Oh, well. Another one off the list.

Finally! This game has 25 achievements, some of which made me very angry. As always, I won’t talk about all of them, but I’ll describe the hardest ones. But first things first – I really enjoyed playing the game. It’s similar concept as in Alien Hallway, but a hundred times better. This is how this genre should look like! Now about the hard achies:

King of the Stone Age

Kill all Vikings in a Boulder Mode game without killing any of your own.

Oh god, oh god, oh god. I hated doing this one. In boulder mode the whole map zooms in and you see only a big boulder rolling from left to right. You have to jump over friendly units and roll over enemy units. The map, however, is so zoomed in, that you have about 0.5 second to react. Better not try do this one tired. The only way to achieve this one is to actually try and try and try and… try. Until you remember the layout (which never changes). My first try was on Saturday and I got the achievement on Wednesday, so yeah. It took me all in all about 2 hours. But the feeling after I got it… Who am I to tell you, you know it for yourselves.

Blotting out the sun

Complete Chinese Campaign level 7 with 15 or more Rocketeers alive

IMHO the second hardest. Rocketeers got a bit nerfed in the latest version, so it is much harder than ever before. You get three Rocketeers in the beginning of the level and you can’t buy more. The trick here is to multiply them with your magic. However! You can’t use the magic for anything else, because you wouldn’t have enough mana to make 12 additional Rocketeers then. Buy 10 workers as fast as you can, build a Buddha statue and then research Ninja Monkeys. When Rocketeers appear, start cloning them immediately. Keep building Ninja Monkeys (don’t you ever stop creating them) – they come in handy when catapults appear, as Ninja Monkeys are able to stun them. Build Buddha statues wherever and whenever you can and keep pushing forward. This achievements needs a bit of luck, too, so if you don’t succeed in your first try, try again. I had to do it 4 or 5 times.

Uncontrolled Demolition

Destroy a tower under construction with Rage.

I wouldn’t say this one is hard at first. But well… It was. This did the trick for me: Start skirmish, pick Vikings for you and Chinese for AI. Pick a large map (doesn’t really matter which one) and set gold, mana and workers at maximum. When you’re in game, research axe throwers, lightning bolt and rage. Keep producing axe throwers and use rage on them at once so they come closer to each other. AI usually starts building a tower as soon as its unit comes past a build spot. As soon as you see it started building, kill enemy units with lightning bolt and rush to the tower using rage. It took me about an hour until I rage’d there in the specific moment.

Phew! Glad I got them all.

I saw  Penguins Arena for 99 cents at the newly open Gala Store. Considering it’s one of the first Steam games with achievements, it was a no-brainer for me. 6 hours later, I had all of the achievements, some of which I’ll describe here.

Duel Master

Win 50 duels

This achievements is a bit weird. According to 100% Achievements Group forums, it won’t trigger in… well… duel mode. You have to start classic multiplayer (yes, even bot fights are called multiplayer here, no one else plays the game today anyway) and be the only one penguin of your team alive. When playing with bots, after you die you take control of a bot controlled penguin, so the best way to get it is to kill yourself a few times, so that you’ll be the only one. This is the most annoying and time-taking achievement here. Penguins Arena gets boring fast.

Tribe’s berserker

Win 100 fights

Tribe’s grunt

Take part in 150 fights

These two are actually very, very easy. Just start the game, turn off your screen (to save some energy, be ecologic), take your girlfriend to the movies, get some dinner afterwards and when you come back, you’ll see that you’ve earned not only these two, but also 80% of the other achivements as well. Simple.

Alien Hallway is a mediocre Swords and Soldiers-like game from the most immature company I have ever seen. The game consists of a few elements – your base, enemy base and the battlefield. Engineers gather (infinite) minerals with which you can buy soldiers. Soldiers have their own AI, the only thing you have to carry about is the right choice of your army. The enemy does the same and whoever destroys the opponents base wins. I usually like this kind of games, but this one fails at several levels. First, it is horrendously bugged. Second, it looks as if it was made using MS Paint. And furthermore, it feels like a remake of a Microsoft XNA tutorial.

The achievements are pretty easy and most of them I got in a standard gameplay. The only harder one requires you to finish the game on Extreme difficulty. Which only means the enemy has more health and deals more damage. So you have to play the easier levels to make money in order to buy unit upgrades. Oh, wow. It must have been tough to come up with something like that.

First of all I have to say that I totally love Botanicula! I love the style, the gameplay, everything about it. It’s a czech made point ‘n’ click adventure where you have 5 characters (but control them as one) and have to save the nature from evil all-eating spiders. The game includes 53 easy achievements, you’ll get them all if you try to collect all the game cards. Strange thing is that you can buy this game at humblebundle.com and activate it on Steam, but you can’t buy it on Steam directly. Maybe somewhere in the future?

I actually finished Portal’s achievements a long time ago (some of there are really hard, especially the challenge ones), but then, just prior to releasing of Portal 2, VALVe added a new achievement called “Transmission Received” with a cryptic hint “..?” All you have to do is find 26 radios hidden throughout the game and deliver them to specific locations. I couldn’t get myself to doing it, because I knew it would mean to play the whole game from the beginning to (almost) the end. But today I finally started it up again and after 3 hours I got the achievement, so I’m at 100% again. Yipee!

Star Trek: D-A-C isn’t a hard game, it’s just boring, that’s why it took me so long to 100% it. No one plays it online, since it’s very repetitive, you’ll quickly learn that you’re bored after a few minutes. Anyway, the hardest achievement is probably Kobayashi Maru, and that’s only because you have to use google. The achievements themselves are kind of nice, but because you have to play with bots, who are practically incompetenent, it’s just a matter of few hours to get them all in a standard gameplay.

Meh. Nothing to see here.

At last! After numerous tries, I have finally managed to get the last three achievements I was missing. Namely Fair Play (Won a game without using any tricks or treat), 300 Club (A perfect 300, 12 strikes in one game) and Freedom Fighter (Free Play Mode was completed). Fair Play was fairly easy, as it was sufficient to create a game against a living enemy (as two player mode is called in this game). The other two were pain in the arse. The last Free Play Mode level has the objective of getting 300 points in a game (which is generally the max score you can get in bowling), so it comes with 300 Club, but man was it hard! The hardest part was getting a strike in the first round where you have no tricks at your disposal. Then it was more about luck, I even got to a situation where I had 11 strikes and failed the 12th one, which, as you probably can imagine, sort of pissed me off.

However, it was more than worth the little popup in the lower right corner of the screen. ;-) I really enjoyed playing this little gem, but I don’t think 10€ is an appropriate amount of money to pay. Anyway, good night now!

This one got me sweaty (not as sweaty as Bullet Candy had gotten me, though). Fortix is a modern remake of an old arcade classic Qix. Your goal in this game is to fence enemies forts while avoiding cannon balls, dragons and fire balls, the point is, however, that it’s not enough that you avoid enemies, they can also only touch your trail to kill you. Achievements in this game are all pretty straightforward and not really worth talking about (especially not at 4 AM), the only one which made me swear like a sailor countless times was ‘Mission Imposible,’ which requires you to complete the game on Impossible difficulty. No kidding, that difficulty is no close to being easy at all. Everything moves so fast that you only can progress by small, well thought pieces. And although you will have everything thought out, there is a random factor which will get you killed many, many times. Choleric fellows, watch your blood pressure!

Anyway, after 6 hours I finally got them all in this one.

Let’s go over my 100%’ed games. I have 17, according to AStats, I’ll just write what I remember (some of them I completed years ago) about each of these games.

Audiosurf:

Nothing spectacularly hard. It’s all about the right songs for each achievement, which you can easily look up at official Steam forums. There was one which took me significantly more time, but sadly I can’t remember which one it was. That probably means it wasn’t that hard after all, since I tend to remember these.

Bloody Good Time:

This game has an interesting story behind it. This is what one of the developers wrote on their Facebook page:

Regarding Bloody Good Time, the whole game was a scam from Ubisoft to prevent them breaching copyright when they made Assassins Creed Multiplayer mode. They ran us into the ground, and sold BGT at a low price with minimal content to ensure it would never compete with Assassins Creed, and indeed to ensure that Outerlight would go out of business. In business terms, they did a splendid job destroying the competition and increasing their monopoly in the games industry. In business terms we did a terrible job defending ourselves.

When they cut the budget for BGT we pointed out the need for DLC, 3 levels is just not enough, but they stated they did not care about replayability, or longevity, for BGT. So, in a nutshell, hell will freeze over before there is any DLC for BGT. Even if I wanted to add some DLC for BGT, they hold the copyright for it, as well as the distribution, so I couldn’t add any DLC. Sorry m8! My bad…or Ubisofts bad, depending how you look at it.

Assholes, these Ubisofts, aren’t they?

Anyways, I’ve completed this one an hour ago, so I still remember some of the achievements, haha. ;-) Again, nothing hard. The only harder achievement is to get 2000 fame (cumulatively). No one plays the game online, so you have to put up with bots. Also, you get mostly 100 fame per 15 minutes, meaning you have to play 300 minutes against boring bots to get 2000 fame. Luckily there are console commands not considered cheats which you can use to boost rewards for specific feats. Again, you can look up these commands at Steam forums.

The next one is Bullet Candy, a game cursed by many, completed by only a few:

When I started playing Bullet Candy, I truthfully didn’t know what was awaiting. If I knew, I would never buy the game. This is a game about bullets. Bullets, enemies, lasers, particles, more enemies, more bullets and even more bullets. All around you at a small screen. It has 50 insane levels with the hardest achievement requiring you to finish it without losing a single life. A single. Fucking. Life. FYI, it takes exactly 1 (point zero) hit to kill you. Only 0.4% of players actually managed to get it. I even had to use a CPU slowdown program to make the game run at about 1/10 of its normal pace. You can read the previous sentence as: “To make it more compatible with human senses.”

Another achievements requires you to finish the game under 11 minutes and 30 seconds. Yes, there was a moment when I finished the game in 11:32, I am quite amazed my keyboard is still functional after that. Bullet Candy also includes so-called Extended mode, which is basically the 50 levels played thrice. To unlock ‘Long Haul’ achievement, you have to finish Extended mode. Well, the reason only 0.5% of players have this one is because the god damn game keeps crashing after having played 100 levels or so, so it’s more about luck than anything else. You’ll unlock most of the other achievements together with ‘Follow the Word of God,’ which is the first one I talked about here. That is if you manage to unlock it, of course. I’m glad this game is long dead, because the picture of more achievements in a future update (woe betide!) makes me shiver, it really does.

Chaos Theory:

Not much to say here, all the achievements are pretty easy and I got them after 3.6 hours of a standard gameplay.

Cogs:

Whew! I’ve never been good at this type of puzzles, so it got me thinking for almost 16 hours. I even had to watch walkthroughs on YouTube for 5 or so puzzles. The achievements are nothing non-standard. You’ll get all of them by completing the game with the highest rating on each puzzle.

Day of Defeat: Source:

Day of Defeat: Source is a great game with very dull and boring achievements. Most of them you’ll get by grinding. Get 1000 kills with this, 1000 kills with that. You most probably won’t get them by standard gameplay. I had to create a map in Source SDK, start in on a dedicated server, fill it up with bots, learn some console commands to make them do what I want and grind and grind and grind for about 10 hours. However, you won’t get ‘Jack of All Trades’ achievement alone, as it requires you to get a kill with 5 kinds of weapons in one life.

Foreign Legion: Buckets of Blood

Booooring. :-) Both the game and the achievements. Kill 2500 chickens, make a 10 kill combo, purchase this, wear that… Standard achievements, the only thing which could prevent you from getting them is the simple fact, that Foreign Legion is an unbelievably boring game. I finished all the achievements once, uninstalled the game and half a year after the developers added more. Sadly, it doesn’t have Steam Cloud, so I had to spend a few hours leveling my character again.

Gravitron 2:

A lot of people like Gravitron 2, I hated it, though. Games like this aren’t made for choleric people and I shamelessly ended up editing the levels to make them easier… I don’t want to see this one on my HDD ever again. :-)

Half-Life 2:

A classic one. Achievements in Half-Life 2 are mostly fun, as there is a good ratio of grinding achievements to skill-requiring ones to story ones. The only bigger problem was crossing the Antlion beach, or whatever it was, without making a step on the sand, I had to watch a YouTube video for this one. I am kind of surprised only 2.5% of players have the Kill an enemy with a toilet achievement. Seriously, does no one use Gravity Gun?

Half-Life 2: Episode One:

Pretty much everything what I said about HL2 applies here too. There is one outstanding achievement, though, that is ‘The One Free Bullet,’ for which to achieve you have to finish the game firing exactly one bullet. It was a real challenge and a twist to the game to finish the whole game using only Gravity gun, crowbar, grenades and rocket launcher. :-)

Half-Life 2: Episode Two:

Oh dear, Episode Two came with some pretty hard, but enjoyable achievements. Specifically ‘Little Rocket Man,’ for which you had to grab a garden gnome (the only one in the whole game) and carry it through to the very end of the game. Putting him in the car in a way he wouldn’t fall out wasn’t easy. Also he sometimes got lost and I had to reload an earlier save. Oh, just a note – after you carry him to the end, don’t forget to put him in the rocket (you’ll know which one, don’t want to spoil here), otherwise you won’t get the achievement.

A hard one was also ‘Get Some Grub,’ for which you had to squish every Antlion grub in the game. There is almost 300 in the game and some of them are pretty well hidden, so you probably get the idea. I recommend you to find a text walkthrough and go by it. Well, of course you can do it alone, just don’t get mad, when you find out, that in the end you have squished like 299 out of 300.

Obulis:

Obulis has no creative achievements to offer, most of them are “finish this level” and “finish that level.” Just one thing – never use any hint, or you won’t be able to get 347 and a half stars which you need for the ‘You… Complete Me’ achievement.

Puzzler World:

I’ve really liked Puzzler World. Puzzler World is about… well… Puzzles. There is over one thousand various puzzles from 14 categories. I most enjoyed Link-a-Pix puzzles. The only drawback is that the game looks too childish. There is 14 achievements total and you can guess what they are like. Yeah, every one of them is “complete 10 puzzles from category x.” The hardest for me was the crosswords one, because English is not my native language, I had some hard times with it.

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim:

I’m particularly proud of completing this one, as it took me almost 90 hours. Sadly, most of the achievements are complete-a-quest and grinding ones. There are some fun ones, but the dull ones prevail. Still, having completed all achievements in an open-world bugs-filled RPG? Yeah.

Wasteland Angel:

Although set in a promising world, Wasteland Angel is an incredibly stupid game. Most of this top-down game you’ll spend driving your car around a small city destroying everything at sight. It took me 4.4 hours to finish the game (and with that get the last achievement) and if you’re not a complete moron, you won’t even have to try to get all the achievements too. Seriously, devs? Glad I got it de facto for free in a bundle.

World of Goo:

I’ve liked this game so much that I also bought a copy for my Android tablet. The achievements here are basically just “100%’ the game,” which is nothing easy, though. Again, I had to use YouTube several times.

Zombie Driver:

I, in fact, have 100%’ed Zombie Drivers a few times now, because the devs keep adding new content as well as new achievements. They were pretty easy, until Blood Race mode came and with it crazy achievements like killing three enemies with one rail-gun shot, which I luckily got by pure luck, heh. I finished Zombie Driver again just recently, because I couldn’t have got past all the tournaments, the choleric me just wouldn’t let me until now. :-)

Well, and that is everything I have 100%’ed. There are few games in my account missing only an achievement or two, so I’ll have to browse through them and choose which to finish first. I’ll keep you reported. :-)