Berzeger's (Mostly) Steam Achievements

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.

There are exactly 5 (+1) things that make an achievement a bad achievement. Straight to it:

Make the player buy a DLC

Do you have achievements in your game? Great. Have you released a DLC? Good! Now you can release a new achievement dependent on the DLC and put it into the base game. Example of this achievement:

Xotic‘s ‘Even More Perfect’:

Perform a perfect chain with a point multiplier powerup active (requires Pipe Works DLC)

Make the player destroy our planet by producing even more CO2

Do you want to make players play your game for an extended ammount of time? That’s obvious. Please, release an update, add more challenges, whatever. Just don’t reward us with an achievement for a *really* extended playtime. Example:

Garry’s Mod‘s ‘Addict’

You have wasted a year of your life playing GMod!

Make the player play with you

It is a bad idea to put in an achievement requiring players to play with you, a developer. Especially, if you rarely play your own game. Practically not achievable. Example: Garry’s Mod again (WTF is wrong with you, Garry?):

Garry’s Mod‘s ‘Yes, I am the real garry!’

Play on the same server as garry

Make the player play on a specific (non-repeating) occasion

It’s perfectly fine to have an achievement like “Play on April Fools day.” It happens and will happen every year, so it is unlockable for everyone. What the flock has lead some developers into thinking that having an achievement connected to a thing like “You have played the beta” would be a good idea? How are we supposed to unlock it now? Example:

PC Gamer‘s ‘Beta 1 Tester’

This achievement is awarded to the helpful testers of the first Beta

Make an achievement practically unobtainable (not technically) after some time

Ok, let’s assume you have an online scoreboard in your game. It is fine to award players for eg. having finished a race under par time. But seriously, who could have thought of having an achievement like “Get into Top 10?” What is wrong with that, you ask? Nothing, for the first few days. But after a few months the probability of getting into the Top 10 quickly approaches 0. Look at Trials 2, for example. After being released 4 years ago, these are the points of the Top 5 players: 6199.97, 6199.56, 6199.01, 6198.80, 6198.31. You get the idea? Now, you may ask what kind of sick game could have an achievement like that? Ohoh, we don’t have to go far, my friends, it’s Trials 2, and it went even further. Not Top 10, not even Top 5, you have to be the one!

Trials 2‘s ‘Top Dog!’

Reached number one position on a track’s leaderboard. Now let’s see you STAY there..

Sadistic bonus: Make the achievement not achievable in the game itself

Yes, there is an achievement like that. Make a nice poster, make a movie about the game, write a nice review… Y’know how it goes.

Trials 2‘s ‘True Fan’

Awarded for being downright awesome. It’s not about performance on the bike, it’s about being seriously cool.

To sum it up, my special eff you goes to every developer who thinks including an achievement inspired by this list would makes their players cry out of joy. It makes us cry. Just not out of joy.

 

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. :-)

Hi there!

It’s been a few years since I started hunting Steam achievements. It took many hours, but finally I managed to get into the top 30 on SteamStats, which was something, considering Steam had about 13 million users at that time. Then I got to a college (Faculty of Information Technology, Czech Technical University in Prague, to be precise) and suddenly I hadn’t as much time at my disposal as before, which ultimately lead to falling back to 150th place or so. Now I’m in 4th semester and since the school is easier now (whether it’s due to me getting used to it or the school really being easier after the first few semesters), I have some free time again. Yay! Also, my girlfriend got to Charles University, specifically the First Faculty of Medicine; she’s always studying, leaving me enough time too. Anyways, as I’m writing this, I’m positioned at the 87th place at SteamStats.

What will this blog be about? Can’t say for sure. All I can say is that I *aim* it to be about achievements, tips how to get specific achievements and generally some blabbering about them and about games with them.

Hope it’ll turn out well and you – fellow achievement hunters – will like it.

Cheers!