Be Excellent To Each Other

Hello. I have never maxed (got 1000/1000 cheevos) a full-price 360 game.

Does that make me unusual? Poll-me-do!

Also, I'm aware this is going to turn into a "gamerscores are rubbish, only nerds try and get them" "fuck you buddy" thread, so play fucking nicely or I'll get my bat out.

I play the games but have never done them to the 100%, I just get the enjoyment of the game not the cheevos.

I've said yes as I got the 1000 from the main Oblivion game, BUT, it counts itself as a 1250 because of the expansions.

Only 1 so far. Assassin's Creed 2.

Me neither. I like it when I get an achievement and will sometimes go back to get one I should have got but dicked up, but other than that they're an irrelevance. I could have got the full amount on 1vs100 as I was very close (only needed to answer a handful of questions) but on the final day of the game being available, knowingly decided to play left 4 dead instead. My life feels no less complete.

I have maxed 11 full retail games (including 1250/1250 on Burnout Paradise). I've also got 250/250 on Rock Band Track Pack 2 and 200/200 in a further 15 XBLA/WP7 games.

I don't think it's especially strange not to have done, though. Most games you have to go out of your way to get them all. It's certainly less strange than playing kamikaze Gears of War ranked matches 10 hours a day for three months.

I've never got 1000/1000 or whatever the PS3 equivalent is (Platinum trophy?). I've thought about trying it on a couple of games but there's seemingly always at least one cheevo that involves hours of tedium so I don't bother. Regarding cheevos in general I found that once I got to 10,000 nothing happened and so I stopped caring about them altogether.

I think MS should give you, I dunno, 1,000 MS points to spend for each 10,000 gamerscore you get, and maybe 50 for each 1000/1000. That'd cost them pretty much squat in the long run and be very nice to the users.

I suspect legal wranglings would get in the way, though.

That would be a great idea.

I have to say I'm surprised so many people haven't 1000g-ed a game... I would have thought somewhere along the line everyone would have found a game absorbing enough to play to completion and get the vast majority of the achievements, and then once you realise you're only missing one or two surely it is only human to think "well, why not finish it off"? Judging by Riles post about 1v100, evidently I'm mistaken. But it baffles me that people wouldn't want to just put the finishing touches to a 1000g score once they get so close (you (and others) do have some 900+ scores I'm assuming?), while of course I fully understand and respect the whole "who really gives a toss about achievements" stance.

But can't you get enjoyment, without searching for 100 flags or feathers etc?

I love going back and trying to get ones that make me enjoy the game in an extra way, even if it's replaying a level to squish a certain number of bugs or something.

If it's a grindy one or out of my skill range I'm not so bothered.

I've got close, but never managed to become bothered enough to push for the full thousand.

Can understand the attraction, but have only done it on easy ones where i can see the end in sight. Embarrasingly my wife has probably maxed out more games than me (she loves the LEGO games)

I don't think I have got more than 600 on a game. I will occasionally aim for an achievement, but very rarely.
I also prefer getting them for things I didn't know I was going to get them for; whether because they were hidden, or because I didn't look.
I do think they add something to games though, like in L4D when you have to carry the gnome, that is just funny, but I don't think I made it, and I haven't gone back and tried again.

I thought my post acknowledged that

Russ's point about the nature of the specific achievements is important though. Ones that involve playing whole sections without weapons (ie Mirrors Edge) or with specific ones (ie Half Life 2) are great fun additions to a game that you miss out on without the prompt from the achievement list to do it (unless you have a good imagination). The Fable 2 achievement lists give a lot of prompters for funny things you can do and really made the game more fun IMO. Obviously "get X kills in multiplayer" or "find all X in the game where X > a few" don't add a huge amount to the fun so i fully understand turning your back in them. My point was really that I know even if I wasn't a cheevo nut, I'd still be tempted to try and max a game if I saw in an idle moment that I had all but a couple of the cheevos already, just to say I had. Maybe being able to say proudly "I've never maxed a game" is more satisfying though

Not really, I'd like to have a 1000/1000 on there, I think AC2 was probably my nearest and I enjoyed getting all the achievements but seeking out every last feather or whatever it was just didn't seem like a fun way to spend a few hours, basically there are too many games around and too little time these days to have to bother with one once I've got most of the fun out of it.

I like to max.

It's often unpleasant to do but I kind of get into a weird zen thing with it. Grinding out a collectathon or something like that, it's awful but it's also relaxingly mindless I guess.

I totally get why people don't bother with. But I like it. I particularly like the idea that you can 'beat' a game and it's on your record as being beaten long after you have traded in the game.

Utterly pointless yes. But I see it as a collecting hobby. Some people collect boxed Game and Watch handhelds, or every Japanese shoot em up for the Dreamcast or whatever. I collect maxes. Not arsed by gamerscore but I like to max.

That said, I wouldn't recommend it. I've seen things, man....

While I do actively hunt for cheevos, I don't really have that much time for gaming any more, and I've got a huge lists of games I own but haven't even played. So it's hard to justify "find all the orbs" no matter how much I love Crackdown, for example.

I think the closest I came was Need For Speed: Most Wanted, because you get all 1,000 just for completing the game. I was on the last guy (worth 500 points) but now I can't find the disc

I answered "yes" , however I only have one game with 1100 points (Fallout 3) and its one I played for so long I wanted to have the feeling of 'doing everything' (of course after that I have about 3 bits of DLC for it that i've not touched).

I do have a number of 200/200 for XBLA titles

Achievements / Trophies have gone through an odd journey , at the start the developers really didnt know what to do with them - famously Avatar will give you 1000 gamerpoints for around 90 seconds of gameplay , or Kong will give you 1000 points by finishing the game (you get something like 200 for completing each section so finishing the game gives you the 1000 points).

After that developers realised that they could be a carrot to get people to do more in the game , and there are some really cool achievements for playing the game in a different way or taking things to extremes which almost break the game - but they also started putting in stupid boring grindy ones as well.

I remember recently reading a blog post about someone who had finished Fallout New Vegas , but had come no-where near the stimpack healing achivement and was basically walking up to the top of a hill and jumping off to nearly kill themselves , using stimpacks to heal themselves and then turning round and trudging up to the top of the hill to do the same again.

Stuff like that makes you realise just how broken some of the achievements are, and although I dont think its that unusual for someone not to have 1000 gamerscore / A platinum trophy on a game I think there will be a lot of people who just have 1 or 2 for something they really enjoyed and wanted to put in that extra time/effort into.

I maxed one of the Madden games, but that's it for 'full price' games.

It was ludicrously easy, made you do a few different things and not very grindy, so I enjoyed it.

I agree that the best cheevos are the ones that make you play the game in a way that you wouldn't have done otherwise. For instance, not on XBL, but the iPhone version of Plants vs Zombies, I enjoyed but was sad when it finished. I spotted cheevos, and they were always to do something odd with a level (complete it only using plant X, or without Plant Y, etc). So I got a great deal of enjoyment out of completing all of those.

I've done a fair bit of 'grinding' towards the Just Cause 2 achievements, I suppose, but only because I find them fun.

I think I've only done Afterburner and the new PacMan game on live. Both were easy.

I like achievements but I never go out of my way for them. It's nice to get acknowledged for doing something in the game and it's fun to stumble across them by accident.

I don't have time in my life to max out games unfortunately.

Never done it, never tried. I may have got the majority on literally one or two, but I'm not certain. It doesn't help that I've played across four separate machines since 2007, mind, with a different profile each time.

The best use of achievements I've seen was in Call of Duty 4. They were things you couldn't predict or grind towards - unexpected stuff like saving a specific soldier from a specific enemy during a fight, without any indication from the game that you were 'supposed' to. Just a nice bonus if you happened to do something neat.

I've only maxed one full-price game (Bully, although I suppose I also maxed the vanilla Fallout 3, but I haven't completed the DLC achievements yet for that one). I'll only ever attempt a max if it doesn't become too much of a grindy chore to get the last few achievements, or if doesn't mean playing through the whole game again at a ludicrous difficulty level.

Bully is actually a really good example of an entertaining max with only minimal grindyness (and even the grindy bits were still fun, to be honest).

Yeah Bully was good although you definitely don't accidentally max it, there's a little grind like you say.

Mortal Kombat 9 has set the bar for grinds now. Absolutely ludicrous. I put a lot of hours into Virtua Fighter 5 and that was pretty horrific but MK9 demands a month (a full month) for one of its achvs.

Bring it on!

Yes because ashes and Madden were easy.

Don't think I have ever checked.

Do you get a special message or anything?

I tend to find I complete a game and am on somewhere around 3-400/1000G. If it was more like 800/1000, I might make the effort, but as it is I rarely can be bothered.

I like cheevos, especially the clever ones that come up when you randomly do something you weren't planning to do (like squishing bad guys while rolling a jeep in Crackdown 2), but the grindy ones put me right off.

I think the closest I got was Halo 3.

I'm not at all bothered. Yes I've got like 32k gamerscore, but I've played a lot of games, and most of those are low hanging fruit. I think I'm at 31% gamerscore recieved, versus possible gamerscore...or something.

Personally, I consider a game complete when I play throught the single player game to completion on the default difficulty. If I go back for more, for whatever reason, it's a bonus.

No, although somewhere among the dashboard stuff (game library maybe?) there's a trophy case which displays completed games, along with a "bunch" of 'career' stats.

You can see your maxes on True Achievements I guess and that announces milestones for things like 100 games maxed or whatever.

Is this thread an elaborate trap to lure Dimrill back?

You can also see them on xbox.com (for PS3 the max is actually something special as you get a platinum trophy)

Grim... your tops seem to be 790 for Bioshock (82% missing 9 achivements but that includes the DLC) , or 185 for Braid (missing only the speed run)

Why do you have to exaggerate so wildly when the truth is damning enough?

CSI-Hard Evidence and Sherlock Holmes I've completed, but mostly that was from just playing the game through anyway. I'd be more likely to go for completion on a game I only needed a couple of bits for rather than grinding, that doesn't intertest me at all. I do like achievements though, I do think that add to the games.

I had to check TrueAchievements to see if I'd got 1000 for anything. I've got two -

Sega Mega Drive Ultimate Collection. I liked the achievements for this as it encouraged you to play the lesser-known stuff like Flicky.

Warriors Orochi. I loved this game, but I'd have never maxed it without using an FAQ as it wasn't obvious what you had to do in some missions to trigger specific events. Even with a walkthrough, it wasn't straightforward. Still, the achievements eked out a bit more gaming time from something I'd already completed which is a good way to implements them. Shame that Koei then arsed about with the sequel, turning it into a complete grind. Idiots.

I play games that have mechanics that entertain me. Working out and understanding those mechanics is what entertains me and once I feel I understand the mechanics throughly (or reached the limit of ability in things like Shmups) I wander over to something else. As such nothing has held my attention enough for a full 1000 points, although I got to about 850 in Mirror's Edge (due to the huge amount of depth and beauty in the mechanics) and I maxed After Burner because it's interesting mechanics outlast the easy achievements.

Life's to short to be grinding away at stuff I understand.

That's kinda why I like iOS stuff. It's cheap enough that I can get a load of interesting different mechanics to explore and play with. It's also why the real life card game Dominion is one of the best games ever.

I've only ever maxed out one game - the most recent Keflings one.

I really like and enjoy getting Achievements, though my total Gamerscore is never going to trouble too many people, but that's okay, because it's just fun, and for me.

I mostly get anywhere between 300-600 on each game - I'm not skilled enough to go much further than that, but by that stage I've had my money's worth so no complaints from me.

Oh shit, I've realised I even play games like a Physicist.

I've done 10 but then I have played 255(!) games according to True Achievements (300 per 360 voice) If a max involves grinding or finding 100 of X then usually it can fuck off.

Having said that CoD2 on vet was somewhat grindy and rage inducing but that feeling when the achievement popped at the end of it all was definitely worth it. Looking at the games I have maxed on True Achievements there's only really Split/Second and Sonic & Sega all Star Racing that have high-ish ratios. The others seem to be fairly routine maxes for people.

I finished Fable 3 the other day and you can go and do stuff after you've finished it to get the cheevos etc and after the final battle of holding down B ad infinitum for half an hour I thought bollocks to that and will probably never go back to it again.

18 apparently. (1 ps3 max too)
and 16 xbla.

A bit more than I expected.

i can't sat i ever cared enough to do the grinding..

and i am a bit crap at gaming too..

play 90% xbla arcade btw.. and have completed 2 of those

I still find XBLA games to be more interesting than full retail, and the maxes are usually more based on skill than grinds so they are more fun. I've got a lot of XBLA maxes and some of them remain my favourites.

I'll quite often play a game through, and then have a look and see what achievements there are. I'll then go and do the ones that are t do with the bits I found interesting, or amused me. The one in Half Life 2 where you had to cross the beach without touching the sand once I think was a good one, as that bit was fun. The one in fallout3 where you go and get all the locations I would consider to be worth my while, as it's kinda part of the game, and there's likely to be a tangible in game reward. Picking up 1000 moon orbs which are all around the map, not so much, as I'd rather be playing something else.

the opposite of that is the shit they put in R-Type for beating the first two levels using rapid fire and no power-ups. Fucking stupid, counter-intuitive and bollocksly hard.