A lot of people ask me what is the point. The biggest reason to go that extra mile, kill that extra 1000 zombies, or beat the tank with the knife is for bragging rights. Friends, and rivals can see what games you have played on their Xbox360s or check out your profile on Xbox.com, and see what you have been able to accomplish. This gives players proof to back up their epic stories of their virtual victories. Plus it gives you something to talk about when you put down the controller and step back into that crazy 3D sim, we like to call "real life".
Hey Jim, I saw you got the "Stab happy" achievement in Zombie Carnival. How did you get it, because it's been kicking my ass?
Yeah dude, it was freakin insane. First you have to get butt naked, so the boss will lower it's guard. Then when it comes in for the kill, you have to throw the cat at it, so it starts to cough up blood, then run up to it and stab it with the pen a couple of times, before it recovers. Basically you have to keep doing that until it dies. It took me 17 tries to do it. I started at 7 and finished it at 12. But those 5 points were so worth it.
Anyone who actually pays attention to that little flashing bar that pops up every time you fill certain requirements knows there are some games out there that have achievements like that, and give you close to nothing for your effort, but yet we still do it. *cough cough Bullet Witch, beat Hell mode for 1 freakin point, wtf is that sh!t about, cough*.
But aside from being able to brag to your friends about killing 53,594 zombies with your bare hands, they do serve another purpose. The prolong the life of many games by adding replay value to them. Most games do this by giving the player some sort of reward for doing certain things, like special features, new modes, and secret characters and weapons. Other 360 games just give you achievements to get you to play the game again. Most of them require the player to play through the entire game again on a harder difficulty. Once again this falls under bragging rights, but for others like me who never start a game out on the hardest difficulty at least have a reason to pop it back into Xbox, and keep it out of the used section at GameStop. I know for a fact I would have never played the main story of Gears of War over and over again on the different difficulties if it wasn't for the achievements. I might have played multi player for awhile before finally trading it in. It's a great game, don't get me wrong, but it just wasn't something I would have ever considered playing again on the harder difficulty just for the hell of it.
Now this was the main reason behind the achievements, but it was never fully realized by Microsoft. Microsoft intended for players who were true hardcore gamers to be able to cash in all their hard work for different downloads, such as arcade games, gamer pics, dashboard themes, even Microsoft points. They tried it out in February of 07, as a contest where players were assigned different levels based on their current gamer scores after registration. The gamer was then tasked with raising their score by at least 1000 points in order to be eligible for the prizes associated with their current level. The contest ran from February 12th - April 12th. It was cool to be able to finally say all my hard work finally paid off. Unfortunately I have been unable to find out if Microsoft would try this again. I speculate it was an experiment to determine how much something like this would cost them if they continued doing this sort of real world reward system.
Here is the link for the official site so you can get a better understanding of the contest.
http://www.xbox.com/en-US/community/news/2007/0205-xboxrewards.htm
And there you have it folks. Now leave. All that time you spent reading this you could have raised your score by at least 500 points, or even more if you played your cards right.
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