The 5 Most Pointless Grind-tastic Achievements Ever

It’s safe to say that the vast majority of achievements are designed to extend the length of the video game you are playing. This may be through tricky hidden challenges, or post-game content, or it could be an easily missed objective that may require multiple playthroughs. If the game developers are feeling uninspired and lazy, however, you can end up with tedious achievements based on extensive grinding. These are those achievements, the worst nightmare for any completionist.

5 - Dead Rising

Dead Rising, Capcom’s zombie survival simulator, already had some pretty difficult achievements. These were made bearable by the game being roughly as fun as visiting Disneyland on a sugar high. But Seven Day Survivor was different. You had to survive for one in-game week; this translates into over 20 hours of gameplay.

This makes the Bladder of Steel achievement seem
positively reasonable in comparison.

This doesn’t seem too lengthy when compared to other achievements on this list, and it isn’t quite as monotonous. The reason it deserves this spot is because you can’t save or exit the game at all. You have to play for 20 hours straight.

4 - Beautiful Katamari

Well, I suppose Beautiful Katamari wins the award for the most honest achievement on this list.

Also, this.

Beautiful Katamari - and indeed, the entire Katamari series - is a very fun and unique game that has enough replay value to keep you going for a very long time. Unfortunately, 100 hours is extremely generous, particularly when considering the rather short story campaign takes all of three hours to complete. You are more than likely going to leave your console on while you’re asleep, but even this method is going to take several days.

3 - Bejeweled 2

Bejeweled 2 is one of those games that seems so innocuous upon first glance. “Look at me,” it says. “Look at my bright colours and shiny gems. I’d never hurt you.” But you would hurt me, wouldn’t you? You’d hurt me and hurt me and demand I come back to be hurt again.

I... I’m sorry. I have this thing with Bejeweled 2. I was bitten badly by this game.

I’ll cut to the chase. The achievement is for "completing" the Endless Mode in this game. Being that it is called "endless" for a reason, you are looking at around 250-300 hours of playing to get this achievement. That in itself sucks so hard that you’re in danger of getting a hickey if you complete it. Add on the fact that a game mode and two more achievements are inaccessible without clearing this and you start to understand why this game is so vindictive.

When the game talks to you it doesn't
even try to hide the fact it's diabolical

The absolute worst part is The Bug. See, Bejeweled 2 has an interesting way of handling game saves. When you continue a game it automatically deletes the previous save. When you quit the game, it creates a new one. This means that if, for example, you are in the middle of the 157th level and you experience a power outage, you irreversibly lose all of your progress. Swift vengeance enacted upon the controller, console, and PopCap offices will follow.

2 - Bomberman: Act Zero

Bomberman: Act Zero was released to universally bad reviews. It took the unique cartoony aesthetics from the Bomberman series and scrapped it, replacing this...

...with this.

Suddenly, Iron Man

On top of the drastic design overhaul the single player was abhorrently long and repetitive, and even at launch it was incredibly hard to even find multiplayer matches, let alone join. These issues pale in comparison to the sadistic achievements, however.

Most of them were standard fare and monotonous by design, rather than maliciousness. Clearing the single player would take hours, especially since you can’t save your progress, and the addition of hidden and completely unmentioned challenges to unlock several achievements complicated things further. There were several other grind-tastic achievements to obtain, but the real piss-take came in the form of the "break 1,000,000 blocks" achievement. You got a few dozen blocks per stage to clear, meaning you would have to play at least twenty thousand games whilst clearing the entire arena by yourself. I estimate roughly 500 hours spent going for this one achievement.

1 - Dead or Alive: Xtreme 2

Dead or Alive: Xtreme Beach Volleyball was, I like to imagine, an experiment to see exactly how much merchandise you can sell by slapping a big pair of boobs on the box.

Pictured: feminism

Alright, three pairs of boobs.

As sleazy and uninspired as it was, the game sold remarkably well; well enough to spawn a sequel. DOA:X2 is every bit as chauvinistic and objectifying as the first (Team Ninja have even gone on record as saying that if fans masturbate to the Xtreme series they’d consider it “a success”) but the move from the Xbox to the Xbox 360 means you can now earn achievements. They consist of the tedious task of unlocking every single swimsuit for every single character.

Pictured: progression

The number of people that have cleared all of the achievements is so small that it’s extremely hard to guess exactly how long it takes, but estimations are generally over 1,000 hours. This wouldn’t be so bad if the game wasn’t already extremely boring and unappealing to anybody outside of the “can’t maintain an erection unless it’s for polygons” demographic.

Alternatively, you can spend thousands upon thousands of MS Points to cut down the time drastically in the biggest dick move that will ever exist until Ron Jeremy perfects his “Trust the Thrust” dance routine.

Know of an achievement that you think should be here? Post it in the comments below!

The NRA vs. Kindergarten Killer

“There exists in this country, sadly, a callous, corrupt and corrupting shadow industry that sells and stows violence against its own people. Through vicious, violent video games,” he began, and I let out a sigh somewhere between exasperation and bemused disdain. It sounded something like “huurrphruphlem,” for reference’s sake.

The truth is I’d been waiting for that moment from the very beginning of Wayne LaPierre’s speech, the pivotal moment where video games would be suddenly thrown up as the worst thing to happen since the holocaust. It’s one of those inevitable things that seems to happen with every widespread shooting since Columbine. Alright, let’s have a listen, what names will he throw up?

In fairness, this game used to scare the living
daylights out of me.

“With names like Bulletstorm,” he continues. Hm, that’s an unusual target, although it does reward the player for creative kills. I can see why he’d include it. “Grand Theft Auto,” crikey, it must be a whole year since that was last deemed the downfall of man. “Mortal Kombat,” a title which would be more poignant if more than a tiny handful of characters in the series used guns, and even then only 15 years ago when it was still cool to use the series as a scapegoat. “And Splatterhouse,” he seems to finish, triumphantly. Well, if you want a game that teaches you possessed hockey masks are dangerous then you could certainly do worse, but honestly? This was a poor list of titles. Surely Call of Duty or Battlefield would have been better examples to back up your point of view, games that have realistic portrayals of violence in a (mostly) modern-day setting. Or maybe Counter Strike, a game Adam Lanza has actually been connected with?

Regardless, he’s rattled off a few generic examples. It seems a little bit foolish for the NRA to try and pin any blame for any shooting on video games given that they’ve released a few of their own, but I suppose at this point they’re thankful for any hatred they can deflect. Hang on - isn’t he finished?

“And here’s one, it’s called 'Kindergarten Killer.' It’s been online for 10 years. How come my research staff can find it, and all of yours couldn’t? Or didn’t want anyone to know you had found it?”

I’m slightly ashamed to admit that my first thought when I heard this was not “that’s a disgusting game” but rather “a video game I haven’t heard of? Preposterous!” After a fair amount of rather disgruntled research (read: frantic Googling) it became clear why I’d never heard of it; Kindergarten Killer is a ten year old flash game made by a single person.

It is surprisingly hard to get
a gore-free screenshot.

Yep, that’s right. A flash game made ten years ago by Gary Short, then only 18 years old, apparently shares 1/5th of the blame for the Newtown shooting. Ignoring the fact that the game is almost impossible to find without explicitly searching “Kindergarten Killer flash game” (which in turn means turning a blind eye to whatever disturbed web searches Wayne gets up to) Gary Short is not exactly a great chap to vilify. Within minutes of finding a cached version of his old website I found a (crude and very NSFW) post about how he explicitly hates hunting.

The game itself is fairly standard for old flash shoot-’em-ups and plays like an old pop-up gallery (or, because I’m suffering from an irony deficiency, a target range.) You play as a disgruntled janitor moving from room to room with a shotgun clearing out inexplicably armed children. The graphics are, predictably, very cartoony and simplistic, and the gore is extremely over-the-top and stylized.

I’ve seen a few rather confused news reports call it “stomach turning,” or “chilling,” and I suppose in a way it is. It was made by a kid who was doing his best to be controversial. Was it responsible, or even partial inspiration for the shooting? Not at all. In fact, the playable version I found had fewer than 50,000 hits, and I’d wager a good deal of those have come to light only after thousands of gamers were left scratching their head wondering what the devil LaPierre was talking about.

Interpret “what the devil LaPierre” as you see fit.

Super Columbine Massacre RPG!
was bitingly satirical.

It brings to mind Super Columbine Massacre RPG!, a video game that also faced heavy controversy for being entirely based on the Columbine High School shootings. It was called “heartless” and “worshipping terrorists,” and led to all manner of death threats and general internet nastiness. In reality, it was an extremely intelligent video game where every second of meticulous research was on display, and you came away from it feeling suitably disturbed and shaken.

If you haven’t played this I heartily recommend it for a fine example of gaming as an art form, by the way.

Look, Wayne, I understand the position you’re in. You’ve had to remain silent out of respect while people campaign to, as you see it, take away your rights. This isn’t the case. You can have your guns, it’s just about time there were tighter regulations in place. Lanza should not have had such easy access to those firearms, and his mother should not have been allowed so many guns when she had a mentally disturbed son. What part of that is so hard for you to swallow? Unless Lanza was throwing Mortal Kombat discs around like makeshift shurikens is it really appropriate to bring up video games at all? It seems a bit weird to claim that playing games where you use firearms is more harmful than firearms themselves.

Instead of trying to drop the blame onto the media, listen to suggestions and ideas. Evolve them and help. Stop being so bloody stubborn. And please stop playing decade-old flash games!