A History Of Violence (With Video Games)

I recently came across this great site called trueachievements which tracks all of your 360 in-game achievements. Let's begin this by saying that the 360 achievements system is great fun, in a pointless-rewards-that-noone-but-you-cares-about kind of way (and therefore similar to fantasy sports, which I also enjoy - I might have just uncovered a bad trend), but fun nonetheless (and much better than the system the Playstation 3 has stolen/come up with, as much as I know about it). Let's also state that it is very crap that you have to pay a monthly subscription to play multiplayer games on the 360, and it's basically a nightmare when you want to cancel said subscription. You can sign up automatically via your XBox, even enter your credit card details, but you want to cancel ? nup, that's far more serious, and you need to go hunting online for the local Australian phone number, call up an actual call center, then sit through about half an hour of questions.

Anyway, the thing that makes achievements fun for me is that you have things to aim for while you play the game, getting 250 headshots (BOOM! HEADSHOT!) while playing Red Dead Redemption for example. It evens gives you reason to replay a game, beating Mass Effect on normal, hard and insanity difficulty levels for example. OK looking back that one maybe wasn't worth it, but would I play the same game three times (although with different characters) otherwise ? not a chance.

I'm not playing to be the grand 360 champion of the world. I don't have the time and of course I wouldn't want to even if I did. I'm also not playing it to 100% complete every game (as far as the achievements go) - right now I think my best is maybe 90% completion of three games, and I've had the 360 for more than three years now. It's just a nice, simple reward for the occasional time I find to spend (some might say waste) on video games. Normally via the 360 interface all you see is your total achievement score update, and the list of achievements you have unlocked, but this website brings it all together the way it should be done. Historical data, crazy stats and graphs, leaderboards (just for fun) and so on.

If I owned the same game on 360 and Playstation 3 (although I don't even own the console, yet) I'd play it on 360 just for this reason, even if the graphics were a little inferior. Here's a fun trip down memory lane I had, showing how much (or little) I've played my 360 over the past three years, and the games I've played over that time.

July 2007 - November 2007

• Forza Motorsport 2

December 2007 - January 2008

• Project Gotham Racing 3
• Saints Row (only played briefly)
  

May 2008

• Grand Theft Auto IV
  

August 2008

• Project Gotham Racing 4 (only played briefly)
  

September 2008

• Gears Of War (only played briefly)
  

November 2008 - December 2008

• Saints Row
• Saints Row 2
  

January 2009

• Burnout Paradise (borrowed)
  

March 2009 - April 2009

• The Orange Box (Half-Life 2 only, borrowed)
• Mass Effect (only played briefly)
  

July 2009

• Grand Theft Auto IV TLAD (only played briefly)
  

November 2009 - December 2009

• Forza Motorsport 3
  

February 2010 - April 2010

• Mass Effect
  

May 2010 - June 2010

• Bioshock
  
• Final Fantasy XIII (only played briefly)
  
• Red Dead Redemption

The most interesting things I found when looking back are how sporadically I played these games. I'm not sure why I'd play the 360 for a couple of days, then not again for months, then do the same thing again. I think I lost the passion for gaming the day I started working full time (not a coincidence at all), you might say that I'm not a passionate man in this regard (or any other, for that matter). As can be seen from the above, I tried to have a go at a bunch of games, but just didn't get hooked.

Currently I have an impressive and growing collection of unplayed (or almost unplayed) video games. At a rough guess the list includes:

• Bioshock
• Bioshock 2
• Final Fantasy XIII
  
• Gears Of War 2
• Grand Theft Auto IV TBOGT
• Grand Theft Auto IV TLAD
• Mass Effect 2
• Rockstar Table Tennis
  

And I'm sure there's others I've forgotten completely. Maybe one day...