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OT: I've had a trophy problem for a while now, but I think I have finally got over it. It just doesn't grab me anymore. 

I've never cared that much about trophies or achievements which are essentially the beanie babies of gaming. Something that serves no purpose other than to show off to anyone else who cares.   I do prefer the PSN trophies because they show what you actually did as opposed to just a random number of points that some got just by renting a bunch of kids games.

But the TV achievements make no sense because it would be like getting an achievement for watching an in game cutscene.  You didn't do anything.  At least the ones for fighting a boss or winning so many online matches made you interact.  Plus I fear a future where people are watching "Here Comes Honey Boo Boo" for achievement points. *shudders*

I must be one of the review that really doesn't care about achievements. If I unlock one, woo! If I don't, no big deal to me. I just want to beat the game and move on to the next one. 

I've never cared about achievements. I know some people that buys these HD re-releases on PS3 just because of the achievements, and can absolutely not understand how I can be content with the inferior original PS2 versions, but that's just because I don't care. When I've finished a game, I'm done with it, and I never play it again even if I only unlocked a few achievements (which is inevitable during the normal course of the game). Only a few exceptions to that rule, I played Mirror's Edge all the way from start to finish several times, but that's because I enjoy the game, not because of achievements.

I am guilty of this, I played GTA4 thru twice just to get the liberty city minutes achievement. I have no desire to play the single player again, even though I don't have some of the achievements. Even after I got it for PS3 so I could play it online again, I still can't find any interest in doing the single player again. Trying to get all those achievements on 360 just killed the game for me.

I'm Guilty of enjoying ps3's trophies just to "level up."

good read

I hate multiplayer trophies.

I remember when achievements meant unlocking hidden game modes, cheat codes, and levels.  When you realize how different games are today it's kinda sad.  It's kinda like, "Yep, I'm being cheated."

Sometimes I will go for achievements for a challenge.

To the extent that an achievement shows me a fun challenge I may have otherwise missed I like the concept.  Otherwise I generally ignore them.  I rarely play a game more than once.  RPG's on the other hand, cause major heartburn and knuckle gnawing if every quest is not completed "perfectly".  Just  me.

I love trophies, but... I have actually stopped buying games that require the aid of other players to get the trophy (i.e., have so many "friends" meet up with you at a stadium as in Burnout Paradise).

I like them but I don't go out of my way to get them if the game is garbage or its something I am not interested in.  If I like the game I will generally try and get at least 80% of the achievements, its also great to revisit older (good) games and play through them again trying to get the last few achievements.

On an unrelated note, you missed one hell of a potluck.

Apparently that's the only way msft will be able to convince people to use their redundant TV service. I wonder if there will be more points awarded for not fastforwarding through commercials.

Achievements by definition should be awarded for completing a task. Watching TV is a passive action and it just doesn't make sense you get achievements for that. However, I view my 360 achievements as kind of like a diary...I like to sometimes view old achievements and remember which one I got on what date...brings back some nice memories sometimes....so I guess the TV achievements could have a similar use, and you could compare them with someone else to see what common interests you have....I just really hope they don't mix the TV achievements with the ones obtained from games......TV achievements should have their own score seperate from our current Gscore.

a lot of the top trophy hunters also cheat and hack to get their trophies so there really is no point anymore... and now that next-gen consoles are coming... all these trophies and achievements dont really matter especially for those who decide to start getting trophies

Thanks for achievements Obama!

Personally I never really cared much about achievements or gamer score or whatever there is.

So they don't really bother me.  I just play the game the way I see fit and if an "achievement" pops up I just smile and think "thats nice!".

I hate achievements. They take away from your feeling of personal accomplishment, and make an otherwise completed game all the sudden seem incomplete. I say let the game itself be it's own achievement.

Needless to say, that's one thing I appreciate about Nintendo. The fact that they steered clear of these meaningless achievements.

So now people can get achievements by sitting on their butts and watching shows they hate? *Sigh*

was there an actual upside to achievements? 

I only noticed a little thing in the corner pop up that replaced actual unlockable content in the older games.  Achievements were just a con so the company could provide less content then they had before and still make the sheeple happy.  A perfect example of new age marketing tactics.

i can't imagine wasting time playing games like Hannah Montana or just any really really bad game just for trophies... I mean it's already bad enough you're playing a terrible game that constantly frustrates you or even making you think why the hell you're playing it...if every game was worth playing like Uncharted or Ni No Kuni.. then I would care about trophies but there's just too many bad games out there or games I have absolutely no interest in (ex. Hannah Montana.. wow I wonder how many bought that?) for me to even care.. if you want a really high trophy level/gamer score.. you would have to force yourself to play every bad game out there and that just ain't worth it.. you would also have to buy every DLC for games that have DLC when games are already expensive enough... 

My best example would be Terminator Salvation. Something like 10 Gold Trophies and a Platinum for completing the game on hard which isn't exactly hard. So many people bought the game just to get the platinum. However I do enjoy trophies. 

I find that achievements are an excellent way of prolonging the life of a game long after you've reached the finale, but within reason.

Achievements/Trophies I can get behind: 

Single player achievements for action games or games with some form of NG+: The first time I played through Dead Space, I played on the hardest unlocked difficulty, tried all of the weapons and had a lot of fun doing it. After that I looked at the achievements (I tend not to look at them until after I've completed my first playthrough) and noticed that there were achievements for completing the game on the new unlocked difficulty and another for using nothing but the Plasma Cutter for the entire playthrough. It gave me extra incentive to run through the game again and I had just as much fun as I did during my first playthrough.

A few months later during one of the many AAA release droughts, I decided to play through Dead Space again with the intention of picking up the last few achievements while simultaneously curing my boredom and once again had a lot of fun doing it.

Achievements that spark some form of competitive entertainment: The Mile High Club from Call of Duty 4 was the cutting edge of e-wiener extending technology back in 2007 because of what it represented; holding this trophy showed that you were among the exclusive sect of elite FPS twitchers that had taken on the ultimate trial and had come out on top, you were teflon and everyone else was jell-o and listening to people rage about how you must have gamesaved to get it was hilarious.

Multiplayer achievements that encourage you to try everything it has to offer: Killzone 3's multiplayer trophies (not the local co-op ones, whoever thought of those should be shot... Out of a cannon... Into the sun) dabbled lightly in the shallow end of multiplayer as a means to get you to try each class, they never went any deeper than reviving another player as a medic, completing an objective or sniping someone from cloak which to me is an example of multiplayer achievements done right. You could get all of them within five minutes of playing with each class long before you decided that you weren't comfortable playing as a medic, so that you'd never find yourself being an overall detriment to your team's success by grinding 500 kills with a gun and a class that you truly hated just for the sake of a trophy.

Achievements/Trophies I despise:

Achievements that exist solely as an attempt to shoehorn some replayability into a game: This one is the most subjective, but Heavy Rain's trophies weren't enough to make me play through it again to reach a different ending because I already knew the identity of the Origami Killer, and for me unraveling the mystery was the sole reason to play it. It's not because I believe the numerical value assigned to Xbox achievements to have any deeper meaning than the different trophy colours on the PS3 (I actually despise the gamerscore system on the Xbox and your friend is a shining example of why), but just because the game was only interesting for me once.

Time based multiplayer achievements: Crysis 2 - Dedication... Moving on.

Grinding multiplayer achievements: As mentioned earlier, any game that requires you kill an absurd amount of enemy players with a weapon/class long after you've decided that you don't enjoy playing with them. This one falls down due to the fact that it's supposed to be a representation of someone's preferred play style, but any idiot can get 500 kills with shotguns or as a support gunner or whatever given enough time. This kind of information is best presented through something like Battlelog (Although I'd prefer the server browser part of Battlelog to be in-game rather than on a web browser) or an in-game leaderboard that shows the exact number of kills/deaths or score that someone has achieved with each class/equipment over the time they've used it.

Social multiplayer achievements: I don't know what standard operating procedure of the friends list for most people is, but mine is reserved for people that I would actually want to play with, and in the case of public matches, I'm going to want them to be on my team. Now the achievement 'Et Tu, Brute?' for Bad Company 2 wants you to knife kill 5 friends which would require them to be on the other team, despite the fact that the game is designed to place any friends that attempt to join you in any empty player slots on your team, if available. So on the off chance they end up on the opposing team, you now have to go and obsessively track them down rather than help your team with the objective... With five different people. For a lot of people this isn't going to happen by chance, you're going to have to go out of your way to do this one and probably even add people to your friends list just for the sake of doing it. 

Also them local co-op ones on Killzone 3 I mentioned earlier assume that I have friends and family who have an interest in video games, more specifically, first person sci-fi shooters who want to come and sit on my bed and play it with me, whom I want to come and sit on my bed and play it with me. 

Secret achievements that aren't going to happen by chance: These should be reserved for achievements that would be considered story spoilers if they were to show up on your profile (even though they're pretty weak most of the time "Well done for walking to the end of another linear corridor, have some gamerscore"), or for something funny that you don't have to go miles out of your way to achieve, like when the Civil Protection officer at the start of Half-Life 2 demands you pick up a can and put it in the trash, so you throw it at his head. If I have to look up a secret achievement online just to find out that I'm going to have to go and sign into EA Sports Football World and add to the number of unremarkable screenshots that have all been uploaded for the sole purpose of getting 10 gamerscore, then that's a big no-no!

Great post. As someone with most favorite games on the SNES and PS1 I find myself lately uninspired to revisit them. It's not that I don't want to, I very much do, yet I feel more compelled to play PS3 games for the trophies but thankfully I never play games that I have no interest in. Geez, I feel like I'm at an AA meeting right now: "Achievements Anonymous."

*secrets* or *locked* achievements where you can unlock them by doing something randomly,pure luck,curiosity or great gamer skills/sense of exploration(if you see what I mean)  are fine and what achievemts should be.  I just hate when I open the damn achievements list after buying a brand new game and all I see is ''Unlock by completing chapter 1'' ''Unlock by completing chapter 2''  ''Unlock by talking to X character''  WHO CARES IF EVERYONES GOING TO DO THAT DAMN ACTION THROUGH THEIR FIRST GAMEPLAY?


IMO, if they want to prevent piracy in the future,which will most probably be even more common next-gen with the PS4 being simplified PC AND to counter used games sales (if thats what they want cause I dont), is to bind achievements for a game to the first buyers account,make achievements REAL achievements and when a player does unlock them,he gets rewarded by the Devs or MS/Sony for going through their games,buying them at full price and fully enjoying them.

How would those rewards work? Simple,  Bronze,silver,gold,plat trophies.  10cent in game credits,20c,35c,50c for plat.  

Players would still have to go through a incruciating amount of games to MAYBE one day have enough credits to purchase a brand new game at full price for free,but this would also be a motivation for players to play the game how its meant to be played,enjoy their game, encourage devs for their hard work by buying games at full price not used/pirating  AND to actually work for your achievements.

I don't need a message to pop up on screen to let me know of my gaming achievements. I beat Ninja Gaiden on NES, as an example, and just knowing I did is enough.

Achievements do play to a certain compulsive collecting instinct that gets gamers drooling like dogs at dinnertime. Ultimately though we have the choice to ignore them.

Achieving a higher Gamerscore used to be fun, but at this point it's sort of 'eh' to me. I enjoy going for achievements still, but never will I play a mediocre title that I'm not enjoying just for 'moar pointz'. I think I started realizing how dumb it was around the time all of my friends were going out and renting copies of King Kong, then using cheat codes to boost it up. Total waste of time.

I've never cared about achievements, or understood why others do, especially playing a game you don't care about just to get them. You don't actually receive any tangible reward so what's the point? I'm guessing it's for extremely competitive people to indulge in some kind of virtual pissing contest?

And achievements for watching TV - beyond pointless.

I used to care a lot more about achievements when GTAIV came out and before I was mainly a PC gamer. I rushed through the game and didn't do any side quests or explore tons because I saw a trophy for finishing the game in under a certain amount of hours and I had no idea how long it would take so I missed out on a lot to ensure I got that.

Hold on a second... Achievements for watching TV? Sounds ridiculously exploitable, and 10 times more meaningless than even game achievements/trophies. Just turn the TV on, walk away, and let the points roll in.