Sometimes I get the feeling that there really isn't that much to achieve. Take Dead Rising for instance- a great number of the achievements in the game were really nothing to be supremely proud of. Freefall for one was easily obtained by accidentally falling of any high ledge in the game. Things such as the Bullet Point achievement (fire 1,000 rounds) was easy to get if you kept your character active, rather than sitting in the security room with his thumb up his ass. Then there is Self Defense (kill at least one psychopath) and you have to kill 2 to progress the game's storyline. Yet another is 3 Day Survivor which you achieve simply by beating the game. Of course there are the ones that have no listing for the requirements, such as Snuff Shot B, Snuff Shot J and Legendary Soldier. The first two are to take pictures of the main characters Brad and Jessie after they become zombies (in the case of Brad he could be easily overlooked, but Jessie is an absolute gimmie). Legendary Soldier is achieved by killing at least 10 Spec Ops, which isn't really all the hard to do and is part of the late game storyline. You could completely avoid the Spec Ops at every turn, but really after getting the Disembowel and Face Crusher skills they pose no real threat. Then there are a few that are difficult to get, and require a good amount of time management. Any of the survivor linked achievements can be difficult, since there are 50 survivors total and many factors that can prevent you from saving them all. Then there are the Psychopaths, I think 10 legitimate ones total and the best ranked psychopath linked achievement requires you nab em all. Then there are achievements linked to photographing specific people and objects. Another is the Strike! achievement that requires you knock down 10 zombies with one bowling ball.
Each game is different when it comes to acheivements. Some games they are ridiculously easy and added more as an after-thought to the game. Some are very hard to get. Same games have them impelmented very well, some don't. I think for each full game you can earn up to 1000 points and each arcade game 200. Each game has to have an acheivement point system integrated. Some are as simple as completing training, yet some are for the more hardcore gamer for whom beating the game is just the start and this gives them a reason to keep playing. Not sure if I answered your questions or not.
Well sorta, but I didn't really ask that. I know what they are about and all, and I wont stop playing Dead Rising 'til I do get all the achievements. As ridiculous as Zombie Genocider seems (killl ~53000 zombies) I will pull it off. On the other hand there is the Darkness, which has 25 achievements you can perform in single player and 25 in multi. Sadly I probably won't ever play that multi.
I still reckon it'd be good to make achievements harder to gain but have them translate into Marketplace points. Reward good play.
Well, it's all up to the game manufacturers what achievements get placed into games and MS makes them mandatory. Yeah, it would be awesome if they turned into marketplace points... unfortunately, someone would figure out how to exploit it and everyone (except the consumer of course) would end up losing money. Can't have that now! heh. Sites like: http://www.xbox360achievements.org/ list acheivements from pretty much all 360 games out there and probably have hints on how to obtain them. I know some games, the acheivements are rather cryptic, not quite sure knowing how to unlock them. I'd unlock far more multi-player acheivements if there were some incentive, like Matt mentions.
^ I have a macro to autoplay the windows live puzzle webgames, thus earning tons of free points which can be used to buy M$ products. I ran it for a night, and it does indeed work. I've stopped because I'm sure its illegal and frankly I don't think it's worth it, but some of my RL friends kept going and have ordered Zunes. You can supposedly get an Xbox 360 but I heard that the point caps from the different games actually make it impossible to earn enough. Oh and one person I know in RL (through 1 person) did in fact GET the zune using this method, just takes like 6-8 weeks from the time you order it. Seems pretty doubtful with this becoming widespread that any of my friends that did it recently are going to actually get any products though. Some argue that MS will make good on it since the live games trigger a "live search" for every answer when it is checked. The claim is that MS doesn't care about botting since it still boosts the search scores they get... however watching the macro it seems like it doesn't actually complete the puzzles or do any searches... just hacks its way through.
Live Clickbots and solvers are probably pretty kosher - they're the kind that fill in the puzzles, do all the searches, etc., etc. Your bots are less of macros and more of memory access flaws inherant in Flash.
