The Final Achievement

I'm almost there. It's been a journey since December 2005, but sometime this year the journey will be over. What journey? The long road to one million Gamerscore.

Gamerscore are points awarded for achieving various things within each game that the developer of the game put forth. When Gamerscore began, it was difficult to get a full 1000 points from a game. On Call of Duty 2, this required beating the game on the hardest difficulty and there were so many levels with tanks that seemed to know where you were at all times. 

Gamerscore has evolved though. Some games have gotten tougher and require an almost monk-like dedication to the task. And then, there's the opposite. The opposite is what sucked me in.

I'm a Gamerscore addict. The website, trueachievements.com, tracks a gamer's Gamerscore. I know these points mean nothing, and they're more irrelevant than ever with games that you can amass 4 or 5 thousand Gamerscore in this 10 minutes. And some of the games that'll be a quick 1,000? I'm ashamed to have played them because they are so bad. 

I always liked the sound of Microsoft's "beep-boop" of an achievement being unlocked, but since the start of the pandemic I've been dedicated to increasing the point total no matter what. Bad game? Don't care. New game that's got a complex story and everyone is talking? Nope, don't care. Give me the achievos. This became too much so I'm changing this.

1,000,000 is a big number and I still want it. After I get there, though, I'm retiring from anything related to Gamerscore. Completions, ratios, achievement percentages... I won't care. There are so many worlds that developers have made that deserve to be explored, and so many bad games that don't deserve to be seen by anyone. At the rate of devolving, and Gamerscore inflation, I'm awaiting a game that simply awards a 1,000 point, full completion, for simply pressing start. 

The past week I've been on a marathon of clearing out the easy achievements in my gaming library and also searching out quick completions. I may have complained about it, but this is something that must happen to get to a million. It's been working, I've gained almost 60,000 points which, I looked it up, it took me five years to get that from when Microsoft made Gamerscore. It's a sprint now, there's still about 75,000 to go, but I'm driving of the moment, that the game makes the achievement unlocked noise, and I'm free of this irrelevant system and I can move on.