14 DAY TRIAL // There's a big Steam sale. There's a smaller GOG sale. There are always some Humble Bundle sales right around the corner. Everything's on sale somewhere, sometime, and backlogs are getting bigger and bigger, like a real-life game of Katamari Damacy.
Apart from the games that you know you'll never play, because you only got them as part of a bundle with the ones you were really interested in, there will also be a ton of games that you will definitely play, during that magical time span when all work gets done and the cure for cancer is attained, the fantasy locale of 'tomorrow.'
The bad news is, most of those games that you really want to play and always tell yourself that you will play will end up ignored, wasting their lives away with the rest of the pile, because there simply isn't enough time to consume all the culture that humankind is producing.
Which brings me to a very weird point, from my perspective. A couple of years back I was reading through some site's comment section and found a weird sentence that made no sense, some guy said that he was going to buy Bethesda's incredible post-apocalyptical open-world role-playing game Fallout 3 on the PS3 because he wanted trophies.
Like Ozzy Osbourne during the 2011 Super Bowl commercial for Best Buy, I immediately went, "what the [expletive] is a Trophy," wondering what on Earth could possess the poor man to buy such a great game and not enjoy it like the rest of the PC Master Race, but instead mar his experience by playing it on a gimped computer that can't do anything as its master (Sony) doesn't let it, not because it couldn't, because, you know, it's a computer after all and computers know how to do stuff. If you let them.
My first brush with achievements was right around that time, when I was playing World of Warcraft and one day read about the introduction of that incredible life waster. The massively multiplayer online role-playing game is in itself a colossal life waster, feeling like more of a job and high-maintenance girlfriend than something that you just unwind it, but it's so delicious that you simply can't stop gobbling whatever it throws at you.
So, while I was constantly battling my impulse to level another toon or go farm for some more glowcap and bloodthistle, in the manner only the Civilization series manages to get into your brain and convince you to commit suicide by dehydration by playing "just one more turn," the introduction of achievements felt like a pretty devious blow from Blizzard.
The game is great and all, but there is also a thing known as life out there. The graphics are really good, the gameplay not so much, but it's something that we all have to do. Now my favorite company was basically saying, "I know how much time you spend with WoW, but you're clearing the Arachnid Quarter just too darn fast on Wednesdays, so we need you to do something else in order to make sure that we still mean the world to you."
At first, I said that it was a great opportunity to find some of the countless Easter eggs that I had missed during my Azerothian adventure, and get some nice stuff to boot, but then I read on and I saw no mention of any rewards. No Paragon system, no bonuses that translated into gameplay, no gear, no nothing?
I wondered why anyone would care about something that doesn't help them in any way and that only requires that they waste more of their life, but before I knew it, all my friends were doing it.
Because peer pressure is much more important and compelling than reason, I decided that I too had to like them somehow, and finally managed to find the silver lining.
Having achievements meant that you no longer had to ask "did you REALLY defeat 25-man Archavon?" when grouping with random strangers, which was pretty useful. Then it struck me that you could really put some stats in that to show recent achievements, real things, like average dps on a certain boss in the last month, and other such stats that would actually have an impact in-game.
But no. Achievements are only there for bragging rights, and that's the way they'll stay, because nobody seems to mind that they're wasting their time trying to get cheevos or trophies. While a whole bunch of unplayed games are slowly dying, withering away untouched.
Even worse, in spite of my closing the eyes and hoping really bad that they will disappear into thin air like the time needed to fulfill them, they seem to be everywhere, and to have gotten more and more monotonous and drab.
Sure, finishing the game is an achievement, finishing it on the hardest difficulty level is also one, speed runs, killing a boss with a limited array of moves and many other such challenges, they qualify as achievements and serve to broadcast your dedication and love for a certain game to the world.
But the really mundane ones? They have to go. Stop trying to complete achievements that only take time (collect 70 mounts, 50 legendaries, kill 100 monsters) and start playing through your backlog of games. You can thank me later.