14 DAY TRIAL // Tired of never ending button pressing to get your lousy missing 50 or 60 points for unlocking an achievement? Well, so was car mechanic David Harr who ingeniously thought of making a machine that will work for him, to gather points for unlocking achievements on XBLA. Apparently, the guy was fed up with having 60 more points to go, in order to unlock whatever achievement he was after, playing 2000 offline Perfect Dark Zero matches.
For those who aren't familiar with the game, a player is obliged to press the Start button and B, 2 times each in order to start a new match. Doing that 2000 times over and over again can get a little frustrating. So, our mechanic guy decided to leave these robotic actions in the hands of, well... a robot. The xBot, as Harr called it (obviously) can perform tasks like create a multiplayer game, enter game, turn off game and of course, repeat. Before you know it, the achievement is yours. Keep in mind that the xBot was designed by Harr to do exactly the tasks required for playing Perfect Dark Zero matches. Other games or even other games modes in Perfect Dark Zero would have to require the robot a different set of commands.
Nonetheless, bad mouths have already started to call Harr and his xBot names, saying that using such a machine to unlock achievements on Xbox Live is "unethical." Harr immediately replied: "This is not playing online on Xbox Live-it is not playing against other people. That would be unethical. I asked myself: What type of rewards would be coming out of the effort of doing this? If I was recording button presses and joystick movements and duplicated that to help people bump up their scores, then there is money involved-that would not be ethical. This is a one trick pony, getting you just 60 points. It's not stepping on anyone's toes."
Taking in consideration that others will find his idea useful, it could become a greater issue, but making a machine that does what you'd have normally done yourself if you only had the time, really "isn't stepping on anyone's toes." Heck, we have machines that do things for us every day. Making that machine to press the buttons in the Xbox's joypad doesn't mean it will take the fun out of playing the game. Where's the fun when you have to do the same thing 2000 times in a row? Let's just hope that David Harr's xBot doesn't become self-aware and burns his house to the ground.