"True Achievements" Brings Justice to Gamerscore

A statistical status update:

• Between all the games I own, there are 769 achievements. 
• I've won 249 of them. 
• That's 32.38%. 
• Those 769 achievements are worth 16,700 G. 
• My gamerscore currently sits at 4,815. 
• That's 28.83%. 
• Weighted for difficulty, my achievements amount to a score of 5,901 out of a possible 16,700. 
• That's 20.89%.
• The most difficult achievement I've won is Little Sister Savior (which I discussed briefly in my BioShock post), which gave me a whopping 100 G but, weighted, is worth 127 G.
• December 28th, 2009, was the best day I've had (achievement-wise). 
• That day I won 12 achievements, worth 250 G (314 weighted).
• Of those 12/250:
• 4 achievements were won in the live trivia game 1 Vs. 100, worth a combined 55 G.
• 3 came from Left 4 Dead 2, worth 50 G.
• 3 came from Madden 10, worth 120 G.
• 2 came from Pure, worth 25.

This analysis was made possible by TrueAchievements.com, the new love of my life.

Maybe you've noticed the irritation that I experience with some games, in regards to achievements. The key words to look for are MacGuffin, collectibles, and chapter\checkpoint\completion prize. They are cheap achievements or cheap replay value. Finished part one of the game? Here's 25 G. Collected ten thousand hidden pizza slices? Here's 25 G. Stumbled upon the picture of the lead programmer's cat by holding down both sticks for twenty-five minutes straight? Here's 25 G. These represent the extreme ends of the achievement spectrum, in terms of difficulty. The completion prizes will be won in the natural course of the main quest, so easy you might not even notice them. The collectibles are often so difficult, tedious, and time-consuming that they suck the fun out of even the most mindless hack-and-slash game.  And not only do these make up the large majority of achievements, they all seem to have been arbitrarily assigned gamerscore values.

The beauty of TrueAchievements is that achievements are assigned new values based on difficulty. Justice is finall done to your gamerscore. And that's just the beginning. As you can see, it also crunches the numbers for you; making comparisons between your score and the truth. Inevitably, your TrueAchievement score will be higher than the one XBox Live gives because the truly difficult ones are rarely worth as much as they should be. On the other hand, the percentage of possible score will be significantly lower for TrueAchievement than Live because so many of the achievements you've collected are of the varieties mentioned above. But the site isn't done yet: it will help you fix your score. Set goals, pick out individual achievements for your to-do list, keep track of the relative value of each achievement you win. TrueAchievements gives you an interface to do it. It's like a personal gaming assistant.

• Start Press: A Whore No More (pastemagazine.com)
• Achievement Chore: She Plays For Gamerscore, Whether It's Fun Or Not [Gamerscore] (kotaku.com)