Achievements: Boon or Bane?

It's been a long time coming, but I've finally had a few minutes to sit down and tackle one of the most interesting developments to come out of the "current gen" consoles.

There is nothing worse than going to your profile page in Xbox LIVE and seeing not only your total achievement count and gamerscore, but the dreaded "OUT OF" gamerscore number. That is, every time you put a game in your 360 (or download a full version of a LIVE title), it adds the total value of the possible earned achievements to this number. Thus, if you have played 42 full games, you'll have a gamerscore out of 42,000 points! It guilts you into feeling like you've wasted your money on a game if you haven't played it enough to milk most of the achievements out of it.

In my opinion, there are right ways and wrong ways to do achievements:

WRONG WAY: Eternal Sonata, Devil May Cry 4 - most of the achievements are locked away until at least the second playthrough, making you feel like you accomplished next to nothing even by working your way through a game on default difficulty levels. The games mentioned here leave the VAST MAJORITY of gamerscore points FAR out of reach until beating the game on higher difficulty levels and grinding sidequest after sidequest (1,000,000 red orbs? REALLY?)...argh...

WRONG WAY: Shadowrun, Gears of War - Lots and lots of online-only achievements. There are two problems with this. The first is finding opponents after the game's online community begins to dwindle. Lack of available opponents means there is no way to unlock the achievements, which really isn't fair to those people who actually stuck with the game in the first place! The second problem is the quality of online achievements -- they have the potential to piss off a lot of people who happen to be in a game with a person who is grinding for achievements. Things such as "get 100 kills with grenades" or "get 100 kills with the chainsaw" or "kill a team member" can turn certain game types into absolute chaos. Gears of War had quite a few of these... However, the first problem doesn't really apply if you're a game such as Halo 3 - which also did a fairly good job of avoiding too many "asshat" multiplayer achievements...

WRONG WAY: Avatar: The Last Airbender, TMNT, and other licensed games - You know you have a bad game on your hands when you make the achievements blatantly easy for no other purpose than to make sure people play your game. Movie games have been notorious for this lately, especially those based on kids' licenses. Then again, if you buy a game solely because you'll be able to pick up 1000 achievement points easily, you have bigger problems* than worrying about purchasing a bad game.
*says me, who shamefully has 1000/1000 from Avatar in his Gamerscore history... -_-;; I didn't buy it though!!

RIGHT WAY: Soulcalibur IV - Now THIS is how you do achievements. Not only are the tasks extremely varied, but many are unlocked simply by playing the game normally. Grinding for them is actually counter-productive in many cases because of the way the game is designed. Also, and more importantly, in-game rewards (in the form of equipment for custom characters) is unlocked as more achievements are earned, encouraging players to continue playing for something other than additional Gamerscore points. Adding in-game rewards to achievement milestones is something newer games are starting to try, and it's a trend I would like to see more of.

Unless implemented the right way, achievements and trophies serve little purpose other than to artificially prolong the life of a game. And believe me when I say that most (and I mean most) of the achievements that consist of simply grinding for hours and hours have the potential to bore even the most hardcore of gamers to tears. Microsoft once tried handing out free XBL games and T-shirts for a contest won by increasing gamerscore a few thousand points over a specific time period. Apparently too many people entered, because they sure haven't tried anything like that again...