Microsoft did a hell of a thing when somebody there thought up achievements. Although born on the 360, they’ve come to be fairly ubiquitous amongst games today.

Not being an XBox 360 owner, my first real experience with achievements was in Team Fortress 2, which I tried briefly during its beta testing. Soon after that, the other players online became so much better than I that playing soon became an exercise in pain. I did manage to get five Team Fortress 2 achievements, but that didn’t feel like much of an accomplishment, and at that point I wasn’t trying specifically to get any of the achievements. I think the first time I started gunning for achievements was with Half-Life 2: Episode 2 and Portal, where I did pretty well. I’m glad Valve started their own achievement system, and if they go back and put them into any of their older games retroactively, I’m all in to replay those games. But some of those are damn hard. Anybody who got the Little Rocket Man achievement has got way too much time on their hands.

My second achievement experience was with the Playstation 3’s “trophy” system. To be honest, most of them in games I’ve played are a bit lame. I’m picking up some trophies as I move through Dead Space, but I don’t even know what most of them are. I just note them passively as they appear. Oh, I just dismembered my fiftieth limb. Ooh. No big deal.

I’ve got to admit though, the addition of trophies to Pixeljunk Monsters is something I’ve very much appreciated. I still go back to that game from time to time. I’ve now successfully completed every level in the main game, and I’m working my way very slowly through the considerably more difficult expansion. I’ve got about a half dozen trophies, and every once in a while I’ll go back and add another, but they’re no cake walk either.

Fallout 3 has got to be my first legitimate attempt to collect every trophy in the game. I’ve got 81% of the game’s achievements, via Games for Windows Live. There are ten left that I don’t have. Four of them are from the Operation Anchorage expansion, which is lame because you need to shell out cash to get the achievements. Three of them are gotten by going through the game with a neutral character – something I’ll do if I ever play through again. One is “The Nuka Cola Challenge”. I’ve gotten 27 or 28 of the requisite 30 bottles of Nuka Cola Quantum, and the next time I feel like firing the game up, I can probably get that achievement quickly. And the last two, to me, are the hardest achievements in the game: Silver Tongued Devil, and Data Miner, which require you to succeed in 50 speech challenges and 50 hacking attempts respectively. The problem isn’t beating the challenges, it’s finding them. I’ve got somewhere around 30, only because I actively sought out everything I could. What a pain.

Mass Effect for the PC has achievements, but I haven’t given them much attention because they don’t connect to anything – I can’t link to a web page that shows them, and nobody I’ve added as a friend anywhere can see them. Kind of like PS3 trophies, which you can’t view online. It really makes you realize that achievements are all about showing off your accomplishments in video games. Too bad that 90% of the games I play don’t have them.