There are many reasons people play games, one of them is to get a little trophy or icon saying you did something. Something you might have spent hundreds (or at least tens) of hours on.

 

I happen to like collecting achievements, because it always makes for the best stories.

 

So tell us about your games that you remember clear as day because they were so memorable. They don't have to be explicitly connected with an achievement or trophy but I'm doing this because I find it a lot easier to remember stories when they have a little icon attached so I can remember my goal.

 

also, do you care about achievements? Do you aim for them or just play games your way?

I am a very big trophy hunter on PS4, I always like to make sure I've completely finished a game and I find that trophies often help with that (especially ones that you wouldn't expect to do in a "normal" play through of the game).

 

Unless it's a free game I wouldn't normally play without the trophies, which I do in one play through, I like to do two play throughs (once normally just to get the story an everything, then a second time mop up any trophies I might have missed along the way).

 

This is my trophy card at the minute:

 

 

I've dropped a bit as I've not been on much since Christmas, I was on the verge of breaking the world top 50,000 around mid-December! :lol:

Agreed so much on the achievements that you don't get in a normal playthrough, those are the best sort. I need to do some catching up, I'm only on 3 perfect games and 27% average completion rate.

 

I go so far as tracking all my achievements with Astats (http://astats.astats.nl/astats/User_Info.p...561198031748243 - in which I've broken into the world top 100,000 *.*), or more generally MetaGamerScore - which combines across platforms.

 

I created this thread becaause I wanted to rather selfishly share a couple of stories about two of my most treasured and apparently valuable achievements.

 

Civilization V

 

In Civ V, once you found a city it gets a name assigned to it, the first name on the list for your civilisation that isn't already in your empire. So England goes London, York, Nottingham and so on. The Celts are a bit of a strange civilisation in V, visually, with Boudicca as their leader and a painted woad warrior as their unique unit, they resemble the Celts of pre-Roman Britain - but their city names are taken from the 6 modern Celtic nations: Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Cornwall, Brittany and the Isle Of Man, and they alternate, one with each, so it starts as Edinburgh, Dublin, Cardiff, Truro, Nantes, Douglas. Llanfairpwllgwyngyll is the last Welsh city on the list, at 33rd city founded. And while you can rename cities, Llanfairpwllgwyngyll is too long for the text box, so the only way to have this city in your empire is to literally have 33 cities. Considering it's fairly suboptimal in Civ 5 to play with above 8 cities, with 15 being the general maximum you control, let alone found in a normal game, it's difficult unless you max out happiness (which lowers the more cities you have). Although you can rename conquered cities to ones on the list to speed it along, you do need to have 33 cities to do this.

 

I set the conditions for the match fairly in my favour, Celts have a bonus in woods, so I made it a forested world and made it a huge world with half the number of players so I'd have enough space - and that worked, I don't think I met another civilisation until around about 1600 AD, I was on a huge peninsula, almost entirely filled with thick forest. But even so, it took a long time (partly as I set it on Marathon speed) to get the thirty-three cities required. I made themed parts of my empire by purposefully settling cities in a radius - the Cornish part was clearly the resort part - Truro was set in a beautiful savannah with mountains overlooking it and herds of elephants nearby, while the beaches of Newquay were just as famed in this makeup as they are in real life.

 

I had to fight off some Romans, on the other continent and disapproving of my attempts to settle the entire world, but when I finally founded Llanfairpwllgwyngyll and got the achievement, I felt so accomplished. Probably the most time I spent on a Civ game.

 

Europa Universalis IV

 

Each province in EU4, and there are many, produces a different trade good, naval supplies being one of them. Naval supplies basically means wood. Not tropical wood, that's a different beast, but basically, with EUIV at its heart being extremely complicated Risk, this means that I had to go all over the world with one of the weaker nations in the game. And Norway has a rather difficult start in EUIV, they're subject with Sweden under Denmark, which means to get independence you have to fight Denmark and (probably) Sweden, both of which are stronger nations than you at game start. And if you just sit underneath Denmark, they'll eventually peacefully integrate you into their nation. And even once you're free you still have poor land, and you're having to rush to colonise the world and stop other nations from colonising too much, because large swathes of Canada, USA and Siberia have very high potential to spawn naval supplies in the middle of nowhere.

 

It took me a few restarts to get Norway independent at all, and then I had to go find the naval supplies. Some provinces were sitting right in the middle of great powers, so I had to fight off the Chinese, the Ottomans (although by the time I attacked them, my navy was stronger than the British navy at its height, I invested heavily in naval superiority and for once in EU4 it properly worked for me), I had to carve deep into Hungary, the Holy Roman Empire and Spain, set up a tentacle of Norwegian land from the bottom of India up to the Himalayas, subjugate Japan and Korea, keep an eye on the Australian and African provinces, grab one very annoying province in the centre of South America and pretty much completely destroy Russia before they colonised Siberia and found more wood. And all so I could have an achievement that references the Beatles. I'm very proud of having done this one, it took me forever and was difficult all the way through as I never became so powerful that any war was trivial.

 

Both these games have tons of achievements like this and it's probably the main reason I play them so much, because each one requires you to play a new game in a completely different way. I'm currently working on Basileus in EU4 where I must survive and restore the Roman Empire as Byzantium, starting in 1444... which is a little difficult to say the least.

There's something to be said of video games just being interactive visual stimuli to make your brain release endorphins. Even before achievements were a thing, I often got the satisfaction through minor accomplishments in games. Like say in Banjo-Kazooie, which had a whole bunch of different collectibles that all had their own unique jingle that made them satisfying to collect. That even goes back to the original Super Mario Bros., whose coins are largely frivolous, but it sure feels nice to get them.

 

While not linked to achievements, there's definitely a similar thrill I get from speedrunning Furi these days.

individual runs I'm quite proud of. The first one is probably the boss in the game that I've spent more time training than any other, once spending a long night listening to Spotify's entire New Music Friday playlist failing to bring my record under 3 minutes flat. Long after that, I did a full run of the game and got a time of around 2:35 on that fight, only 10 seconds away from the world record which surprised me as that seemed unobtainable prior. It inspired me to persist many more hours into that fight, slightly refining the pre-established strategy which is nothing but reset central since at the very start of the fight, you're relying on a coin toss for what the boss starts with, and then for the rest of it, you're relying on high precision inputs where even the slightest mis-step can completely ruin everything. This goes as far as the very last thing you do in the fight, where you rapidly dash towards the boss as soon as she becomes vulnerable, allowing you to skip a 5 second cutscene. To my amazement, I ended up smashing the world record by 6 seconds with a 2:19, which caused a mighty tussle between me and the other top player of the game (we're friends but very competitive) who took back the record a week later by just 1 second, which I then did a day later. We both kept plugging away at it and then 2 days later I pulled off the miracle 2:13 run that I linked, which is probably my best speedrun in terms of perfect inputs and a general lack of errors (at least 3 seconds can probably be saved with updated strategy but I've no motivation to try atm).

 

The second run I linked isn't as technically impressive and is full of mistakes & non-optimal gameplay, some which is obvious from watching, some that isn't. I'm quite proud of the run though because it's a bonus DLC fight that not many people give attention to (partly because the other DLC boss has far more infamy as a grand finale of sorts, though it's full of a lot of irritating random chance that makes it less fun for me to speedrun. So because no one else really runs this fight, it's one where almost every aspect of the route was devised by me, and in that sense it might be the hardest fight in the game. There's a technique in the game called a perfect parry, where if you block at the last moment (possibly only a couple frames, no one knows exactly) you'll stun the boss and stop them in their place for a few seconds. In most fights this isn't very useful and you often have to go out of your way to avoid it, but this boss has a habit of jumping around the map and making himself invulnerable, so a lot of this fight involves landing about a dozen perfect parries so you can keep him exactly where you want him at almost all times. If that's not enough, in the final section of the fight, you have a sort of Breakthrough/Space Invaders set up where the boss puts up a bunch of shields that move around in addition to every attack he throws at you. For ages we thought the best thing to do was to just rapid fire shoot, because while you can charge up your shots, it's very easy to waste a lot of time if something gets in the way or you get hit while charging up. I discovered during a friendly race that doing all manner of charge shots and jumping around the place was definitely riskier, but saves a lot of time and so I went back to the fight some more and ended up getting a 3:57, but before I started refining the fight, the world record wasn't even under 5 minutes.

 

In terms of actual achievements, the one I think I'm most proud of is this one in Enter The Gungeon

 

To get it you have to get through all 5 boss fights in one single run (which may take 30-40 minutes), and you have to beat each boss without getting hit once against them. If you haven't seen the game before,

*not* even the hardest boss you can fight on floor 4. The game is also a roguelite meaning that the weapons & buffs you pick up as you go are from a random pool of hundreds, which isn't so bad compared to similar games, but it does mean you have to adjust your playstyle on the fly to utilise them well. I might not have even attempted the achievement but I was so close to getting 100% on the game I thought I may as well. It was a taxing affair that I spent about a week on, even once getting so far as the very end but then getting hit for a stupid reason against the last boss when it's on the ropes. Completing it though was one of the biggest moments of accomplishment ever for me, I felt so good about it.

 

Also here's my astats page

Edited January 25, 20187 yr by Dircadirca

God those bosses look incredibly difficult Dirca! I've only become NOT SHIT at that sort of thing through getting into The Binding Of Isaac last month and I'm still pretty bad, having only beaten Mom once there.

 

The reaction times for that must be insane.

Getting achievements is just bonuses for me I don't set out getting them tbh.

God those bosses look incredibly difficult Dirca! I've only become NOT SHIT at that sort of thing through getting into The Binding Of Isaac last month and I'm still pretty bad, having only beaten Mom once there.

 

The reaction times for that must be insane.

I will say that Gungeon looks deceptively a little trickier than it is because your character is relatively small and you have a dodge roll ability which, while tricky to get the hang of, does allow for some handy maneuvers. I find Isaac can be trickier just because it's so hard to get your giant head out of the crossfire, as well as (usually) having less freedom in aiming. Isaac also has characters like The Lost which will ensure I will never 100% the game :P

I hate "only online" achievements.

I hate "only online" achievements.

 

Oh god, don't get me STARTED on those little bundles of turd. :drama:

There's also the even worse beast: Nearly every single achievement I DON'T have in Rocket League (about 20% of them) is basically 'do certain task while using a specific cosmetic upgrade that has to be bought. Naturally they individually cost about a quarter as much as the game itself.

Kind of a cool thing that's happened in my niche speedrunning world, since March last year, the world record in Furi has been in the under 30 minutes realm, but just tonight I took it down to under 29 minutes ^_^

I think now is a good time to kill two birds with one stone and test post my Fortnite Festival FC’s

Disease Lead EXP FC

Work Bitch Lead EXP FC

these were from a while ago before the new site came on

I am on a mission lately to try and get all the cute and pixel sprays in overwatch due to the achievements surrounding them....they are probs out there on a website

On 28/02/2025 at 23:25, HarryGarfield said:

I am on a mission lately to try and get all the cute and pixel sprays in overwatch due to the achievements surrounding them....they are probs out there on a website

Some of those achievements are a damned nightmare! I have been playing overwatch since original release in 2016, particularly support characters. I finally got Zenyatta's Rapid Discord achievement last year and I nearly cried 😂 Although I do know that there are groups that "cheese" the achievements as I believe there are usually forums on the achievement sites for people to group up to try and get certain achievements.

In terms of acheivements I think one of my most memorable would be getting the platinum in Bloodborne. I had literally tried playing and dropped bloodborne many times over the years as I could never quite get into or get the knack of it. But then something clicked with me and I spent a full week playing non-stop and managed to beat all the bosses. I'm hoping to do the same for Elden Ring eventually but I need to be in the right mindset to play souls-like games.