Discontinued Achievements

With the release of the Xbox One, and the fact that EA are allowed to continue making games with online achievements, there is probably going to be an increase in the amount of games where servers close down and achievements become unobtainable.

In order to try and keep up with this, I will attempt to track them as I find them. The reason for starting this is the recent closure of the James Cameron’s Avatar servers and the fact that I can no longer gain the 1,000 points having earned every other achievement in the game. This post will continue to update over time as more games are discovered – in alphabetical order:

Total Gamerscore and Achievements Remaining

FIFA08                                           40 Achievements             800 Points

FIFA12*                                         42 Achievements             945 Points

Forza Motorsport 2                        43 Achievements             980 Points

James Cameron’s Avatar               31 Achievements             840 Points

Lips                                                66 Achievements             1,660 Points

Pro Evolution Soccer 2009            42 Achievements             820 Points

Pro Evolution Soccer 2010            26 Achievements             950 Points

Project Gotham Racing                  22 Achievements             905 Points

* The EA SPORTS UEFA EURO 2012 DLC has been removed from the Marketplace so if you do not have the DLC you can no longer get the achievements. A new low, even for EA.

Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag (Xbox ONE)

My very first Xbox One Review. How exciting! I followed on from the completion of Assassin’s Creed III and cracked straight on with this for a few weeks, however the sheer vastness of the game caused me to make it an ongoing project which spread out over the next six months.

The in-game world is huge and beautiful. A lot of effort has gone into the development of the game, especially the first area, which makes sense as it is the first place that people see. However the whole world is fantastic. Characters, locations, sailing, everything.

Anyway, enough praise and on with thereview – in a dramatic Assassin’s Creed U-Turn, we actually go back in time and play as Edward Kenway, Connor’s grandfather. Against the grain for linear progression but okay, we’ll go with it. Now, let’s not forget that the whole Assassin’s Creed world is just a simulation. In the ‘real world,’ Desmond Miles is dead and his body has been shipped to Abstergo Industries where you, a new Abstergo employee, are reliving his memories to create a new computer game based on the life of Edward Kenway. How crazy is that? The framing is that we are working in a computer game developing job to create a game where you play as pirate in the West Indies. Ubisoft just love their framing.

Onto the story within the story, playing as Edward you are a master Assassin with absolutely no assassin training whatsoever. It is actually quite funny. Your ship crashes onto a desert island and it is just you and the actual Assassin, Duncan Walpole, who survive. In typical pirate fashion, Edward kills Duncan, takes his stuff including the hidden blade, years of assassins training and all, and goes to Havana and pretends to be him in a meeting with the Templar.

Unlike all of his predecessors, Edward does not possess a moral compass. He is out only for himself and his pursuit of The Observatory is totally self motivated. I don’t know why he thinks the Observatory will give him untold wealth, but at some point he is told it is valuable so he goes after it with no expenses spared.

He makes lots of friends along the way, gets them killed and also makes more enemies... generally speaking Edward is a horrible person and while this was funny for the first thirty or so hours, it did start to wear thin towards the end.

The sounds effects are good for the most part and again I enjoyed the sea shanties that you can collect and are then sung by your crew when sailing the high seas. This is very good as you will spend a lot of time travelling around in your ship looking for various collectible items.

The gameplay has the standard Assassin’s Creed issues in that the free running isn’t as seamless or easy as I would expect it to be. My Edward continually gets caught on various objects, doesn’t grab hold of ledges when I wanted him to and generally acts like a brain damaged moron from time to time. The worst instances of these were his survival instincts or lack thereof. When I jumped from a tall building in an attempt to land in a haystack, several times I died landing right next to the haystack. There was a similar issue in Assassin’s Creed III and to be fair, it has noticeably improved but it’s still something I would be happy to live without.

Achievements – 1,250 Points – 60 Achievements

As with all Assassin’s Creed games, the achievements are plentiful and varied with loads of stuff to collect and, of course, multiplayer.

There are 19 achievements obtainable for playing through the game but you will also nab a few others including swimming a certain distance, plundering ships and recruiting crew members. I made a habit of collecting everything every time I visited a new location so I had a lot less to do once I had completed the main game.

Two challenging achievements include destroying all the forts and taking care of the Legendary Ships but once you have fully upgraded your ship it shouldn’t be too problematic once you identify the patterns required to take them out.

There are also the generic achievements for killing certain enemies in certain ways and getting chain kills, etcetera, but nothing too painful. The whole single player element is very time consuming though and despite fast travel, sailing around the map is a bitch.

Multiplayer

I really did think we were on to a winner after the sparse achievements on Assassin’s Creed III however, I was very wrong. There are nine multiplayer achievements (including DLC) to get, the most painful of which is getting to level 55. The easiest way to do this is to play one wolfpack multiplayer map every day to take advantage of experience boosts.

Outside of getting to level 55 there are a few small pain-in-the-ass achievements. Playing a match on every game mode was a struggle as everyone has already decided they didn’t want to play the shittier game play modes by the time I got around to playing it.

There are two achievements I used a boosting session for; killing someone using a booby trapped lift which I may have got through luck, and being the highest scoring player in a game of Domination as The Jaguar. In order to do the second one you have to get the opportunity to select the Jaguar which requires you to have the multiplayer DLC. There is a one-in-two chance of doing this if you have four players and you are the leader for one team. Next, you have to be the highest scoring player which means you need to actually be good at this game mode. Both of these scenarios were unlikely for me to pursue. So I didn’t.

Downloadable Content

The extra 250 points consists of two downloadable packs. The first is the MP Characters Pack #1 Blackbeard’s Wrath which has four achievements, the two I mentioned above and another two which can both be obtained in Wolfpack mode once you reach the correct level to use the abilities.

The other is Freedom Cry where you can play as Edward’s one time friend, Adewale as he liberates slaves from plantations. It is essentially the same gameplay style as the main game, only you get to play as someone whose moral compass is pointing in the right direction. And he is badass. He carries a machete as a default weapon and can use a blunderbuss to kill multiple dudes at the same time.

I had a lot of fun with Black Flag even if Edward’s self destructive personality threatened to ruin everything. There is the option of replaying the game on the 360 but I can’t bring myself to play the whole game again. At least not yet, anyway.

Dead Space

I was intrigued by Dead Space. A survival horror set in space seemed like a new concept to me and it received quite a lot of good reviews. What could possibly be not-to-like?

Firstly, the story. You play as Isaac Clarke, a scientist or technical dude (not really sure), on a mission to an unresponsive space craft stranded near a planet that it was exploring. Apparently it is a repair mission so it probably makes sense to bring along a scientist who knows about that sort of stuff. When attempting to dock with the stranded space craft, Isaac and company’s ship is struck by a stray asteroid.

This is where the alarm bells start ringing. Based on the information we are given, this is a fairly standard approach so for the pilot to fuck it up in this manner, is a little surprising. Anyway the ship ends up crashing and the team is laid upon by the alien/undead lifeforms aboard, leaving only the three survivors. Isaac is of course one of them otherwise it wouldn’t be much of a game.

You have the standard Marine-style leader guy, voiced by and styled on Peter Mensah, who is ‘in charge.’ The woman who wants to be ‘in charge’ and constantly slags off the marine guy. And Isaac. The only one of the three survivors capable of doing anything.

From the first moment it is established that you are the only three survivors, the dialogue is essentially, ‘Isaac go here and fix the tram system.’ ‘Isaac, see if you can walk across the exterior of the ship and destroy the giant space slug blocking our comms array.’ ‘Isaac. Can you fight your way through the corridor of undead aliens and restore the fuel supply.’ And my personal favourite; ‘Isaac, my poison didn’t work so you are going to have to go in there and fight the giant alien single-handedly.’

Are you having a laugh you bunch of lazy cunts? Why doesn’t one of you help me out for five minutes? The best bit is that Isaac is the computer technician slash scientist yet the other two spend most of the game time dicking about with computers while you are trying to survive. Another example of this is when, after being given a distress beacon, you have to place it on an asteroid and launch it into space. In the real world, someone like Isaac would have made the beacon and Marine-Mensah would have killed the aliens and done the leg work.

All of this doesn’t really matter though because despite Isaac not having a weapon when walking off of the space craft he is more capable with them than any of the other fucktards who come with you. A room full of aliens is nothing for Isaac if he has a pistol (plasma cutter) and a stasis module.

Isaac’s weaponry and armour are a little against the whole survival horror genre. You have a fully functional suit, a vast array of weaponry and a shop from which you can purchase ammo, medpacks and new weapons at regular intervals. I have to say I was actually a little shocked that they built in a currency and purchase function, especially after my spaceship crashed on a half destroyed mining vessel.

Despite Isaac’s unexplainable abilities with weaponry, his melee attacks are a pile of garbage. He has two; swing into the air, and if you get in the way it’s your own fault; stamp my foot, and if you get in the way it’s your own fault. There is no manual targeting which means you just swing at the same height or stamp on the floor in a really uncoordinated fashion. In order to stamp, you have to use the right should button. To run slightly faster that walking speed, you have to hold the left shoulder button. Getting these two mixed up at certain points of the game mean you instantly die. Which is not fun.

Sound is usually key to a survival horror game but if I’m honest, I didn’t think that much of it. It didn’t build a lot of tension with me because the gameplay mechanics destroy the immersion so if the sound had been fantastic, it would have only served to make the game pretentious.

The sound effects really annoyed me after a while. When you have to do things outside of the spaceship with a limited amount of oxygen, Isaac will make sounds like he is dying once you get to having around thirty percent of oxygen remaining. This means that Isaac’s suit upgrades in terms of air supply must only increase his ability to hold his breath!

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 48 Achievements

Right, on to the real reason I played the game; achievements. The game consists of 12 chapters and awards one for each chapter. There is a thirteenth for completing the game and an additional four for the boss fights. This means there are seventeen unmissable ones for completing the game.

There are seven missable achievements, all of which are pretty straightforward. Two of these are relatively difficult and involve you having to complete a certain section of the game without taking excessive damage. These achievements are also secret which is an absolute fucker (the golden rule is that secret achievements should be potential storyline spoilers only.) Another one of these is also for completing the game using only the plasma cutter, the default weapon, which incidentally turns out to be the best gun in the game by a long way anyway.

There are 22 fucking around achievements for collecting logs, dismembering enemies, killing enemies in certain ways (more secret achievements here) and getting kills with certain weapons. Now, you would think that all weapons you had to acquire from the shop would be better than the default weapon? No way. The flamethrower is the pick of the bunch for shittiness here. It simply cannot kill anything quickly and amassing the thirty kills required for the achievement was a pain in the ass.

You can do a second playthrough and keep all your crap once you’ve completed it so it didn’t bother me too much that you had one achievement for completing the game with one gun and another six for getting specific weapon kills. However, there are two achievements which caused me to get really fucked off.

Cunt achievement number 1: Maxed Out. This achievement is for upgrading all of your shitty weapons, suit kinesis and stasis units. There are not enough credits in one playthrough to do this and even if you roll over your save, I still didn’t manage this until chapter 11 on a second playthrough. For the record, I hate having to play through a game more than once which brings me nicely on to...

Cunt achievement number 2:  Epic Tier 3 Engineer. This is an achievement for completing the game on impossible difficulty. Why don’t I like this achievement? Well, you cannot play on impossible until you’ve already completed the game. So to legitimately get all the achievements you have to play through the game three fucking times with no extras or changes.

Downloadable Content – N/A

To sum it up, it is a real slog to get all the achievements for one real reason. The game is really dull. The characters are not interesting and it’s hard to relate to a mute main character. I didn’t mention this earlier but Isaac’s girlfriend/wife was supposedly on the stranded space craft and there is meant to be an emotive reason for him being there but this never really materialises due to his mute nature.

You have to play through the game three times in order to get all the achievements and I don’t resent this with a game like Condemned or Mass Effect, as they actually have moral choices built in so the storyline or character traits are different based on your decisions. Dead Space is the same every time so this is a fail in my book.

I don’t really get why it got so highly rated. As a survival horror game, it doesn’t know what it wants to be. It tries to be action adventure while having horror elements and it fails to deliver in both departments.