The third part of our achievement feature involves the stupidest ever to be devised. Feel free to replace the word ‘stupidest’ with the word ‘easiest’ there as most are stupid because they’re so easy to gain.
Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard is a silly game, parodying dozens of videogames, so it does make sense that it has silly achievements. 15G for starting the game, 5G for pausing the game (‘You Took Five!’) and a ridiculous 60G for watching the credits which are available from the options screen. That’s a potential of 80G before you’ve even killed your first enemy.
Quite a few Japanese games give achievements for starting a game too including Shadows of the Damned, Virtual On: Force, Dodonpanchi Resurrection and Deathsmiles. Long before these games were released The Simpsons Game had a similar one – ‘Press Start to Play’ with the description of “The easiest achievement… ever”.
Going back to Japanese games, a few Japanese developers out there have an odd sense of humour. Finishing the mediocre Bullet Witch on Hell Mode unlocks an achievement worth 1G, and in Dead or Alive 4 if you lose a certain amount of online matches in a row then some achievements worth sweet FA are added to your score. Or not added, in this case.
Becoming ‘Prestige’ in Call of Duty: World at War – the highest rank for the online mode – also bagged 0G in return for people’s time and effort. In the words of the developer: “Time to go outside and find some things to do…â€
Avatar: The Burning Earth is one that’s popular with achievement hunters. All five achievements can be unlocked within 2 minutes of starting the game simply by racking up a combo by attacking the first wave of enemies. It’s because of the ease to get 1000G in an instant that it still sells for between £10-£20 on the likes of eBay and Amazon despite being released way back in 2008. At the time of typing the PlayStation 2 version will set you back just 36p on Amazon.
Sega Mega Drive Collection, oddly known as Sonic’s Ultimate Genesis Collection in the US, is another one easy achievement hunters like. They’re for things like talking to another dolphin in Ecco and collecting 100 rings while playing Sonic 3 as Tails. The latter is even easier to do than playing as Sonic.
Both Duke Nukem 3D and Duke Nukem Forever have an obsession with poo. Duke Nukem 3D gives you an achievement for walking in poo while Duke Nukem Forever gives you one for throwing it about. Nice.
And we’ll leave you with what I think is the stupidest achievement ever – throwing yourself off the Golden Gate Bridge in Homefront. Committing suicide, basically. If it were a Lemmings game that would make sense but in a war game it makes none at all.