10) Dead Rising's 5 and 7 Day Survivor. Not only does it require you to play non-stop for approximately 14 real-world hours, it makes you do so on a system that is NOTORIOUS for breaking. This achievement is like stuffing a rattlesnake down your drawers and hoping you won't get bit. Only the brave and the stupid need apply.

9) Earth Defense Force's "Inferno" achievement. Not only does EDF get a bad case of the broken's on Inferno (horrible collision and hit detection), but in order to beat the mode, you'll have to land the Lyzander Z, a gun that drops so rarely and on so few levels that you'll spend just as much time farming as you will playing the rest of the game in its entirety. Not only that, but the achievements don't stack, so you'll be playing each diffficulty individually if you want them all.

Gears of War's "Seriously" achievement. Kill 10,000 goons in ranked online play in a game with a lackluster online mode. Sound like fun? It's not. In fact, it's rather turdy.

7)Crackdown's find every orb achievement. Why developers continue to throw these in games is beyond me, because they aren't fun in the least. Crackdown's world is more fun to explore than others given the dynamic of being a super-cop, but it's still mind-numbing and ridiculous.

6)Condemned 2's online achievements. Here's another sterling example of a game getting an online mode when one isn't needed or even welcomed. Online modes are becoming so commonplace that they're really getting tiresome. To top it off, Condemned 2 is pretty crappy compared to the original, so not only do you get an asinine online mode, you get a crappy game to boot. NICE.

5)Assault Heroes 2's co-op achievements. I have an idea -- let's make a game's achievements based around the premise that, like, everybody bought it and that way people will play together and it'll be really awesome. And then we'll release it a week after GTA hits. News flash: Not every game sells well, and Assault Heroes 2 is no exception. The co-op achievements are dumb, and nobody bought the game because they're all too busy playing GTA. Nimrods.

4) Not to be outdone by Gears' crappy "Seriously" achievement, The Club's "No, Seriously" achievment takes it a step further, requiring you to get 10,001 ranked kills as opposed to Gears' 10,000. I'm not disputing that killing 10,000 people is an achievement -- it is, but it's also rather dumb. And the reason The Club's achievement ranked higher is because, unlike Gears, no one bought The Club, which means the achievement is unattainable. Great job, guys!

3) Viva Pinata's play for 50 hours achievement. Would've been fine, had most people not gotten all the other achievements by the 30 hour point, which means if you want this one, you're gonna be letting it run idle for about a week while you're in the other room watching Seinfeld reruns. Fun -- NOT.

2) Tie: GTA's "Let Sleeping Rockstar's Lie" / Guitar Hero III's "Meet Your Maker" achievement. Yeah, let's put an achievement in that relies on nothing but random luck and requires the presence of somebody who WORKED ON THE GAME to get it. Mind boggling bad, this achievement is.

1) Tie: Final Fantasy XI Online's achievements -- ALL OF THEM. This shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the achievement system, because, in order for you to get them, you'll have to play it until the day you die -- LITERALLY. Square has really stumbled in recent years, but nothing they've done is anywhere near as bad as this. Guitar Hero III. Let's play a rhythm game that comes with a guitar with a controller instead. Whoever came up with that idea over at Neversoft should be shot.

Next month, another post where we dive into the world of needless online modes, broken achievements (the best kind!), and poorly thought-out implementations of the achievements system so you don't have to.

I made a really smarmy, borderline nasty blog entry a while ago about a commercial that one of the "game" colleges ran. It showed a couple of hapless tools playing with last generation controllers pretending to test a game. About halfway through, their "boss" came in, and in a cheerful sort of way (that sounded like she was asking them if they would prefer the ham or the turkey on their sub) asked them to look at getting things wrapped up on the testing. Towards the end, Tool 1 tells Tool 2 that he "can't believe he gets paid for playing VIDEOGAMES!" In my entry, I stated that neither could I.

The point of that blog post was that for all the posturing on how big videogames have become, the fact that they made a commercial with a couple of nards who looked like they just walked out of an Backstreet Boys concert, said a mouthful about how far we had to go. Little did I know that Biff and Ted (the names I gave Tools 1&2), would actually seem like a godsend just a few years later.

See, Biff and Ted aren't even in the picture anymore. Oh no, that's so, so 90's. This is a brave new world, and in it, you and I are doing Biff and Ted's job for them, and we aren't asking for a goddamn cent for doing it. In fact, quite the opposite -- we are standing in line and PAYING THEM for the privilege.

I don't want to sound like a hardass, because I know that games are getting bigger, costlier and more complex than ever before, but Pandora's Box was opened the MINUTE developers knew they could patch a console game, and this is the result. The result is GTA having lock-up issues on day one. The result is Bully being filled with poor framerates, broken achievements, and a host of other annoyances. The result is that you and I are the new testers, and we don't even ask for compensation for services rendered.

Something to think about.

I bought a Dual Shock 3 for the PS3 last week not for logical reasons (ie, there are games I want to play that use the rumble controller effectively), but out of necessity. My Sixaxis still cuts out in games and it's been getting worse. But while purchasing the controller, I overheard someone in the store say something along the lines of "the PS3's power will show itself this year." I didn't think much of it at the time, as it's something that's been repeated ad-nauseum by pretty much everyone (myself included) since the system came out.

But the more I thought about it, this train of thought isn't just irrational, but unfounded. I tried to come up with any instance where "the power of the PS3" had delivered a better experience than what can be had on the 360, and I could only come up with one -- Burnout Paradise. To top that off, not only did I HATE Paradise, but the difference between the two versions was so negligible that I couldn't rightly call it "superior" and still feel comfortable.

This is becoming the big question in my eyes. If the PS3 is so immensely powerful, where are the games that showcase it? It's been a year and a half, and the 360 is still neck and neck with "the beast." I'm not saying that it ISN'T more powerful, only that there's been nothing shown on the system to make me BELIEVE it is.

Sure, there's the Blu-ray drive inside, but how many games have used it? And, the slow speed of the drive forcing developers to make huge hard drive installs as a workaround makes me feel like it may be just as much a hindrance as a benefit. After all, if developers are stuffing 3 to 5 gigs of data on the hard drive for a 7 to 9 gig game, what's a 50 gig game going to require? This is the way I feel about most of the features on the system, and maybe that's why everyone is hanging on some mystical power coming out of nowhere to make themselves feel better about the system. It seems like for every one thing I like about the system, there's something that goes with it that I don't like. The online is free, but let's face it -- it's a pretty crappy service. And the MGO beta didn't do much to allay my fears about Sony's plans with online play and features. I like the design of the controller, but the Sixaxis felt cheap and simply didn't work all the time, a huge no-no, possibly an unprecedented no-no. More importantly, the games look pretty similar on both systems, yet I still buy almost all my third-party titles on the 360.

At this point, we're coming headlong into the second year for the system and it hasn't done what everyone still seems to believe it will. To quote Richard Genelli (Stephen King's awesome gangster from his book "Thinner") "Only an **** doesn't believe what he's seeing, Paisan." If blind faith and Microsoft's problems with failing hardware are what Sony ends up relying on to sell the successor to the two biggest systems in recent memory (possibly ever if the PS2 keeps going), then Sony has already lost. In fact, the insistence on power being the reason to buy the system shows that Sony (and its fans) have forgotten why they liked the previous two Playstations so much to begin with.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ABGIJwiGBc

This is why you never shoot .50 cal rounds at iron targets. Hope this guy played the lottery afterwards.

In case you haven't heard, Sony just announced a June 12th release for Metal Gear Solid 4, and here's the kicker: it comes bundled with every 80 gig unit and the price didn't go up. It also comes with a Dual Shock 3.

While I think it's a little silly to force the more expensive proposition on people, this is basically a price drop for a few million people on the 80 gig sku who were waiting for Metal Gear to hit. I've been highly critical of Sony the last few years (and I think most of it's been justified -- they've made some of the dumbest decisions I've ever seen relating to videogames), but there's no doubt that they are willing to do whatever it takes to get the PS3 off the ground.

And I still can't help but think about Microsoft's decision to leave the 360 price stagnant for two years, and how they basically gloated about it in interviews. I think both of these power-hungry entities are good for the industry, but only when one side isn't able to wield too much power. Microsoft has proven that they still don't know what it takes to lead, to cut prices, to introduce new skus that make sense, to package them with compelling software, and I think this June may be the point where it all comes back to bite them. In a year and a half, Sony has cut prices on a more reliable machine with next-gen movie capabilities and packaged it with what is surely going to be a great game.

What has Microsoft done? What did they do while they were ahead, besides sell people broken machines and nickel and dime us to death? What misstep will cause the hammer to drop on Microsoft this summer? Was it the overpriced hard drives? The microtransactions? The lack of reliable hardware that seemingly only goes down in price every two years?

Whatever the case, Microsoft needs to really wake up here. Sony is going to clobber them this summer if they don't do what they should've done already. I've said it before, but it bears repeating: the closer the two systems come in price, the better-looking Sony becomes, even with a more limited library and a bare bones online plan. Sony's machine works, they have great games coming out for it, a few exclusives, and they've remedied both the price and the controller situation.

There'll probably be more than a few sleepless nights for those in Redmond. They've got some heavy mental lifting to do with their future plans for the 360. They've done pretty solid for a company that has second-place in mind, but Sony just showed them why they've been the king of videogames for a decade. I'm sure part of the reason Sony is making the move it is is because the 360 has done so well, but I've felt for a while like both companies were simply following each other -- right off a cliff like little lemmings. Microsoft doesn't just need to come up with a game plan, they've got to decide where they want to be for the rest of this generation. If they want to be ahead of Sony, they're going to have to make some changes, but if they want to go dead last, they'll keep going the way they are.