I tried to pull the plug on this game yesterday. I wanted to walk away and work on some other game. After realizing you can't do offline splitscreen versus yesterday, meaning self-boosting was impossible, I was in a very bad position. It means that all of the Challenges had to be done legit. There were no shortcuts anymore. I've met a couple people while playing Team Deathmatch, and I could just ask them to help me boost in a private match, or go to True Achievements or similar sites and try to find someone. But here's the thing - I don't like doing that.
See, to me, achievement hunting is OCD, and it's a very strange and specific type. It's hard to explain, but it boils down to this: Once I start a game with the intent to perfect it, I cannot abort and play something else. I was going to move priorities over to Symphony of the Night, which I still plan to perfect by Ultra SF4 next month as well. But I woke up, and the first thing I did was start Colonial Marines back up. My brain wouldn't let me move away from it.
Then came an hour of beating my head against a wall made of Challenges. My current Actives are the following:
Short, Controlled Bursts: There's an achievement that shares its name with this, but it wasn't nearly as hard to get. Took about 20 minutes of checkpoint restarting, and I got it after I was killed somehow, but I did get it. The Challenge is as follows: "Do not miss an enemy with any bullets from a full rifle mag." No reloading, and that's a trick of its own, and you cannot miss a single shot. This is made difficult by the fact that you're almost always with an NPC Marine or three, and they're also capable of killing enemies. They will kill-steal and the shot you just fired will hit a dead target. Those shots do not count. Worse, it's impossible to try getting it on Xenomorphs. They're twitchy and move around too much. I was on Easy/Stage 1 and after over 90 attempts, I had to walk away for awhile. I couldn't do it. I'll try later on Stage 2, on the human enemies. Maybe those will be easier.
Iron Fist: "Kill 10 enemies with melee in a single campaign mission without dying." -- You can't get this easily on Xenomorphs because they'll sit there clawing at you the whole time. Also there are typically multiple aliens on you at once. On top of that, 90% of the time you whip out your pistol and execute them for the final hit, which does not count towards your progress. It may also be one that's easier on the Weyland-Yutani soldiers in stage 2. Given they have guns, however, I kind of doubt it. Even on Easy, you die really fast. You can't checkpoint-scum it, either. It will remove any melee kills you've gotten. It even removed a melee kill I'd gotten at the very start of the level after not doing so for about 20 reloads. Why it suddenly erased it and put me back at 0/10, I do not know.
Sentry Duty: "Destroy 5 sentry turrets." -- This is an issue mostly because no one plays anything but Team Deathmatch. Marines can set up turrets in other multiplayer modes, but not TDM. I want to say there are Weyland-Yutani turrets later in the game, but I can't be sure of that. If there are, then I'll have to slog through more campaign levels to get to them. The turrets in Stage 2, however, are ones you have to disable from behind. You cannot destroy them with weapons. This is a major problem, because until I get it, I can't work on any other Challenges in this category.
I don't know what happens after you clear a Challenge category. The campaign one is a short list - including Iron Fist, there are only five left there. The next challenge is easy, as it just requires killing 2 enemies with a Smart Gun, Flamethrower, or RPG. There's a campaign level with a Smart Gun section. Easy in and out. The Challenge after that is killing 5 enemies with explosives in a mission. Grenades in level 2 would be easiest there. The final two are for beating any level on Hardened and Ultimate Badass difficulties. Level 1, obviously, the best choice for getting those quickly. Once I get those, I want to see what happens. If you get a second Active from one of the two remaining categories, it would be nice. But I have a feeling you'll just be down to 2 Actives instead.
As far as achievements go, I'm under 20 now. I could probably get a couple today if I really hunkered down and focused on them. Like killing 3 enemies with a single Firebomb - it'd be Xenos because Soldiers don't group up. Or Heavy Lifting, for beating The Raven in under 1:10. But that's going to be one of the last ones I get. For one thing, it's at the end of a very long mission. For another, there's no on-screen timer. On top of that, it's very tight.The guides I see all tend to clock in at 1:04 or higher. You have very little room for screwing up. The Power Loader is slow, clunky, and for some reason any time you land or receive a hit, it spins the thing 90 degrees. Plus you have to get it on Soldier difficulty or higher. Which it to say Normal or higher. Now I assume this would be easier in multiplayer, but I don't know if the players not in the Loader are able to actually damage the boss. And since it happens at the very end of the stage, if you fuck up and don't get the Restart Checkpoint, then you'll have to replay the entire stage again, something that will take about an hour if all goes in your favor.
There are three achievements for beating later Stages, and one for beating the game on any difficulty. I could knock those out today, I'm sure. But that still leaves Challenges. And Challenges are the worst part of any game's achievement hunt. Borderlands 2 was a nightmare in that regard. Saints Row 3 and 4 artificially extended their lives with Challenges. They're never fun to do. They're tedious and frustrating at best, and pointless game padding at worst.
Gearbox, as a whole, is perhaps the most incompetent studio currently producing games. Randy Pitchford is to gaming what Curt Schilling is to gaming. In franchise terms, Gearbox is the Alien 3 of video games. The worst part, of course, is that I'm far from being done with that company, since I still plan to go through Duke Nukem Forever at some point. But I've looked at that game's achievements and there isn't a single Challenge anywhere. I can only assume many in the company cried themselves to sleep at night because of this.
A:CM is incredibly deceiving a game from the outside. Everyone knows it's bad. But only those trying to get the achievements will know the extent of this badness. You will restart checkpoints hundreds of times. You will see AI routines bug out and break. You will spawn upside-down and inside of walls. At one point in a Team Deathmatch battle, I was killed by a Xeno and was unable to respawn at all. For over 90 seconds I sat there, staring at a grey screen, before the option to respawn finally came up. This is something that should take 10 seconds at most.
To those who have come before me in perfecting this game: I salute you. And I am sorry for what you have gone through. To those who think about coming after me, might I suggest having someone rip off your fingernails instead, if only because the pain you experience will be briefer. Even if you want to challenge yourself with a bad game - find an alternative. Aliens: Colonial Marines is not a game you perfect because you want to. It is a game you perfect because you have to, either because you want to justify spending money on it, or simply because your poorly-wired brain won't let you walk away from it. Simpler, it could just be that you want to beat the game, you don't want the game to beat you.
I mentioned at the start that I could get someone to help me boost Challenges, and I said I didn't like doing that. The reason is because I understand how dumb this achievement hunting thing is. I don't want to drag someone else into it with me, even if they are in the same position I am. Even if I wasn't, I'd feel like I was wasting their time. And it's something that would persist even if we were alternating Challenges. It's one of the reasons I hate games with multiplayer achievements. They take too long to get, it involves other people being on the same page as you, and there are typically no ways to get them on your own.
It's one of the very few reasons Kingdoms of Amalur appealed to me initially. Nothing but a single player experience, so the only thing stopping me was the hours I'd need to put in. It took somewhere between 50-65 hours (I really should've looked at my two saves) but I perfected that game eventually. It almost took me as long as it did to perfect Dark Souls 2, which was in the mid-70-hour mark. And like Dark Souls 2, it was because I had to play through the game multiple times.
Colonial Marines is a nightmare for anyone with achievement OCD. Even if you're a huge fan of the franchise itself, this isn't something you should willingly subject yourself to. Some achievements can be fun. Some games can be perfected without much trouble. This is not one of them.
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