Arcades, back from the dead

The surest sign you're addicted to something is when, even when you stop truly enjoying it, you can't stop doing it.\nI've been playing a lot of "Frogger" lately. I don't particularly enjoy it, being that it's a game that's needlessly difficult because of sloppy programming that still hasn't been cleaned up in 25 years of technological achievement. I can get brand spanking new free porn on my computer in 10 seconds, but Frogger is still getting run over by cars that are already long past him. But I still go back to "Frogger." Am I masochist? The vast collection of pornography on my hard drive points to a solid "maybe." But the real reason I play "Frogger" is for points. Achievement points, more precisely, the newest form of crack the CIA… er, I mean, Microsoft has unleashed on an unsuspecting public to keep them glued to their gaming systems.\nAchievements are the "points" you earn for performing certain feats in a game. That can be as simple as earning five or ten points for creating a player or as difficult as beating a game on its hardest difficulty without dying. There are also several rules in place to make sure the system isn't abused too much (like playing through one game on easy for 80 billion points). Every game must contain achievement points to be unlocked (200 for an arcade game, 1,000 for a retail game). An arcade game must contain 12 achievements. A full game must contain at least five, and no more than 50.\nAnd finally, though achievements can be as difficult as developers want them to be, they have to be something that everyone can conceivably pull off. For example, an achievement can't be something like, "Be the first person in the world to win a game of capture the flag in 'Halo 3.'" \nAt first, I was a little skeptical of this whole thing. Would developers actually put some thought into their achievements, or just toss them in as an afterthought? There have been some games like "King Kong," that toss you the whole 1,000 points just for beating it, but most games have set up some great challenges before you can get all them, like scoring 1,000 headshots in "Perfect Dark Zero's" deathmatch mode.\nIn fact, after nine months on the market, it's looking as if achievements are going to be a major ace in the hole for Microsoft. Dozens of web sites such as http://www.achieve360points.com list all the achievements available to help boost your score. Others list Gamercards, which tally the total number of achievement points gamers have earned, and keep track of some people with way too much time on their hands.\nIt's a great way to find people to play with who are at a similar skill level, or just laugh at guys in their thirties who have yet to kiss a girl. The achievement system is even starting to encourage some great new innovations. The upcoming XBLA game "Small Arms" (think "Super Smash Bros." with big guns) will feature the first "viral achievement," where the game's four programmers will be the only people to have it, but everyone they play against (and in turn, who those people play against) will also receive the achievement. Even Sony is copying the concept on the Playstation 3 with something called "entitlements."\nOn paper, this whole thing doesn't sound very engrossing, but when I actually got my Gamertag set up and start playing, and started watching my gamer score grow larger and larger, achievements were no longer the cool little bonuses that get tossed in to keep busy. They began to devour my very essence like an off the wagon Oprah at Ponderosa on a Saturday night. It began with playing through the time attack modes in "Project Gotham Racing 3," something I would normally never do, but hey it was easy and worth 50 points. Why not?\nThen there was the "pacifism achievement" in "Geometry Wars." Yeah, it's a little weird to try and avoid enemies for a minute instead of shooting them, and it takes some serious skills, but it's great to show off to other people online.\nNext, I downloaded "UNO," not because I'm that big of a fan of the card game, but for the sweet sweet boost it would bring to my gamerscore, and hey, the game was pretty fun too! And now, after only a little over a month with my Xbox 360, I'm a hollow shell of a junkie, sitting in my filth playing crappy games like "Frogger" over and over again for just a few more points…