Halo Wars Achievement Hunting

Recently I was promoted to the rank of Brigadier in the Halo Wars multiplayer. Since release it has taken me somewhere around 250 hours to achieve this. That works out to a whopping 2.9% of one entire year. That is including the time I spent sleeping. Three percent of an entire year spent on a single game. This is scary considering I have also played 6 other Triple A title (some of them twice) and three Xbox LIVE Arcade titles from start to finish. I shudder to think of what the actual statistic behind how much time I play games in a year is.

But I am not done with Halo Wars yet. I have yet but one achievement to conquer. It is for reaching the rank of General in the online multiplayer. Each time to rank up, you must get as many experience points in total as it took you to get where are currently. To get to the rank of Brigadier, you need 480 000 experience points, which are rewarded in varying amounts each game depending on how well you did. To get to the rank of General, the next promotion, I need another 480 000 experience points.

Considering how long it took me to get where I am, it may sound like a thankless task for only another 50 gamer score, but I will get that last achievement. Why, you ask? I must get it because I love Halo Wars. Since it is my all time favorite game I feel an obligation to get every achievement in that game. More than anything else I think that it is to show my support for the game.

In the past I have attempted to do this with several other games. For whatever reason they slipped onto my “to-do” list. There are still five achievements in Halo 3 I have not gotten, I have yet to purchase the Zombie Island DLC for Borderlands, and one day I will get all those flags in Assassin’s Creed. I have one achievement left in Call of Duty 4 as well.

But the last achievement in Halo Wars was never set aside. I consistently work towards it. Perhaps it is because of the nature of the objective that I haven’t ignored it. I don’t have to get lucky, or have any kind of skill (although it does help). I simply have to keep trudging forward. Every game gets me a little bit closer.

Don’t get the idea that I am putting myself through a game that I am no longer enjoying just for a single achievement. Halo Wars, being a strategy game, has many different ways you can play and I am far from having experienced them all. Instead of dragging me through “the grind”, the Running the Show Achievement has forced me to experience the game in new ways I would have never tried.

I feel free to experiment with new strategies and am faced with ever changing circumstances when others do the same. Never mind the fact that this one achievement will have taken me over 200 hours to acquire. I had got more out of my $70 than I would have otherwise, and that is what every achievement should aspire to do.