The Scoreboard #20

Pure

Like a four-wheeled-fury of concentrated cool, Pure offers a surprisingly solid list of Achievements to players looking to bomb down mountains at a rip-roaringly intense speed. Stock-standard stuff applies as usual, but in proving that four wheels are better than two (take that, Burnout update!) this stunt-heavy ATV racer wants you to win in more ways than one for serious unlockage.

Best Achievement: “Show Off” (20 pts.) Win a Race or Sprint event and crossing the line doing a Wheelie on every lap. – Writers are inherent egotists, so if you offer us the chance to show up the opposition simply by heaving the left stick down every time we cross the finish line, you’ve got us hook line and sinker. Since egotism applies to more than us word-folk at OXM, it’s a good little objective to earn a quick bit of Gamerscore and give everyone a more polite version of the middle finger. Just make sure you win or you’ll look like a total ass.

Worst Achievement: “Killer Combo” (30 pts.) During an event; perform a combo of at least 250,000 points. – F...Ffffff.... Whaaa? Huh? Two hundred and fifty thousand points in one combo? We’d surely bust in to hysterical laughter and mock the sheer absurdity of stringing this many tricks together before the combo meter ran dry, but frankly... we’re floored. This number is insane, and reaching it would be quite the Achievement if, you know, it were remotely feasible for anyone who isn’t a god on four wheels. We thought we were pretty huge hot shots when we came out of a Freestyle event with 100,000 points – total.

Easiest Achievement: “1 of a kind” (5 pts.) Build an ATV from scratch in the garage. – In all likelihood, you’ll pimp out your own quad-wheeled speed-demon because you want a leopard-skin seat. But if you just randomize your first ride you’ll unlock the 5G and hit the course sooner than if you’d been picky about the shape and color of your rear fender, as well as which sponsor you’d like to promote on it. Building time is for later – Achieving is for the now. Press Y, win.

Hardest Achievement: “Pure perfectionist” (100 pts.) Come first in every event in the Pure World Tour – Initially, you won’t think the amount of tournaments is anything to stress over, but when you account for the increase of events within each sponsored get-together it starts to dawn on you that you’ve got a few (OK, a lot of few) races ahead of you. Advancing from the D class, up through C and beyond becomes progressively more challenging as well, and those higher-up dudes know how to put the pedal to the metal, carve perfect corners and trick like it’s goin’ out of style. Hopefully you’re learning how to control your quad-wheeled beast, too, because you’re hooped unless you’ve got everything under control at all times. A single dirt-nap often leads to a loss – drive safe, kids!

Unbelievable Achievement: Two time! (25 pts.) Perform two special tricks in one jump. – Special tricks require you to bust your ass pulling off fresh tricks by the boatload simply to unlock it, which is fine. But we’ve got to wonder: at what juncture is one able to propel themselves so high that they can pull off two of these things at once? Each one takes so long you could come back from vacation before your rider ever hits soil, but two in one? We’re dying to see what this looks like, because it is probably the most awesome exaggeration of tricking available... and that sounds rad. Too bad we can’t figure out where to go to get it.

Time Investment vs. Payoff: 7 (out of ten) – Pure is all about progress, and your payoff is directly proportional to the time you sink in to it. You’ll be rewarded accordingly for whoopin’ some AI ass and doing some genuinely awesome things. Keep mixing up the way you race, keep tricks fresh, and speed towards each finish line with an unabashed ambition for victory and you’ll be “Yahoo”-ing like any number of Pure’s lame riders. Just don’t expect to max everything out in a weekend – getting 1st place in that one last Freestyle event is as addictive as it is aggravating.

Overall: 8.5 (out of ten) – As mentioned, you’ll get Gamerscore for doing cool or appropriate stuff, so aside from the easy-but-typical “Win Race!” unlocks there are loads of fun things to do for points. Decking out rides, winning with various engines, and of course, showboating your way across the finish line after each lap is just the tip of the awesome Achievement iceberg. As an added bonus, Pure is also freaking incredible... but we’re not here to talk about that.

Duke Nukem 3D

Duke doesn’t feature a giant list of brilliant or cleverly implemented awards – goodness no – but 3D Realms’ classic comedic shooter wins for not having an entire collection of stupid, generic Achievements that were obviously put in the game simply because there had to be get-able Gamerscore. To be fair, it definitely has some bleh-chievements. But we’re a fan of badges that make you go slightly out of your way specifically to do something fun... no matter how perverted it might be.

Best Achievement: “Come Get Some” (25 pts.) Complete "Shrapnel City" on any difficulty or in co-op. – Ok, so we praise the game for having better-than-usual Achievements, and then reward its most generic award with the “Best” badge? We know, but every fan of Duke knows that the final boss – an oversized klingon-frog-steak – was the highlight of the alien invasion. Come on, you fought the fugly mofo on a football field and then booted his eyeball through the posts for a field goal once you made him crumple like you’d liquefied his bones. What doesn’t make that the greatest thing ever?

Worst Achievement: “Oomph, uugh, Where is it?” (10 pts.) Find 70 secret areas. – Duke Nukem’s notoriety stems from the fact that it’s absolutely seething with salacious pop-culture references (and BEWBZ LOL!), which is what you’ll find in almost every secret area. We’d be liars if we said we weren’t in to it (uh, the references... not the naked ladies) but the tedium of going out of your way to find 70 areas that are hidden to the point of not even having any clues to their existence is painful. Good thing this game is like 40 years old and there are walkthroughs by the score available to ease your wall-pushing, toilet-busting monotony. This is a lot of work just to see some nudity.

Easiest Achievement: “Alien Maggots Are Gonna Pay” (10 pts.) Finish the "Hollywood Holocaust" level in under 3 minutes. – Are you a wuss? Us too, so we dropped the difficulty to “Piece of Cake” in order to bomb through the first mission in 180 seconds. Play it once just to get a grip on where the card-key is, and where you need to go one you get it. You’ll barely need to shoot any of the baddies, so pass them without worrying about your health (remember, you’re on baby mode!) and head to the self destruct level-ending button and smash away. The next level also yields an easy Achievement in the tip-a-stripper “Shake it Baby,” which is also, as they say, a piece of cake.

Hardest Achievement: “Oomph, uugh, Where is it?” (10 pts.) Find 70 secret areas. – Not only is it frustratingly dull to look in every nook and cranny for oodles of goodies, it’s also kinda tough. You never know where a hidden passage might be hidden (hint: check every regular ol’ wall for maximum success) or a vent might be out of sight. You’ll have to pay a lot of attention to your surroundings and poke around a lot before you get remotely close to this bizarrely named unlock. Bring a friend or seven along for the ride.

Time Investment vs. Payoff: 7 (out of ten) – If you’re a Duke veteran, you’ll tear through this PC port in all of four seconds, but since the general consensus is “Xbox Live is a bunch of 12-year-olds” we’ll oblige these newcomers to Nukem. In short, the game is, um, pretty short. If you’ve got multiplayer goin’ on, well, you’re golden. You could probably walk away from a full Dukematch and still unlock a respectable amount of Gamerpoints by the time you returned. And despite how much we rag on the menial stuff like secrets, they really are quite fun to earn.

Overall: 8 (out of ten) – There are some boring blunders in here, but stepping in poop (LOL AGAIN!!), the strip-tip, and squishing shrunken pig-mutants is some mighty fine Achievin’ if we do say so ourselves. We’ll even take “Beat Misson X” so long as we get to punt an eyeball from the 50 yard line every now and again. “Game over!”

*****

Wow, what a solid week. Our Gamerscore was jacked over 1000 points with these four games alone this week, thus finally cracking the 30,000G barrier. If you read the other reviews around here (linked above) you’ll see that all of this week’s covered 360 games broke the 8.0/10 barrier critically, but they’re also all 8.0 and above here, too! We’ll see if the slew of ridiculous releases in the coming weeks can live up to the Achievement-y hype – Fable orgies? Why not?! – when we finally get our mitts on ‘em. We’ll try to remember to write this thing for you lovely, lovely readers while we’re nose-deep in Fable, Fallout, Fracture, Dead Space, Midnight Club 3, Saints Row 2 and presumably more... We can’t cover all of this alone! Help our lazy arses out by emailing your own Scoreboard review to us ASAP!

PREV12