Last time, we promised reviews for both Grid and The Incredible Hulk for The Scoreboard. Alas, in the wake of unlocking and reviewing Achievements, neither game made the final cut, and as awesome as Grid’s total-a-car, get-an-Achievement Achievement is, there were more pressing things to deal with. What kind of things, you ask?

This week, you can check out reviews for the Battlefield: Bad Company, Alone in the Dark, and Wall-E, or if you’re a little on the cheap side, it’s worth reading about Sea Life Safari, Ticket to Ride, and Soulcalibur. Since we’re covering the intricacies of Gamerscore, and nothing else, course you’ll find no complaints like “Bad horizontal tearing and some echo-happy sound FX.” – even if it’s present – or any praise resembling “Visuals and mechanics are still great.” – even if they are. The Scoreboard has a singular focus, and with a tunnel-vision focus, we strive to let you know the critical path to jacking your Gamerscore with the latest games.

Soulcalibur

Best Achievement: Conqueror (25 pts.) Beat 25 opponents in Extra Survival Mode – Extra Survival mode is Extra Awesome, in that each fight lasts less than a second. The Extra Survival battles are one-hit-one-kill, no matter who the character is, or what attack they use. The intensity rises with each match, and the closer Round 25 gets, the more tingly bladders become. Choosing a character with a quick stab, or longer weapon – Kilik, Mitsurugi, Tseng Mina – is a better choice than someone like Nightmare or Astaroth, whose slow speed is detrimental, despite their incredible strength. Heck, even Elvis, er, Maxi, works well in this situation, as he’s incredibly quick. Earning the Conqueror Achievement requires as much luck as it does skill, and the challenge of getting to 25 is incredibly rewarding.

Worst Achievement: Summon Suffering (20 pts.) Perform the move Summon Suffering with Ivy – The Summon Suffering combo isn’t the toughest combo out there – far from it. It’s got a funky combination of disjointed diagonals, but it’s fully doable – just not with the Xbox 360’s godawful, unusable D-pad. Even with the analog sticks there, it’s just awkward and painful to pull off, and it makes us want to plunk down the quid for a Hori fighting stick...

Easiest Achievement: Zen Warrior (10 pts.) Win a round with a perfect – Remember when we talked about Extra Survival being so awesome? You know, the one-hit-one-kill matches leave you with a perfect, since you instantly win with full health, or lose with no health. It’s one way or the other, and if you’re on the better side of the deal, you’ll end up not just with a perfect, but an Achievement as well. Now there’s only 24 left before the Conqueror Achievement!

Hardest Achievement: Noble Soul (25 pts.) Beat the game in Ultra Hard without losing a round – Fighting games are notoriously tough, which is why those nerds get so much attention for being complete bad-asses at Street Fighter and the like. The credit is well earned. Completing Soulcalibur on its uber-difficulty is a personal Achievement in itself, but when we even consider getting through Cervantes or Voldo without being utterly obliterated, it starts to hurt our brains and thumbs. You need an award – scratch that, make it all the awards; Pulitzer, Nobel, Grammy... All of it! – not an Achievement, if you can rock Soulcalibur on Ultra Hard without getting dominated.

Time Investment vs. Payoff: 6 (out of ten) – One character campaign will take you less than ten minutes, each play-through time being cut with experience. The little things, like coming back from practically no health, will come in due time, and since Soulcalibur is a great game already, you’ve got reason to devote the time to it. Just don’t expect a ton of Achievements after your first few fights.

Overall: 5 (out of ten) – There are loads of seriously tough Achievements to unlock in Soulcalibur, and while vets will have less trouble than others, they’re still challenging as hell. Don’t expect to walk out of your first session or two with more than 50 Gamerscore, and if you make it 100 points, you’re one of the aforementioned complete badasses.

Ticket to Ride

Best Achievement: Canadian Content (25 pts.) In an Xbox Live match, connect all Canadian cities to win. – In our April 2008 issue, game-scribe Susan O’Connor wrote “We’re hardwired to ascribe rationale and logic and motive to any situation we find ourselves in” when referring to stories in a particular story-light game. In Ticket to Ride, the amount of possible hilarious Canadian stories to ascribe to this Achievement are endless: a Winnipeg train robbery wherein the bandits are after the final supply of maple syrup on this side of the Canadian Shield; building an illegal trade route for delicious French fries, gravy and melted cheese during the Poutine Prohibition; or simply getting the heck out of Montreal and to Calgary, away from the French... It’s all great! On top of that, the badge is a pretty cool little maple leaf, which in itself deserves “honours”. Oh yes, also Gamerscore.

Worst Achievement: The Ticket Master (20 pts.) Keep all 5 Destination Tickets at the beginning of a 1910 Mega Game and win. – The Ticket Master wouldn’t be so bad, if not for one little thing. It’s an alright Achievement – heck, it’s a downright good one. The challenge is there, and it requires a skilled player to execute on it. The problem? You need to buy an unavailable DLC pack to unlock it. Same goes for the Au Naturel Achievement, which requires another DLC pack to unlock its 15 points.

Easiest Achievement: Basic Training (5 pts.) Complete the Tutorial. – The tutorial, like most instructions, is simple and requires little to no effort. Reading comprehension is optional. It is worth checking out to learn to play anyway, since many of Ticket to Ride’s Achievements require you to, you know, win.

Hardest Achievement: Loco Motive (30 pts.) Complete 8 or more Destination Tickets during a single match. – Talk about one heck of a workload. It’s a huge risk to take on 8+ Destinations, let alone wrap ‘em all up, but if you manage to pull it off, the reward is proportional both in-game, and in-Gamerscore. If you’re lucky, you can manage to connect three, four or more routes on the same coast, which will make your life a great deal easier. Who knew building train routes could be so... intense?!

Time Investment vs. Payoff: 4 (out of ten) – Expect to spend a good amount of your day playing multiplayer, and let’s hope you’re winning matches repeatedly. If you’re not kicking all sorts of train-engineer ass, the Achievements will remain locked up in the yard till you can prove your worth. Play smart, and play plenty, and you’ll be fine.

Overall: 6 (out of ten) – Aside from having Achievements that are restricted to unavailable content you’ll probably need to purchase, Ticket to Ride is a good Arcade romp. Don’t expect to get many points if you aren’t doing well, as mentioned, but it’s fun to learn the game. If you’ve purchased it, and you’re in to these kinds of games, you’re bound to spend a lot of time behind the game pad anyway, so the goods will come in due time to those who are patient.

Sea Life Safari

Puns are annoying, but it’s kind of cute in Sea Life Safari’s title. Probably because no matter what this game does, it’s impossible to get mad at it. The Zen experience it provides will have you chilled out and completely relaxed for hours at a time, so it’s hard to be angry at it, or its stupidly simple gameplay. Being so simple, this seawater-shutterbug simulator is heavy on the Achievement distribution, and light on underwater effort. Let’s... ahem, take a dive in to the details!

Best Achievement: Underwater Adventurer (30 pts.) Unlock all levels. – Unlocking levels will require you to be a mean photo-taking machine, since star ratings are the key to unlocking levels, and they don’t really come easy in a lot of cases. This offers a satisfying, though not terribly difficult challenge, and on the way to becoming an Underwater Adventurer, plan on unlocking a great deal of the fairly easy Achievements. There’s big points in shooting for this star.

Worst Achievement: Shell Collector (30 pts.) Find all of the hidden Collectible Shells in the game. – Collecting is lame, especially when some of the collectables are hidden away in secret areas only accessible by taking a specific photo. The gold Shells in Sea Life Safari are everywhere, but trying to find that last one in each level is aggravating, on account of being on rails. Expect to get dizzy spinning in circles like a maniac in pursuit of clams.

Easiest Achievement: Paparazzi (30 pts.) Fill your Favorites Photo Log with at least 50 photos. – The process of taking 50 snaps and archiving them is kind of time consuming – you’ll need to play a few levels before you even get to 50 images – but it’s as easy as mashing the ‘stash picture’ button after you’ve completed a dive. The jerk who criticizes your images will no doubt let you know how terrible that last image of a starfish sitting on a rock was, so make sure you put all of those away. He’s got no use for ‘em, but you sure do!

Hardest Achievement: Shell Collector (30 pts.) Find all of the hidden Collectible Shells in the game. – As stated earlier, this is a nuisance. This isn’t difficult in the way Ninja Gaiden is tough, or the way super-tough AI in Soulcalibur is, but it’s definitely a task and a half as you search the seas for shell-plunder. There are dozens of these silly little buggers, so you’ll be swimming through levels more than once, probably doing some aquatic hair-pulling when you’re down to the last few.

Time Investment vs. Payoff: 7 (out of ten) – While it’s certainly a bummer that it’s necessary to play each level thrice (or more) to unlock all the Achievements, they really don’t take that long. The slow pacing really makes the whole thing feel dragged-out, but in reality, after a solid hour you’ll have a satisfying amount of Gamerscore unlocked from the depths of this Pokémon Snap pseudo-sequel.

Overall: 8 (out of ten) – Despite forcing you to play each level three times before special items appear, Sea Life Safari is a great XBLA title to rip some points out of. Simple snapshots of everything will garner you Gamerscore over the course of a couple hours, and by the end of the run you’ll easily have over 100 points. Collecting shells isn’t fun, nor is it worth putting in the time to find all of them, but shutterbugs will dig the underwater wildlife and their respective Achievements.

Wall●E

For being a movie-game, Wall●E is actually surprisingly good. That’s not to say it’s actually a “good game”, but it shocked us how little we hated the puzzle-solving platformer. As an added bonus, it’s a bit over two hours long and has a fairly light grip on its Achievements, so you don’t need to invest more than an evening in to it for a satisfying payoff. The awards aren’t really clever enough to praise, but there are enough time-trials and optional side quests that will eat up a good part of your session with it, each of the events unlocking both Achievements, and more events to fill your Gamerscore bank with.

Best Achievement: M-O is Easily Distracted (15 pts.) M-O will clean what is dropped on the floor in the Life on the Axiom level. – This Achievement scores based exclusively on its inclusion of M-O. The little neat-freak will follow you around the entirety of the Axiom level, and eluding him three times by littering is pretty straightforward and completely awesome. This award was almost given to the “knock over humans” Achievement, as causing 40 fat men pile up is quite the sight, but there’s something slightly intense about knowing that M-O is on your tail at all times, and that he wants to clean you so well that you’ll explode. It doesn’t get any points for being clever; it’s just a cool Achievement, and anything involving M-O is pretty much gold.

Worst Achievement: 500 Cubes (30 pts.) Crush down 500 Cubes in the entire game. – Easy to get, for sure, but unless Wall●E is planted in front of garbage piles, and is repeatedly creating/throwing trash-cubes, this probably won’t unlock. Along the way to crushing 500 cubes, ensure that, if you’re going to sit at a station to get the deed done, that 100 of each of the three cubes are created. There’s a chunk of GS to earn in crushing 300 cubes – 100 regular, 100 weighted and 100 energy – which will bring you over halfway to the ludicrous 500 mark. Or you could just not endure the pain of making and tossing cubes for an hour.

Easiest Achievement: The Cockroach (5 pts.) Find the cockroach. – There is no “finding” to be had here! The cockroach is our main man’s best friend, so he crawls about his robot-y body seconds before gameplay starts, and as seen in the film, the creepy crawler is never anywhere but right in front of Wall●E. By moving towards the cockroach – who is the first mission’s objective– this effort-free nickel will unlock.

Hardest Achievement: All Concepts (30 pts.) Get all Sketchbooks in the game. – Wall●E isn’t exactly a non-linear game, and secrets aren’t particularly well hidden, but the sketchbooks are very nondescript, small, and easy to miss. It’s strange that we missed so many, because there are so many of these things, but perhaps the promise of unlocking art was deterrent enough... Even Gamerscore wasn’t encouraging enough to bother with suffering the trials of exploring a boring world for books.

Time Investment vs. Payoff: 9 (out of 10) – Clocking in at all of three hours, 500 points can be Achieved without going through the trouble of searching high and low for the radio/sketchbook items. Stick to the story, and take on the quick side missions as you see fit, and within a couple hours or more you’re rollin’ in the Gamerscore.

Overall: 9 (out of ten) – Wall●E is super easy. From the first Achievement that’s handed to you, to the last, it deals out hordes of Achievements in the form of impossible-to-fail mandatory time trials, 30 second long side-quests, and collectible items with an especially hefty value of points attached to them. As expected, it’s another kids-focused licensed game that is undemanding of its target audience. Make sure you see the flick first though – no matter how bad you want these Achievements, the game-adaptation will spoil the major plot points that are best seen elsewhere. Wall●E is the definition of “perfect weekend rental."

Alone in the Dark

Despite the swing-and-a-miss execution in the gameplay department, Alone in the Dark is a grand slam when it comes to Achievements. As you trudge through the eight story missions (not skipping cinemas or chapters, mind you) the Gamerscore will rain down like it’s a stormy night in the Big Apple. Except it’s not raining because of something scientific like precipitation, rather, because some dude in Central Park is smashing vampire bats into fiery wrecks when he’s putting flaming bullets in to the undead.

Best Achievement: Nuke (25 pts.) Kill 3 Humanz at once. – There’s something special about three or more zombies (zombiez?) leaping at you in the air in slow motion as one of them practically swallows a flaming liquor bottle that explodes when shot, (in such a glorious manner that it deserves a symphony) turning the hippity-hoppity baddies into a flaming mass. You just don’t get that these days.

Worst Achievement: Handyman Carnby (30 pts.) Make all possible combinations in the inventory. – One of Alone in the Dark’s coolest features is the ability to open your jacket and concoct a number of various items, most of which boil down to “bottle that will explode”. There’s a ton of items in the game to mix and match, making it a pain in the neck to make every construction combination... It hurts to think about the available combos using a glass bottle, plastic bottle, tape, cloth, flare, glow stick and other items to fuse. It’s smart in the game, but in practice for earning Achievements – in case you didn’t know, that’s kind of what we care about in these cases – it’s preposterous. Happy item-hunting; keep a notepad handy.

Easiest Achievement: Too Many Too Count (Very Many pts.) Really, there are a lot of these things. – Alone in the Dark has some of the most incredibly easy-to-get Achievements ever. The only thing difficult about them is struggling with the gameplay, and since many are story based, you’ll unlock as you progress. Keep in mind that the “Unlock Achievement” button is Big Green, the trusty A button. Smash a window, press A. Steal a car, press A. Heal yourself, call dudes, pick up keys, make Molotov cocktails, press A!

Hardest Achievement: Cockpit Addict (20 pts.) Drive all the way down 59th street in Cockpit view. – It’s a tough enough task to complete this mission with the ability to see, but stripping away your periphery and rear end, it makes it nearly impossible to gauge your distance from pits, 90 degree turns, or the imminent death that is a crumbling NYC that lurks behind you at a far-from-tepid pace. At the end of the day though, it’s satisfying to have completed this mission, and by completing it in first person, you damn well better get some kind of reward. Even after 30 frustrating repeats, driving down 59th was a rewarding experience with one hell of a difficulty curve.

Time Investment vs. Payoff: 8 (out of ten) – Like a majority of this week’s games, Alone in the Dark is mercifully short. We’re not talking Wall●E-short, but your brief tenure in NYC will be rewarded with mad amounts of Gamerscore. Before you finish the last third, a reputable 500+ points will grace your Gamercard, so if you need a quick boost (and you’re patient with flawed execution on awesome new concepts) Atari’s latest adventure might be just the thing. It should be noted that we knocked off a point for the amount of time we spent awake and in our beds terrified of skinless zombie-folk who sought to claw our eyes out.

Overall: 9 (out of ten) – By simply completing the game, you’re bound to unlock over half of the available Gamerscore in Alone in the Dark. Gameplay problems aside, it’s a wild ride that hands out Achievements like they’re demon-cult candy, and if you never do any of the extra stuff – though it’s impossible not to do a ton of it as you progress – you’d still walk away overly satisfied after the eight episodes. This is great for a big boost that will send you back to the video store with a good 500+ Gamerscore jump.

Battlefield: Bad Company

Not having retroactive difficulty Achievements was criminal in 2005 when Gun did it, but three years later, with Battlefield: Bad Company, it’s not so bad. Oh, wait, yes it is. It’s the worst kind of annoying to complete levels on hard and not earn the “finish medium” Achievement, and Bad Company somehow managed to neglect this now-standard Achievement. While we’re still sighing our brains out in agitated frustration, it’s was exciting to earn mad Gamerscore at a steady clip throughout the game.

Best Achievement: Home Wrecker (15 pts.) Destroy 200 walls – By the finale of the game’s first stage, you should have launched each acquired grenade in to the nearest possible residential area. This will make things easier in the end, because you’ve only got so much time to lay waste to buildings with mortars before the needs-to-be-destroyed convoy moseys in on your turf. By launching frags through windows on the way to town, you can save time getting the Home Wrecker Achievement, which should unlock by the end of “Welcome to Bad Company”, if not shortly after. Come on – you’ve got home-wrecking mortars at your disposal. What more could you ask for?

Worst Achievement: Beans Bullets Bandages (30 pts.) (Online) Get 10002 kills – Really? Really?! This can’t still be happening can it? It was kind of cute when The Club did it with 10001, but seriously... no one wants to play one game this much. Even if you’re unemployed and free of social activity of any kind, you’ve really got better uses for your time. We’ve discussed this countless times, but just for safe measure: Get over yourself; your game is not as fun as you think it is.

Easiest Achievement: Killer on the Loose (25 pts.) Kill 25 enemies – You’re earning a point per kill here, and if that pattern continued after you completed this trouble-free task, we’re positive that Microsoft’s Xbox Live servers would crash with the hundreds among thousands of Achievements Bad Company players would have unlocked after the completion of the first mission.

Hardest Achievement: General of the Army (35 pts.) (Online) Reach Rank 25 – Much like Rainbow Six’s Elite Achievement, General of the Army requires you to trade in your membership card to Real Life for a brand spankin’ new one that pretty much makes you a slave to Battlefield developer DICE. Even if you’ve got the fiercest of skills, your ass ain’t leaving that couch for a lonnnng time.

Time Investment vs. Payoff: 6 (out of ten) – Bad Company’s got a fairly short campaign, with each mission offering a respectable amount of points upon completion, but if you want to make the most of it, find a block of time to play through it again, since you can’t unlock the regular beat-the-mission Achievements while playing on hard. Along the way, you’re bound to blow up, tear apart and mow down enough of whatever to pull in a satisfying slab o’ points. It doesn’t offer much in the way of online, since there’s a dedication-factor, but if you’re playing a Battlefield game online, chances are you’re there for the long haul.

Overall: 8 (out of ten) – They’re fun, they’re challenging, and they’re plentiful. Battlefield: Bad Company’s Achievements are fun to get, despite a set few being out-of-reach/ridiculously stupid. Anyone with a rudimentary understanding of FPSes will blow through the normal campaign, while struggling with the all-knowing AI on the higher difficulty. It’s worth checking out to enjoy the carnage, as well as the unlocks that come in the progress.