Around these parts, we know a thing or two about Achievements. Because of our insanely deep knowledge of the unlockable badges, we’ve appointed ourselves the de facto Gamerscore gurus of the entire world. That’s why we’re allowed to review games a little differently.

We’ve got the kickin’-est (and only-est) Achievement reviews available here on The Scoreboard, so if you’re a fiend for the Gamerscore, you’ve come to the right place. You’ve got friends here, and they want to tip you off about the latest Achievements, so you’ll get the maximum amount of good-times and Gamerscore for the least amount of effort. We’re more “awesome” than “in-depth”, ensuring you actually have fun reading our bitchin’ write-ups every other week before using them to decide which Achieve-o-discs are worth your scratch.

This week’s edition will see Achievement-y reviews of Guitar Hero: Aerosmith, Unreal Tournament III, Schizoid, and the guest-authored Deadliest Catch: Alaskan Storm. There isn’t anything noteworthy otherwise, but you’re going to be shocked – shocked! – at how great (or sucky) some of the Achievements pan out.

Guitar Hero: Aerosmith

Best Achievement: Walk This Way (10 pts.) You purchased DMC from The Vault – He’s the King or Rock, there is none higher, sucka MCs should call him sire. He’s DMC – devastating mic control! – and he is, without a doubt, the greatest character unlock in any music game ever. God, Grim, and Satan from GH3 be damned, DMC rocks and rolls passed the competition. How do you beat that hat, gold chains, and general all-around cool-ness? You don’t. By virtue of his presence alone, we award the “Best Achievement” to the man.

Worst Achievement: Get Your Wings (10 pts.) You completed the Tutorial – OXM Senior Editor Dan Amrich compared the Aerosmith tutorial – and, presumably, Guitar Hero 3’s, as it is identical – to “pulling teeth” in a message we received while listening to a Zeus impersonator trumpet about how awesome guitars are. Never has a more apt description been applied to anything, as the arduous tedium of learning to hold down the green button is expectedly dull after Guitar Hero-ing for three years. Does anyone not play these rhythm games? Who’s left to teach?!

Easiest Achievement: Draw the Line (5 pts.) You turned down an encore – When prompted with an encore (you get one on every tier), shut down the fans you’ve worked so hard to earn with a big ol’ middle finger. Promptly flip the proverbial bird by declining and heading back to the set list. Achievement unlocked. Don’t worry – after saying “no”, you can go back and rock the encore anyway.

Hardest Achievement: Cryin’ (25 pts.) Earn a 600 note streak in Co-op (Local or Xbox LIVE) – Huge note streaks are tough, even if you’re jamming on an easier difficulty. It’s so easy to screw up once, which is all it takes to kill your rockin’ roll. With a friend – or random online chump – nailing the 600 mark is tough stuff, especially since the run ends when either of you messes it up. It’s crazy-frustrating, but at least you can put the blame on someone else when you over-strum.

Time Investment vs. Payoff: 6 (out of ten) – You’re set to pull in around 400 Gamerscore for killing off the single player career, perhaps more if you have badass gee-tar skills, and the stackable co-op/online versus Achievements make for a few, fun hours of unlocking. After that, it’s picking and choosing which of the leftovers you want to finish off over the next few, fun hours.

Overall: 8 (out of ten) – There are very few substantially difficult Achievements in Aerosmith, so simply dedicating the time to both offline and online modes is all you’ll need to finish off your checklist. Skilled players will be able to pull off the full 1000 after a bunch of buddy stacking online. The Achievement list feels like GH3’s, you know, except it’s possible to get them this time.

Unreal Tournament III

After long delay, Unreal Tournament III’s Achievements have finally arrived. Unfortunately, as long as you’ve been aching for Epic’s latest (hyper-gorgeous) FPS, it’s going to take about as long to earn the Gamerscore. With outrageous online requirements and a campaign so full of repetitious objectives that it becomes physically draining, it’s a miracle that we dig the game’s unlockables so much.

Best Achievement: Hat trick (20 pts.) Achieve a Hat Trick in 10 CTF or VCTF matches. – Getting a hat trick – that’s 3 goals in a row, for all you non hockey buffs – is gratifying stuff. Wrapping up a single player match having scored all three of your team’s flag captures feels great, so pulling it off online against other humans is immensely fulfilling. Rocking it ten times is, uh, ten times as immensely fulfilling.

Worst Achievement: Get a life… (50 pts.) Get 200 kills in multiplayer on 50 different days. – The solution to this Achievement is easy; it’s the concept that we hate. It isn’t clear, but the reality is this: on 50 different days, you need to get 200 kills. That’s 200 kills per day for 50 days. For those keeping score, this is one more for the worst Achievement ever column: Score 10,000 kills. We loathe the idea of this, as we’ve made evident in just about every edition of The Scoreboard to date, but we’ll humor you with the “quick” and dirty way to hit this goal: Avoid playing close to midnight, since that’ll change the day before you may hit 200 kills for your day; each day you play Unreal, roll multiplayer matches with the bots set to baby-mode, and load up a smaller map with ‘em; pick out your favorite weapon and lay waste to the suckers. In exchange for this tip, you hereafter agree to put up with our whiny-cry-baby attitude toward 10,000-kill Achievements. Forever.

Runner Up: Don’t taze me bro (10 pts.) Get the "Combo King" award in 10 matches. – Awarded for its poor choice of Internet meme. Shame on whoever named this for not changing “Get a life...” to “Over 9000!”

Easiest Achievement: Lock and Load (10 pts.) Completed Chapter 1. – There’s nothing easier than playing a Deathmatch, and since all you’ve got to do is beat one of those to unlock this sucker, wrapping up Chapter 1 is cake. It’s also simple as pie, and a hefty amount of other savory food metaphors explaining its ease. Bring a friend in for some co-op if you aren’t comfortable taking on the AI on alone, since if either of you win the first free-for-all, it’s an Achievement in both your pockets.

Hardest Achievement: Fear the Reaper (60 pts.) Defeat Akasha and complete the campaign in Insane. – Unreal Tournament III consists of 41 absolutely gruelling missions. Some are simpler than others, but when you take in to consideration that the standard bots are smart and challenging, swapping rockets with the Insane AI is an exercise in futility for anyone who isn’t Zeus. We stopped playing Insane after the first mission, and enjoyed the rest of the game’s challenge on Normal.

Time Investment vs. Payoff: 2 (out of 10) – Having to win 500 ranked matches, rack up a set amount of kills for each weapon, complete incredibly specific objectives ten or more times, and, you guessed it, offing 10,000 dudes, is pure insanity. The “Get a life...” Achievement is just a portion of the time you’ll need to dedicate to UTIII to garner a healthy amount of Gamerscore. Even if you flip the campaign on co-op (on insane) you’re bound to be disappointed with the payoff.

Overall: 8 (out of ten) – Being an online-centric game, it’s only appropriate that you spend so much time in multiplayer. While the time required to dip in to the points is substantial, the Achievements are still fun to earn. It’s satisfying when you wrap a chapter, and it’s such a fast paced shooter that each kill feels like an accomplishment. Wasting the online masses with green goop and dismembering them with the flak cannon is rad in itself... And with points earned slowly over time, it’s a good romp.

Schizoid

Ironically, “The Most Co-op Game Ever” insists that you play alone for most of the Achievements. This mind-bending colorful confusion is, on top of being solo-centric, freaking impossible to earn in. With criteria that some might qualify as “Absolutely Bananas”, it’s hard to imagine earning more than a few Achievements without really diving deep in to Schizoid.

Best Achievement: Flitt Breeder (10 pts.) Get a gold medal on level 5 ("My Man Flitt") without destroying any Flitts. – Going the whole stage without killing any baddies is frightening. The blue and orange baddies are already head hunting their respective polar opposite, but when they transform in to Flitts, they become lethal to both of you, as they can’t be killed. Chilling out ‘til the end – allowing all the enemies, since you didn’t kill them, to become Flitts – will result in a victory Achievement that’s both satisfying and intensely fun.

Worst Achievement: Corpus Callosum Severed (20 pts.) Complete level 119 ("Ragnarok") in Uberschizoid mode – Uberschizoid mode is simultaneously the coolest and worst game-mode ever created. Controlling one color with the left stick, and the other with the right, has an absolutely crushing effect on your brain. Trying not to look like a five year old playing my-first-videogame is impossible, since comprehending the corresponding colors locations and objectives will floor you. Making it to level 119 is a completely unrealistic goal for our seemingly stupid selves, so we hate it for that alone, never mind the time investment required to solve it.

Easiest Achievement: Sploderific (10 pts.) Destroy all enemies on level 12 ("Smartbomb") with a single smartbomb. – This was one of the very few Achievements we actually managed to unlock. Level 12 involves exactly the following: holding up. That’s it! You move up, detonate the bomb near the central cage where all the nasties are locked up, and it’s Achievement Unlocked, you nasty scorpio-genocider, you.

Hardest Achievement: Corpus Callosum Severed (20 pts.) Complete level 119 ("Ragnarok") in Uberschizoid mode. – There is nothing that needs to be said here. This is outlandish, and our brains are melting at the thought of Uberschizoid and a triple-digit number.

Time Investment vs. Payoff: 4 (out of ten) – It’s an excellent game if you’re looking for fun, but, uh, we’re not. We want points, and we want ‘em now, so trudging along the 100+ levels in various game modes – each one requiring you to start from the beginning, since unlocking level one, five or one hundred in multiplayer doesn’t unlock it in any other mode – is going to take forever, never mind the absolute brain power required to wrap your head around the Uberschizoid mode.

Overall: 4 (out of ten) – As a game, we dug Schizoid, but since we aren’t here for the slick lookin’ neon graphics, or the bite-sized levels of multiplayer madness, it failed to deliver. The Achievements are uninspired, generic, and otherwise unrealistic. The necessity to replay levels and game variations for points is infuriating, so we’re going to recommend against Schizoid if you’re only in it for the Gamerscore.

Because we were too lazy to do it ourselves, we had guest writer Ross Arbour tackle (get it?) the crab-fishin’ extravaganza, Deadliest Catch: Alaskan Storm, and boy did it work out in our favor. For real, this thing is friggin’ spectacular. There’s nothing for us to say but “this is a hell of a send-off” for this week’s reviews. If you want in on this submission hotness, fire us your own Scoreboard review!

Deadliest Catch: Alaskan Storm

Trawling the Bering Strait at a dead slow 11 knots and hauling in buckets of soon-to-be seafood doesn’t exactly resonate with riveting action adventure. Deadliest Catch is based on the hit Discovery Channel show, and doesn’t stray too far from the common sentiment surrounding other licensed games; it’s craptacular (or should we say crabtacular?). You’ll be trapped with lackluster graphics, a less-than-stellar frame-rate, but the abundance of shallow Achievements early on certainly won’t leave you feeling crabby. Where we come from, Achievements never go out of season!

Best Achievement: Northwestern Scholar (15 points) Watch all Videos in the Virtual Tour – This Achievement involves surprisingly little gameplay, with the exception of moving through a vessel fully recreated from the TV show. Along the way, simply interactin’ with the question mark icons triggers a short and highly informative educational video on the significance of that part on the vessel. Exploratory, enlightening, Achievement inducing.

Worst Achievement: Strung Along (15 points) Drop 50 Pots in a Season – There’s something vicariously unclear and downright fishy about this Achievement. We loaded 50 pots onto the ship and trawled through the seas, gruellingly dropping them into the digitized water one-by-one until the “pots left” counter said “0” – in the same season o’ course! Unfortunately, no Achievement was awarded… did we miss something?

Easiest Achievement: Helping Hand (45 points) Rescue Another Ship at Sea – Everyone digs freebies earned in training, as there’s no way to progress through the game without netting these brutally easy 45 points. It entails finding a ship in distress, which happens to be generously positioned directly in front of your boat and conveniently firing bright red flares. It’s one of the easiest 45 points you’ll ever earn, and it only requires 10 minutes of playing.

Hardest Achievement: Jack of All Trades (75 points) Complete all Missions – There’s a meaty mission lineup awaiting you in Deadliest Catch, consisting of: crowded harbor missions, where you must guide a ship into a tight spot and avoid obstacle collisions; training missions; and various other missions such as fish-offs and coast guard rescues. You’ll also have to master timed harbor dashes, which require putting pedal to the… err... propeller to the water to skillfully navigate through narrow gaps using a speedy powerboat that outperforms any trawler (comparable to the difference between a shopping cart with a lawnmower engine and a Lamborghini). Stand up and take a bow upon accomplishing this formidable feat – it takes some seriously stern patience.

Time Investment vs. Payoff: 7 (out of ten) – There are some tasty achievements to snack on early on, but unless you plan to stick with dropping crab pots from egregiously slow trawlers, you won’t likely surpass the neighborhood of 200 Gamerscore. It takes a daring mate to conquer the Bering Strait, especially given the lack of excitement.

Overall: 6 (out of ten) – Turns out Niko Bellic isn’t the only thing fresh-off-the-boat these days in gaming, but only diehard fans of the reality television show could appreciate this game. The rest of the score-mongerin’ population can appreciate fishing for Achievements – if you want to grab 200 points in a short amount of time, this is a suitable venue, but the other 800 will only show up on the most patient of Gamercards. Remember folks: crab fishing is second in deadliness only to rampant achievement addiction.

Thanks for stopping by this week, lads and ladies. Your comments, as always, are appreciated, and we are anxious to see what kind of reader reviews you can cook up. Feel free to e-mail those to us for a chance at Scoreboard-stardom. We will catch you all in the next two weeks after we surface from beneath our mountain of games for air. Until next week, heroes, get Achieving!