Welcome back! Oh, we missed you dearest readers. It’s been a full two weeks since we last saw you on The Scoreboard, and to celebrate our triumphant return, we’re going to give you the mad hook up! If you can handle our revolutionary reviews of Achievements from the latest and greatest 360 and Live Arcade releases, then jump in and bathe in the awesome.

When you’re done checkin’ out the critiques of Galaga Legions, Castle Crashers, Tiger Woods PGA Tour 09 and the much anticipated Too Human, drop us a line through e-mail to fire us love-letters, hate-mail and other feedback! Or if you want to shine in the spotlight yourself, you can write your own review for The Scoreboard – just make sure it’s a recent game and you’ll be in to win some sweet-ass swag.

Grab a pint of mead, a slab of chicken and your favorite MJOLNIR miniature. It’s time to Achieve, warrior!

Galaga Legions

Let’s be honest: this columnist sucks more than anyone on the planet at Galaga Legions. That said, there weren’t too many of you out there on our friends list that scored much higher than we did! It just goes to show you that Legions is a way hard game with challenging badges that are begging to be branded on your Gamercard. Unfortunately, we seem to have misplaced out Achievement unlocking key...

Best Achievement: Zero Deployments (5 pts.) Area cleared without deploying any satellites! – This could almost fit under “Easiest” as well! Playing Galaga Legions without ever acknowledging the tutorial means that you’re probably unaware of the ability to separate your wings from your ship with the d-pad, and enabling the “satellites” to shoot on their own helps out in a big way when it comes to being swarmed in multiple directions. Since we didn’t know that the masses of space-freaks could be killed courtesy of deployable friends, we ended up doing this one on accident. But the clever idea behind Zero Deployments makes the concept of not calling for help when you know it’s there all the more exciting.

Worst Achievement: One Life Only (15 pts.) Area cleared without losing a single fighter! – Look at the above screenshot. In case you couldn’t fully grasp what’s happening there, that’s actually Galaga Legions. This game has a lot of junk going on at once, and avoiding the countless mass of green that signifies your imminent death is nearly impossible unless you’re some kind of space monster-killing super genius. Basically, you need to be the dude from The Last Starfighter if you’re going to get through any of the insanely challenging areas without being zapped into a pile of atoms.

Easiest Achievement: Area 1 Cleared (5 pts.) Cleared Area 1! – Perhaps the best combination of title and description in any Achievement to date, Area 1 Cleared is as self explanatory as it is totally effortless. The first level is significantly easier than the rest, allowing players to get a taste of the frenetic chaos to come in the subsequent areas. Savor your victory while you can: everything else is designed to put you through the wringer, so Area 1 Cleared wins the title of “Easiest” by default.

Hardest Achievement: All Adventure Areas Cleared (50 pts.) Cleared all areas in Adventure mode! – The only reason we’re selecting this one as the toughest of the bunch is because it encompasses everything within Galaga Legions. This game is ruthlessly difficult, which is part of its fast-paced fun, but if you want the Gamerscore out of it you’re going to have to be a pro in the cockpit. Clearing any area after the first is a congratulatory feat worth triple the points you earn, and flipping them all means you’re totally deserving of some insane jackpot of Gamerscore. For those of us who stink at ripping aliens to shreds with lasers, achieving this goal is a pipedream.

Time Investment vs. Payoff: 4.5 (out of ten) – In theory, Legions is only about an hour long from start to finish. But how well you do depends entirely on your skill to memorize patterns and placement, so don’t expect to get many points without putting serious dedication in to it. Anyone with a modicum of Galaga talent will be able to knock a couple levels off their list and earn a respectable amount of Gamerscore, but everyone else will just have to suffer with beating the first stage over and over again.

Overall: 5 (out of ten) – Call us babies if you must – we know you’re better than us. We got completely worked by this retro revamp and were unable to pick more than, ahem, ten points from it. But it’s a wicked-fun game that will continue to be played and hopefully mined for points. Each round you’ll find yourself getting closer and closer, but it’s agonizing to get to the point of actually being successful enough to boost your score.

Castle Crashers

After a ten-year development cycle, Castle Crashers is finally here! Ok, it wasn’t actually a decade, but we’ve all been dying to chop cute cartoons to itty bitty bits for a pretty long time. It’s arrived, and we’ve chopped our way through it. We scored big, and we can guarantee you will too if you’re willing to step up to the plate and punch enough dragons in the jaw.

Best Achievement: K.I.S.S (15 pts.) Collect all four princess' kisses in a multiplayer game – What’s the only thing better than polygamy? If you guessed “killing up to three other suitors” you’d be a big, fat winner! Since freeing the princesses in multiplayer results in a battle-for-her-hand to the death, our two to four heroes have a lot of work to do in kicking the hand-drawn crap out of each other before engaging in a hardcore make-out session with a royal babe. If you manage to score with all four beautiful ladies, you’ll not only get the play, but the points too! If this isn’t victory, we don’t know what is. Oh yeah, for the record: we were kidding about that polygamy thing.

Worst Achievement: Animal Handler (20 pts.) Collect all of the animals – Castle Crashers is unique in that not a single one of its Achievements are bad. Animal Handler earns the “Worst” moniker for being incredibly friggin’ expensive to earn. When enemies drop a Loonie (that’s a Canadian dollar-coin, for all y’all uncultured folk) each time they kick the bucket, it’s a bit time consuming to earn the 700+ gold to buy Monkeyface or other purchasable animal buddies. If you want to rack up some quick coin, go beat up the big bad bosses that guard the princesses. After you ice the gnarly fellas, a treasure chest that seemingly contains an entire jewellery store inside drops from above for your pick-up pleasure. This is the part where your pupils turn to dollar signs, and your hands get tired from grinding.

Easiest Achievement: Maximum Firepower (10 pts.) Using a catapult, fling a knight with maximum power – Proper timing? Hardly. Complex button inputs? Forget it! You won’t get many chances to launch yourself from a catapult on to a castle wall, but you can go back and restart the flowery field stage where you do get the opportunity. Hopping in the spoon-shaped launcher only asks that you press the X button when the power gauge hits its peak, which is easy to read and hard to miss. We’re shameless so we’ll take the points where we can get them, but if you want the task to have a bit of challenge behind it, try doing it with the TV off or something. We recommend just banking the points and running.

Hardest Achievement: Deer Trainer (20 pts.) Navigate the abandoned mill without hitting any obstacle – For everyone who looks back to the 8-bit era and thinks “Dude! Battletoads was a brutal game,” have we got a sight for your sore eyes.

Castle Crashers presents a similar sequence set in a sawmill and on the back of Bambi, and like its inspiration, the stage’s Achievement is crazily difficult since it fails to show you upcoming walls you’ll crash in to and logs you need to jump. But the slight visual cues it gives allows you to eventually succeed, which is part of its thrill. If you manage to memorize or read the cues correctly it should be smooth sawmill sailing. But holy hell is it hard to pull off.

Time Investment vs. Payoff: 7.5 (out of ten) – A solid play of Castle Crashers will see you rolling in most, if not all of the offline Achievements. Since they make up about half, you’ll spend the rest of the time grinding away online killing or quaffing in the four-player game modes. Local multiplayer is a godsend if you’re having trouble, and since the game is meant to be played multiplayer you might as well take advantage of a couple more multiplayer rewards. 20-something stages and a great list means that the time – probably less than five hours – is well spent.

Overall: 9 (out of ten) – Not only is The Behemoth’s list for Castle Crashers’ Achievements a fun one to run through, but the badges are cleverly created and a hoot to earn. The game has its frustrating moments, but it’s one of the best Xbox Live Arcade titles out there. The Gamerscore unlocks at a satisfying rate as you progress, but make sure to bring a friend to alleviate any difficulty in some of the more stone-hard ones. Enjoy this one in spite of its cost – the Gamerscore and their objectives are worth the price alone.


Tiger Woods PGA Tour 09

Golf: the only sport you can play while drinking and sleeping. It’s a beautiful thing really, but most find the tranquility of slicing a ball in to a lake and tearing up fairways with carts pretty boring. Tiger Woods PGA Tour 09 makes the former fun (while we’re hoping to see the latter as a mini-game next year) with a quicker pace and the addition of Achievements, so even haters have a reason to grab a driver and smash some eggs toward the pin. A list of great Achievements that require real work will satisfy sports fans this year, but score-whores should keep their distance from this course.

Best Achievement: Picture Perfect (10 pts.) Create a Photo Game Face golfer – Narcissism in Achievement form? Yes please! We always dig seeing our mugs in games, and whether we’re shooting down terrorist scum as a Rainbow operative in Vegas or chippin’ in for a birdie, mapping your own face to a character is simultaneously creepy and sweet. Earning Gamerscore for rendering your grill in horrifyingly realistic 3D is some of the coolest stuff we’ve ever come across. Let’s hope this never goes outta style.

Worst Achievement: Scratch (50 pts.) Earn 50,000 Player Points in EA SPORTS™ GamerNet – You read about grinding in Castle Crashers and you’ll read about it in our Too Human report, but we can guarantee you never expected to see “grinding” while on the links. Somehow, the excellent GamerNet features that separate Tiger 09 from its predecessors translate in to trashy Achievements. 50,000 points doing GamerNet challenges take a lonnnnnnnnnnnnnng time, even though multipliers and huge points help alleviate the arduous pain in the neck. You’ll be hitting long ball after long ball during the longest drive, hitting nine and 18 hole courses, as well as scoring bits and pieces throughout your career for killer shots, but after you hit 5,000 (that’s not a typo. Five thousand) you’ll be wondering, “What took so long?”

Easiest Achievement: 15 Minutes of Fame (10 pts.) Beat an EA SPORTS™ GamerNet Instant Challenge – This will be tougher to earn as time goes on since a lot of people are still learning how to submit challenges, let alone making them worthwhile. As of now, you can probably pound a long drive from the tee on your first quick game and unlock this, but before long you can count on pro golfers maxing out the potential objectives’ difficulty just by being that good at the game. For the time being, however, this is laughably easy.

Hardest Achievement: Course Management (25 pts.) Finish a round of golf below par with only irons – Not to discredit the usefulness of the 5-iron or the pitching wedge, but wrapping up a game without the woods is like playing basketball with a cactus or hockey with tire irons. Since we were unable to unlock this one, we aren’t sure that you can even use a putter – it’s entirely possible that you’ve got to chip ‘em all in, but that’s such a ridiculous requirement that we’re going to put that in the “Not Likely” column. If that is true, however, you have our permission to storm EA’s walls with a bag of irons to show them what’s what. Regardless of that, par fives are killer when the best rod you’ve got is a three iron. Ugh.

Trickiest Achievement: Ace in the Hole (25 pts.) Get a hole in one – We considered dropping this in the “Hardest” section until it occurred how close we came to sinking it from the tee on nearly every par three. Learn to use the spin (A or LB in the air) and power (A on the backswing) effectively, as well as gauge the wind. Once you’ve taken all of this in to account it’s a matter of reading the green from mid-flight to determine where your ball is headed. We’re rootin’ for you – hole in one drops are like injections of adrenaline to your brain, so we’re hoping this tip helps you put it in the tin in one stroke.

Time Investment vs. Payoff: Golf (out of ten) – How much you love the game depends on how willing you are to sink the hours upon hours of play time to Tiger. It’s definitely one of the best editions yet, and the Achievement list is full of gratifying challenges that will help ease the pain of having slummed it for Avatar, but if you’re looking for a quick hike for your Gamercard you’d best look elsewhere. You’ve got a lot of golfing to do.

Overall: Fore (out of ten) – Sorry, we couldn’t resist the punny score. In reality, Tiger’s Achievements this year are serious fun, but require doubly serious applicants to get a good haul out of them. You’ll be playing tournaments and challenges aplenty, but with an Achievement for golfing in a rabbit suit, how can you go wrong? Think this over if you are a filthy, greedy Gamerscore junkie.

Too Human

Love loot? Let’s hope so, because Too Human is dripping with it. And we don’t mean that you’ll just be picking up beating sticks and ridiculous hats: there are Viking-boatloads o’ Gamerscore loot-drops to be sucked out of this action RPG. Fortunately, the points are both entertaining to earn and easy to rip free from their plastic-disc prison, so this is a quick ten to 30 hour ride that anyone looking to “scwhore” should sink their ‘Unyielding Love Hammer of Ten Billion Sweaty Socks’ into.

Best Achievement: – Relics of a Forgotten Past (5 pts.) Complete a 7 piece Elite armor suit. – Head and shoulders, uh, gauntlets and pauldrons, gauntlets and pauldrons! Alright, armor permutation doesn’t quite translate in to children’s song so well, but what it does do a good job of is looking unrelentingly badass. Seriously, the first time you lay eyes on Elite boots or a helmet, chances are high that you’ll karate kick your ceiling in excitement (even if you don’t know karate). Donning your blue-eyed baldy with seven of these ridiculously delicious pieces of protection could be dangerous, as it could cause further karate-induced damage to your home, but there are few things more freakin’ cool than a hero decked out in Epic gear. Five points or not, we’ll take it.

Worst Achievement: Valkyrie's Folly (5 pts.) Die 100 Times. – You might want to avoid connecting to Live ever again to avoid the humiliation of being publicly branded with this ultimate “YOU SUCK” Achievement. To rub in the hurt, the death sequences in Too Human are hella long and the payout is only five points.

As a side note, 30-second deaths multiplied 100 times is 3000 seconds. To simplify that, know that once you’ve unlocked Valkyrie’s Folly that you will have spent 50 minutes of your life watching that poor woman carrying your sorry ass to Valhalla. How boring is her job?!

Easiest Achievement: NORN Novice (5 pts.) First Cyberspace Well has been activated. – Fairly early in the game you’ll encounter Freya, a Viking vixen who’s not only totally hot for Baldur but is a big help in progressing a lot of our main man’s motivations. The first thing she does when we meet her, though, is show us to the NORNs (the moderators of the Viking Internet). A tap of the A button allows Baldur to hang out with the three NORNs by staring in to bird baths (yep, seriously) and the first connection is worth five Gamerscore!

We love Internets.

We’re Really Tired of This Achievement: Feeder of Ravens (10 pts.) Kill 10,000 enemies. – If there’s one thing we hate more than tired, unoriginal and repetitious grind-fests of Achievements, it’s makin’ them worse. Sure, we really are sick of seeing “Kill 10,000 Dudes!” on the bottom of every Achievement list, which is why Feeder of Ravens earns this award. But it’s worth noting that it is indeed possible to make this Achievement – one that we’ve pissed-and-moaned about for eons, now – worse. How? Double the kill count. Hate for the Machine does exactly that, so let’s hope that this is the only place we ever see it get larger than ten thous– wait, what? Gears of War 2 is bumping it to 100,000 kills?

WE QUIT ACHIEVING!!!

Hardest Achievement: Unstoppable: Helheim (20 pts.) Helheim has been completed without dying. – We had numerous conversations with readers of The Scoreboard, friends and forumites, and the general consensus is that ripping up Helheim without biting it is as likely as a rhino-saurus (or Rhino-Dino) invasion enslaving the entire Saturday attendance of the Penny Arcade Expo to execute on their nefarious plan for bovine-genocide!

Ahem.

We did get word of someone who claims to have done it (yeah right, dude!) but he claims that the points didn’t unlock. This isn’t impossible; glitched Achievements aren’t uncommon so be wary of whether or not your effort is actually getting you anywhere. Best of luck, dudes and ladies; and do let us know if this unlocks for you -- we won’t be unlocking it anytime soon.

Time Investment vs. Payoff: 7.5 (out of ten) – The overall campaign of Too Human is a short and sweet ten hours, but playing through it again with a friend will likely take a little more than five. After a single go, you will probably have around 500 of the available 1000 Gamerscore, so multiple plays are a must to hit high levels and unlock wicked gear to check off the final few boxes on the easy list.

Overall: 9 (out of ten) – Can you hold the right stick forward? Congratulations, you’ve just unlocked hundreds upon hundreds of Achievement points! Alright, it’s not quite that simple but it might as well be. Too Human is forgiving when it comes to death since you don’t lose that much, and it’s generous in regard to Achievements. It doles them out at a speedy clip and most of them require simply playing the game to hit the natural milestones like kills, skills and upgrades. Utilize all of your abilities, buff out your armor, fill out the skill tree and never stop slicin’ away for maximum earnings!

*** After you get back from Penny Arcade Expo this week, why don’t you try e-mailing your own Achievement review of any hot new release right here! If you’re skipping out on the convention, you’ve got even less of an excuse not to send us a review, especially since you’ll get free goodies out of the deal too.

Thanks for reading, chums. We’ll see you in another couple of weeks when we review, uh... Oh man. There are two Japanese RPGs coming up. Hopefully we’ll get our renegade mercenary on in between saving the world from whatever pretty-boy is putting it in danger this time.

See you then!