Greetings, true achievers! Spring is finally here (with tons of games, no less!), and unless you’re Canadian, the snow has completely disappeared. Unfortunately, so has Scoreboard founder Casey Lynch. Yup, OXM Online’s chief score-whore has gone over to “the other side” – he’s now VP of Communications for the Radar Group, an IP shop working on games like Prey 2. Not too shabby, eh? We’ll miss him always, though we’re a little afraid of the way he keeps insisting that we refer to him as Madame Vice President…

Fortunately, I’ve busted in to the OXM Online HQ and taken over, just so readers can get their Achievement-review fix. It’s a shooter-heavy week this time around with Turning Point: Fall of Liberty, The Club, Condemned 2: Bloodshot, Frontlines: Fuel of War, and Rainbow Six Vegas 2 on the chopping block. For good ‘chievement-whoring measure, we will also be taking a look at the embarrassingly easy-to-1000 (erm... even if I only got 900) Jumper: Griffin’s Story. Who needs to analyze “visual fidelity,”“character development,” and “robust gameplay features” when there’s friggin’ points to be unlocked?

So yeah, The Scoreboard is back, and it’s here to bring you the most complete, detailed breakdown of the latest Achievements. You’ll scream, you’ll cry, and hopefully you’ll ROFL, but you’re guaranteed to come out the other side with thousands of Gamerscore points...but not without a little effort.

Rainbow Six Vegas 2

Rainbow Six Vegas 2 isn’t much better than the first game, both in general quality and achievable Achievements. It’s a good thing this game is so much fun because the amount of time required to unlock a respectable amount of points is unbelievable – the kind of unbelievable that would lead folks to quit their job. Whatever, this game is rad, and the Achievements cry to be busted out of their oppressive Achievement prison, and only you have the key: tons o’ bullets. The lock is made of terrorists.

Best Achievement – True Identity (20 pts.) Use the Xbox Live Vision to create a character with your appearance.  Is there anything more sweet than slapping your photographed face on an elite Rainbow operative, then getting Gamerscore for it? The answer is “no”. The only problem with this Achievement is that it requires a $30 peripheral, but if you’re like me, you bought a camera for the last True Identity unlock.

Worst Achievement – Elite (50 pts.) Achieve the rank of Elite Getting to the highest rank requires the maddest of mad skillz and a ton of free time. The reward is only 50 points as well, so you need to weigh your options: do you want the 50 Gamerscore, or do you want to sleep, eat, and leave your mom’s basement? It's a lengthy journey that's ultimately not worth it unless you’re playing it for fun anyway.  You could just play King Kong or Avatar TLA: The Burning Earth to multiply your score-to-time ratio exponentially.

Most Broken Out of the Box Achievement – Private First Class (10 pts.) Achieve the rank of Private First Class. Ubisoft tried giving vets of Vegas a break, allowing them to carry over their save file from 2006’s Vegas title. In the process, anyone who’s using said save file loses out on an Achievement, potentially forever. For reasons unknown, the Private First Class Achievement doesn’t unlock when using this perk and since you’ve automatically surpassed the required rank, don’t plan on unlocking it without clearing all things Rainbow from your hard drive. Unless there’s a patch, this one could be out of grasp for a lot of gamers. Laaaaaaame.

Easiest Achievement – Novice Hunter (5 pts.) Complete your first Terrorist Hunt mission at any difficulty. Realistically, you could join a T-Hunt game and go for dinner. Your buds are bound to finish it eventually. Even more realistically, you could just play it on the default difficulty for five minutes and clear a map of 15 terrorists without trouble. Your “laziness level” will determine how much effort you feel like exerting for the pathetic five points.

Hardest Achievement – Freedom Shall Prevail (75 pts.) Complete the Story Mode on Realistic difficulty. Rainbow is a tactical game, through and through, and if you’re playing like an idiot, you’re dead. And that’s just on the default difficulty. Choosing Realistic difficulty will reveal things to you about yourself you otherwise never would have known. Your lack of patience, violent controller-throwing tendencies, and television-kicking superpowers will become immediately apparent, and your hatred for trial-and-error will exponentially inflate. Save yourself from the evils of agony – they want nothing more than to make your life miserable. Playing Realistic in Rainbow Six Vegas 2 (even on co-op!) is only detrimental to your health.

Time investment vs. Payoff – 5 (out of 10) Most of the Achievements will be earned online, with a lot of them focusing on milestone kills. It helps that Rainbow is one of the best multiplayer games around, and since you’ll likely be devoting 20, 30+ hours to it, feel free to rap the short-and-sweet single player campaign for a ton of points. Play it on co-op to save yourself some time and get some more Gamerscore as well.

Overall – 7 (out of 10) Vegas 2 gets more points for having fun and worthwhile Achievements than it does for having easy-to-earn ones. There are a bunch that most folks simply will not get because it takes too much time to build up to 500 kills, but there are some great Achievements across the board. Still, if you’re not working for it, you not getting paid.

Condemned 2: Bloodshot

HEADS UP: This section contains an Achievement with a very spoilery name. Fans of the first Condemned will know it when they see it, but don’t freak out when you do. It’s a multiplayer Achievement with no story spoilers! Phew. Glad that’s out of the way.

Bloodshot’s Achievements are infuriating. They aren’t particularly hard, but they have awkward descriptors like “Explore all maps more than once!”, “Kill the killers” and “Go kill, kill, kill in MP.” So finding out exactly what to do to earn big points required a little info-hunting on the Intertron. Luckily, once you’ve got the general idea of what’s what, cashing in on Condemned’s Achievements is cake, provided you’re willing to dive in head first and stay in for a loooong time.

Best Achievement – The Final Word (10 pts.) You completed your first environmental finishing move. This Achievement is less about the points and more about the experience. By the time you’re prompted to perform an environmental finishing move, you’ve been exposed to the brutality and visceral feeling of laying the smackdown on crazy crackheads in dark alleyways. After knocking ’em out with fisticuffs, 2x4s, and lead pipes, you’ll wonder what else you can do to these poor schlubs. As if on cue, you’re instructed to push a bum’s head into a television after dropping him to his knees. The vicious attack will no doubt have you pumping your fist in an “oh snap!” fit. The Achievement Unlocked pop-up is a welcome perk.

Worst Achievement – SKX (50 pts.) Kill 9 unique players with the Serial Killer As if busting your hump to rack up 1000 kills wasn’t enough with the Serial Killer Achievement, now you’ve got to hunt down and kill nine individual players... who also have the Serial Killer Achievement. It’s made worse by the fact that you can’t just kill nine “Serial Killers” before grinding your way to 1000 kills, which seems like a lot of murders to commit before being classified as a serial killer, wouldn’t you say?

Easiest Achievement – Self Medicated (25 pts.) You've bandaged your wounds. While it’s as simple as hitting “A” on a health kit a bunch of times, this won’t pop up until toward the end of the game. That is to say, if you’re a total sissy and avoid medicine cabinets in bathrooms. If you’re brave enough to open and close those mirrors – just thinking about it gives me the chills – and put up with the scares, you deserve that health. For the rest of us, we’ll open first-aid cabinets and SCU lockers as we see ’em. It’ll unlock eventually and completely effortlessly.

Hardest Achievement – Master Investigator (30 pts.) PERFECTION as a sleuth all the way through. Crime scenes in Bloodshot are fairly ambiguous, and you’re given very little instruction on how to go about solving specific things like blood spatter or bullet calibre. Earning a perfect rating feels great, but earning it for every crime scene – many of which are hidden in places far too scary to find – is ruthlessly challenging. Find a guide.

Time investment vs. Payoff – 5 (out of ten) It’s easy to get completely sucked in to the predominantly silent – and bed-wettingly frightening – world of Metro City. Good thing, too, because you’ll need to be seriously into Condemned 2 if you plan on extracting any kind of Gamerscore reward out of the multiplayer, and you’ll need to be aware of everything going on in the single-player game to get a lot of those Achievements. Ten hours or more in campaign, then ten more in multiplayer might get you beyond the 500-point mark.

Overall –  6 (out of ten) Blue-balling ending aside, Condemned 2: Bloodshot is truly a fun game with some Achievements that are actually achievements... a nice change of pace from the “Smoke 20 Fools” awards that are doled out elsewhere. Gamerscore whores should look elsewhere if they want a big fix of points, though. Condemned is tight-fisted dealer.

Frontlines: Fuel of War

Frontlines: Fuel of War had a poor demo showing, but the retail game was actually pretty damned impressive. Both the gigantic online battles and the quick-and-dirty campaign are decent fun for shooter fans, but more importantly, have totally awesome and easily obtainable Achievement points! Even if the futuristic first-person shooting doesn’t tickle your fancy, spending a weekend with Frontlines (preferably with a friend for maximum payoff) would be worth the time of any Achievement... ahem... “women of the night.” Some of these are tough stuff, likely requiring some stack-tastic boosting matches, but in the end Frontlines is a good way to get that GS jump ahead of your Live amigos.

Best Achievement – Fashion Police (100 pts.) Multiplayer: Knock off 20 enemy hats. You got the mad snipin’ skillz, son?! PROVE IT. Instead of going with something lame like a “ten headshots in a row” cop-out, this Achievement is dedicated to the hilarity of not just landing a bullet in a bad-guy’s brain, but specifically launching their headwear in to the sky after doing so.  What makes it more intriguing is that you’ll need to hunt down the folks who were smart enough to cover their melon in the battlefield – not that it’ll do ’em any good when they’re staring down the business end of your long-rifle – by specifically selecting a helmet-wearing soldier class. It’s a time-consuming battle, but the payoff is a Gamerscore-Benjamin. Netting this one is laughably easy if you’ve got a buddy who’s willing to eat it 20 times in a row.

Worst Achievement – Noob (0 pts. – REPEAT, ZERO) Commit suicide 10 times in a multiplayer game. Seriously, this no-point-Achievement garbage has got to go. Come on, this is turning the entire idea of earning Achievements on its head completely voiding any reason to seek them out. Being rewarded without really being rewarded is pointless, and it just puts the junkies out there in to a foaming-at-the-mouth rage, followed by a crippling withdrawal stage. Thanks but no thanks. Also, you’d have to be insanely awful playing Frontlines to kill yourself online ten times. Um, just so we’re clear: I did it on purpose. Really!

Easiest Achievement - Bull's-eye (90 pts.) Complete the first or second half of a mission with an accuracy higher than 50%. This might sound like a doozy, but anyone who isn’t firing wildly in to the floor should earn this in the first or second mission. If you really want to wait it out, the third mission features a half that’s sniper-heavy, so you could bag it with some repeated headshots if you didn’t earn it earlier. Just keep your fire under control, stick with short bursts at close range, and you’ll be in the clear for 90 percent of the game’s total offerings. Not bad for keepin’ it cool under pressure!

Hardest Achievement -  (TIE) All Seven Ironman Achievements (20 pts. each) and Complete a mission in a single session without dying. Considering that Frontlines’ intensity knob is cranked beyond 11, it’s almost impossible to complete a mission without taking a tank shell up the rear, getting ploughed by a truck, or picked off by overly accurate snipers unless you suddenly obtain the divine power of invincibility, flight, and laser-beam eyes. They sure are satisfying to get, but I’d prefer to avoid ball-breakingly difficult tasks if at all possible. With seven missions to clear without being able to call in reinforcements, you’ll be struggling with earning these for hours unless you’re some kind of FPS superstar.

Time investment vs. Payoff – 6 (out of ten) In theory, Frontlines’ single-player campaign can be fully completed in less than four hours. If you’re a total badass at the game, you’ll fly through it earning the time-based and no-dying-allowed Achievements for some serious Gamerscore bank, but the real teeth-sinking will take place online. Skill and diligence are prerequisites for taking a stab at those time consuming Achievements.

Overall – 6 (out of ten) I like shooters, but I’m only human. The troublesome beat-the-clock and the tough online rewards stayed out of my reach for the most part, but serious shooter fanatics will easily cream the online competition and unlock most of the moderately easy single-player Achievements. A laborious weekend with Frontlines, and serious FPSers will strike Gamerscore crude.

Turning Point: Fall of Liberty

Maybe it’s because we were so spoiled in 2007 with a countless amount of incredible first person shooters – Call of Duty 4, Team Fortress 2 and Halo 3, to name a few – but Turning Point was dreadfully underwhelming. It has an awesome story premise that never really takes, and that’s about all it has to offer. Oh wait. It’s got a gang of Achievements, and when you get a look at the hefty points (which come in droves, by the way) you’ll be foaming at the mouth for this World War II shooter.

Best Achievement – Impeached (30 pts.) Oust the false President from office on any difficulty. Around the three-quarter mark of Turning Point, you’re chosen by your rowdy rebel buddies to whack the phoney-baloney President of the United States after an assault on the White House. The real glory of this one comes from thinking outside the box a little. Sure, you could walk in to Oval Office and immediately bust a variety of caps in his artificially elected ass, but there’s nothing more satisfying than cooking a Model 24 ‘Stick Grenade’ and hurling it in the Pro-Nazi  President’s chest. Well, there’s one thing more rewarding: gaining 30 points in the process. Bonus tip: Pocket the Constitution once he’s finished for 20 more Gamerscore!

Worst Achievement – Maybe I Should Go Outside... (40 pts.) Get 2500 ranked match kills in any mode. Yeah right. If you’re planning on planting your butt on the couch and venturing in to the barren wasteland that constitutes the Turning Point online community, well, there are better uses for your time than lingering by your lonesome on the empty servers to rack up 2500 kills. It took me half an hour to set up a three-person deathmatch, and if you manage to find eight people you’re going to be struggling with crippling lag, sticking to walls, falling through floors, and a retina-melting muzzle flash on top of the game’s yawn-eriffic mediocrity. Seriously, this is one of those Achievements that you shouldn’t bother with for more reasons than to save yourself from the fruitless labours of gratuitous grinding.

Easiest Achievement – Gravity is a Harsh Mistress (5 pts.) Toss a paratrooper onto the streets below New York on any difficulty. This sucker is so easy it’s laughable; then again, so is the reward. (Let’s take a minute to laugh... Okay!) Shortly after the harrowing skyscraper escape in the opening minutes of the game, a Nazi paratrooper presents himself to you in a most convenient position atop an equally convenient sky bridge. The fool’s got his back to you, prime for your grabbing, chucking, and achieving. Run up behind and push him off the bridge to the streets below for an effortless 5G. Geronimo!

Hardest Achievement - Presidential Medal of Freedom (100 pts.) Complete the campaign on Insane difficulty. If you can complete Turning Point on the Hard difficulty, you’ll be impressed with yourself. While it isn’t particularly tough on Normal, the higher difficulties become brutally unforgiving; the poor save system, sparse ammunition dumps, and bizarre enemy behaviours will likely push you to the edge, so completing it is a giant load off. But Insane? Forget about it. The vicious onslaught of enemy fire and overly aggressive AI on this difficulty is enough to justify a couple homemade holes in your wall from frustrated controller-tossing. No amount of Achievement points are worth this suffering.

Time Investment vs. payoff – 8 (out of ten) If you’re patient, you’ll be able to finish the single-player campaign in about six hours on Normal, while the stubborn “enthusiasts” out there can spend a couple extra hours dealing with checkpoint issues for bigger completion points. With a little bit of extra effort, you’ll easily crack the 500-point barrier with these lavish and meaty Achievements. If you’re willing to give the multiplayer a go, there are some worthwhile points to be earned.

Overall – 7 (out of 10) Turning Point has a lot of problems, but Gamerscore junkies will enjoy the short romp. “Achievement Unlocked” will be popping up every 15 minutes, and if you can bring yourself to play through Hard Mode, it’d be worth your effort in the end. This game is exactly what people are referring to when they tell you “Achievements make games better” – or in this case, tolerable.

The Club

This year, The Club completely blindsided me with its volatile chemical fusion of some of the lesser-known elements out there: Arcade-ium, Awesome-ite, and Action-ium. The explosive combination resulted in a wicked-fun third-person shooter that focused on points and leaderboard-climbing instead of a deep narrative and lengthy cinematics. Like a quarter-eating arcade cabinet in disc form, The Club is not only hella fun, but hands out Gamerscore like it’s goin’ outta style. Don’t tell it that it’s not.

Best Achievement – Melee the Elephant (25 pts.) Kill 30 enemies in a level with a melee attack in either Tournament or Single Event. Nabbing this moderate-point Achievement isn’t nearly as hard as it sounds if you’re clever about switching down to the Casual difficulty (a.k.a. Baby Mode) before you start an epic match of high-fiving dudes to the face. The switch to Casual makes you a thick-skinned, nearly invincible god; if you need the extra security for personal closure, select Adjo or Dragov for their man-tank strength and start swinging those fists in a Siege single event. Beat down 30 faceless drones before the timer runs out, and you’ve got yourself a cool achievement and a fond memory of a frantic firefight.

Worst Achievement – No, Seriously (40 pts.) Kill 10,001 people in multiplayer Ranked Matches. Listen Bizarre: parodies are funny and all, but when you’re honoring something that wasn’t any fun to begin with, things aren’t cool between you and I, okay? The spoofed Achievement (Gears of War’s “Seriously” – 10,000 ranked kills, for all the Xbox n00bz in the audience) wasted too much time, effort and social activity for most gamers to give it a second glance, and as much as I dig shooting faces online in The Club, you won’t see me grinding away online for hours on end trying to earn your homage. I’ll find a better way to amuse myself, thanks. Perhaps I’ll start by counting the taste buds on my tongue.

Easiest Achievement – Listmania (5 pts.) Save 5 Playlists in GunPlay. Got five minutes to burn? Who doesn’t!? Head in to the GunPlay game variant and whip up five of the exact same single-level custom playlist for an easy, lame, and almost worthless Achievement. It’s simpler than the rest, but the payoff is a slap in the face. The simplicity satisfies my lazy ilk, though. Now if only The Scoreboard would write itself.

Hardest Achievement – (Tie) Hidden Treasures (30 pts) Shoot All Secret Skullshots in every level in either Tournament or Single Event and Bag them Bones (30 pts) Shoot All Skullshots on every level in either Tournament or Single Event. These bad boys are far from impossible to find, but you’ll need to eat a crate of carrots if you plan on using the superpowered eyesight required to locate and destroy all of the combo-boostin’, skull-imprinted road signs. About ten kind-of-hidden Skullshots litter each location, and Secret Skullshots, which require precise positioning and perfect precision to hit. Locating them is similar to an Easter-egg hunt, except instead of cheery children prancing in a park, maniacal thugs are vainly shooting shotguns while getting pasted in dilapidated warehouses. Happy hunting.

Time Investment vs. payoff – 8 (out of ten) As of this writing, I’ve earned 610 Gamerscore from The Club over the course of about eight hours. Give yourself six hours to finish the tournaments, and if you feel like taking on the Insane difficulty (it’s not very hard), you’ll get 20 extra points when you finish each map. Hopping online for a couple hours with some buddies to rack kills and stack wins will have you swimming in unlocks.

Overall – 8 (out of 10) It isn’t for everyone, but I enjoyed the score-based antics of The Club, and without going out of your way, you’ll bag a good chunk of the Achievements. With a little research, comrade cooperation, and trial-and-error, you won’t be able to stop the Achievements from flowing. If you’re really devoted, there isn’t much stopping you from getting all 1000 points. Well, nothing but the asinine, life-sucking nonsense of “No, Seriously”.

Jumper: Griffin’s Story

As much as I hate this game, I also have an underlying love for it. By mashing the face buttons for a couple hours, you’re bound to unlock at least 80 percent of Jumper’s 1000 points. Where the other games in this list were skill based or time consuming, the only requirement for Jumper is consciousness, and even that’s a questionable prerequisite. Maybe “breathing” is more appropriate, so if you’ve got a heartbeat, you’re able to totally ready to rock this game’s world.

Best Achievement - When it’s done (50 pts.) Complete the game. I’m going to be frank. This is only the “Best” because when the game is over, you can stop playing it, like, that second.

Worst Achievement – Pack Rat (50 pts.) Find all collectibles in the game. I can’t count high enough to account for the amount of FAQs, walkthroughs, and guides I had to triple-check to make sure I hadn’t missed a collectible somewhere. After a painful second and not-worth-it third completion, I came to accept that I wasn’t getting these 50 beans. My heart broke when I compared my complete “prize room” to the countless collectible guides, confirming that I did in fact meet the requirements for earning the Pack Rat Achievement, but was free of reward. In theory, I could have just wiped my save file and played it again to try and un-break the unlock, but the odds of me playing through Jumper to the end again – taking up a whole 90 minutes of my day – are about as likely as Hayden Christensen being cast as anybody but whiny crybaby. 

Easiest Achievement – Stop hitting yourself (50 pts.) Perform a finisher move from the front. You know the A button? It’s the green one. Push that. Bloop! Achievement Unlocked.

Hardest Achievement – Hard Target (50 pts.) Play through the game without dying. This wouldn’t be so brutally difficult if enemy counter-attacks weren’t so inconsistent. You’ll find yourself laying flat on your face when enemies knock you over without recognizable reason, and the latter half of the game features bosses that take 10 or more minutes to finish off due to their copious amount of hit points, which will often lead to your frustrating demise. It’s an easy one to cheat, but hitting the power button every time you drop dead only leads to monotonous level restarts.

Time investment vs. Payoff – 10 (out of 10) The entire game takes a couple hours to wrap up your first time through, max. To get the full thousand (broken Achievements notwithstanding), take 90 minutes to burn through the game again earning the required experience, landing simple combos, and picking up the worthless collectible prizes.

Overall  - 9.5 (out of 10) The only thing stopping Jumper: Griffin’s Story  from earning the highly coveted 10/10 is that it forces you to play more than one time to net some broken or experience-based Achievements. In the end, Jumper is a fantastic way to boost your way to the top of the Gamerscore leaderboards with a horde of hella easy Achievements…that is, if you’re willing to suffer through the atrocious voice acting, unbearable camera, and a couple glitched Achievements.

*****

That’s it for this week, Xbox-oholics! Not a bad haul if you’re willing to bust your rump (from your couch) to earn the bulk of these Achievements

If you want to get together with some folks for some Gamerscore-centric matches or suggest reviewable games, head to the forums or comment below. Leave your loving (or not-so-much) comments below, and don’t forget to e-mail your own Scoreboard review so you can be a part of the action. Remember kids, this is going down in the history books, so you want to be a part of it, right?

Check back next time for more reviews, guidance, and (hopefully) hilarity. Until next time – I’m late for my AA (Achievers Anonymous) meeting!