Welcome back to The Scoreboard, the hippest, most rockin’-est Achievement review column on the Intertron. Okay, that was lame, but we mean business. For the uninitiated: We do this thing once in a while where we talk about and review the only thing that matters in gaming anymore: Achievements. By dissecting them piece by piece, we have a greater appreciation for the money we spend on games versus the Gamerscore earned. This week we’ll be delving in to a duo of discs in the form of Bully: Scholarship Edition and Army of Two, with a double dose of Xbox Live Arcade titles on the side.

As was mentioned in the previous edition of The Scoreboard, April’s Xbox 360 releases are few and far between. On top of that, well, they blow. Until May, there’s only two games coming, one of which is the bound-to-dominate-the-world Grand Theft Auto IV, so before you all decide to hole up in your bedrooms and become total shut-ins as you play the game in to the ground, take a look at the Achieving you should (or shouldn’t) be doing until then!

Bully: Scholarship Edition

From locking lips with the lads and egging cars, all the way to calling someone a “dumbass” 100 times, there’s no shortage of crazy things to do for Gamerscore in Bully: SE. It’s jam-packed with Achievements that, for the most part, you’ll obtain over time. If you’re not in it for the long haul, you might as well not even bother. Bully is here for the hardcore, and completists will be driven to insanity. You’ve been warned.

Best Achievement – WATCH YOUR STEP (20 pts.) Trip 25 people with marbles. In the main area of the school, there is set of stairs begging to be covered in marbles. Planting a bag on the top of the staircase guarantees maximum hysteria as unaware teachers, students and prefects tumble to their hilarious downward doom. Marbles are also a fantastic way to get out of trouble when someone’s hot on your tail – after all, few things are more satisfying than watching half the school eat it while on a manhunt. No pun intended.

Worst Achievement – DUAL NEBULA (20 pts.) Achieve A High Score on Consumo, Nut Shots, and Monkey Fling Arcade Games These arcade games are annoying and some of the least fun you’ll have in a sandbox game ever.  Their half-assed design will only send you in to a blind, bloodlust-filled rage, so if you want to avoid putting your foot through your fancy-pants LCD screen, avoid these 20 points. Stick to Live Arcade if you want mini-games.

Runner Up - SHARP DRESSED MAN (25 pts.) Collect 250 clothing items. ZZ Top, it ain’t. Time consuming, tedious, and pricey: that’s what this is.

Easiest Achievement - IT’S ALL IN THE WRISTS (20 pts.) Complete All 4 of the Carnival Games once. If you’ve got four bucks, you’ve also got 20 more Gamerscore. Simply pay-to-play and complete each dollar mini-game (breaking bottles with the rifle, testing your strength with the mallet, etc.) at the carnival grounds one time and be on your way. You can’t access the carnival right away, but when the gates open, you practically have it.

Hardest Achievement – PERFECTIONIST (125 pts.) 100% completion. It’s far from impossible, and taking all the classes helps to alleviate some location woes early on, but finding every rubber band, smashable gnome, mission, errand, lootable locker and clothing item will take at least 20 hours (probably closer to 30 or 40 for folks who didn’t play through Bully two years ago.) Book the psychiatrist now.

Time Investment vs. Payoff – 5 (out of 10) Outside of the Perfectionist Achievement, most gamers will reap a minimum of 500 points in a single play. Once the Endless Summer is unlocked, you’ve got all the time in the world to run, skate, bike, and prank your way to an inflated Gamerscore victory. The core of the game will take about 15 solid hours, and add another 10-15 for the minutiae.

OVERALL – 8 (OUT OF 10) ON TOP OF BEING THE EARLY RECIPIENT OF 2008’s “BEST USE OF CAPS LOCK” 2008 AWARD, BULLY: SE ALSO HAS SOME REALLY GREAT ACHIEVEMENTS THAT JUST SO HAPPEN TO BE TIED TO AN AWESOME GAME. There are loads of 20- point achievements, so you’ve got plenty of unlockin’ to do. Get to it, achievers! You’ve got a ton of punk bullies to beat down, wedgie, and insult.

Army of Two

Listen, we aren’t here for quality videogaming, but Army of Two was a little, well, lackluster. We don’t care about the frustrating team-mate AI, 1337 5p3aK text conversations, racial stereotyping, or the fact that Salem says “bro” every point-five seconds. We just want the Achievements and the game isn’t shy about throwing ’em our way.

Best Achievement – Flip You. Flip You For Real (20 pts.) Kill 50 enemies total using the Melee Attack. Physics might not be a fan of this natural-law-ignoring Achievement, but it’s a blast to walk up to an enemy and karate kick him in the face, launching (and “flipping”) him 20 feet in the air. It’s a bit ridiculous for a third-person shooter that is simultaneously trying to be a serious political thriller and a crazy-go-nuts videogame. We were ignoring the deep political plot (kill all them foreigners!) in favour of taking out baddies with hilarious wrestling moves.

Worst Achievement – My Virtual Buddy (35 pts.) Complete all missions with the Partner AI. When earning this Achievement, you will have played the entirety of Army of Two solo. Alone. By yourself.. This game is built around co-op, so running it with the A.I. buddy is far from an enjoyable time, but hey, this is the best opportunity to unlock the “heal your brain dead buddy 25 times” Achievement. When we tell you you’re playing it alone, we’re serious. Plan ahead: you’ll be doing all of the work while picking up your ally’s slack.

Easiest Achievement – Out of Debt (15 pts.) Heal your partner for the first time. Training does not count. As mentioned, your thick-headed teammate is prone to eating bullets. He’ll be down on his ass within seconds in the first mission. It’s a huge pain in the neck because you’ll do the same pull-him-behind-cover-and-put-on-a-band-aid thing dozens of times as the game progresses, which is incredibly intrusive to the action. Fortunately, it yields more Achievements.

Hardest Achievement – Retirement Savings Plan (40 pts.) Earn one billion dollars in total in ranked matches. We aren’t just gamers around here – we’re also mathematicians! Average players will pull in around two million dollars per ten minute match, with certain maps offering more cash for great online duos. At that rate, it would take five hundred matches to get to the billion-dollar point.  That’s over 80 hours of successful online play.  Pick your online partner, maps, and objectives carefully, and you can probably half that ludicrous devotion time.

Time Investment vs. Payoff – 7 (out of ten) It’ll take some skill, but Army of Two’s single-player campaign can be stripped of about 500 Gamerscore in ten hours. It isn’t particularly long, but repeat plays are mandatory, and after you’ve played a mission once, it isn’t very tough to rock it a second or third time. If you’re playing online, plan on hundreds of hours in matches if you want to earn the Achievement for earning a billion bucks.

Overall - 8 (out of ten) It isn’t going to be winning any awards for being an outstanding game, but if you’re willing to tolerate some of the worst AI of the century – this is the third mention of this. Is it drilled in to your head yet? – and play through the campaign more than once, Army of Two is worth checking out if you need a quick shot of Gamerscore and jingoism.

Ikaruga

Famous for its ball-breaking difficulty, Ikaruga forces players to memorize its six challenging stages if they want a mere modicum of success. It still manages to be an addictive arcade shooter (with sweet tunes) that keeps you coming back to finish one more stage or increase your high score, and doing so will rake in the tough-to-earn Achievements. Ikaruga vets should have little trouble, but the shooter is new to a lot of gamers. And the new kids are going to be absolutely crushed by the game’s brutal unlock-requirements.

Best Achievement – Dot Eater (10 pts.) Clear a certain chapter in any mode without shooting at all It’s a great feeling to wrap up a level in Ikaruga when you’re chaining colossal combos (red-red-red, blue-blue-blue!) but it’s even more stimulating to eat thousands of laser dots (nom, nom, nom) without ever firing a shot. Pacifism goes a long way, folks. All the way to ten points and the right to brag that you’re “so good at Ikaruga, I didn’t even have to kill anything!”

Worst Achievement – The “Grade” Achievements – (5 for 20pt. each) Perhaps the most demanding Achievements in history, these practically demand that you (and a co-op buddy) be the most unrelentingly awesome Ikaruga-ers  on the face of the earth, requiring precision shooting and 40+ chains and zero deaths. We’ve mentioned memorization already, but seriously: know the stages inside and out, or your chains won’t take you anywhere. Trying to keep a combo going across all six levels sucks, but the masochists who manage to do it deserve these points.

Easiest Achievement – Target: Eboshidori (10 pts.) Destroy Eboshidori! First-timers might require a couple tries, but beating the first boss – concluding what is the game’s interpretation of a training level – isn’t exactly tough. Everything else is.

Hardest Achievement – Unstoppable (25 pts.) Clear the game in any mode without using Continue In all honesty, it’d be easier to climb Everest without legs or arms than to finish Ikaruga sans-death.

Time Investment  vs. Payoff – 4 (out of ten) Every hour you play earns you another continue credit. After tireless toiling, you’ll eventually just get infinite lives, so you can blast through all six levels (taking out the bosses for Achievements in the process) without worry. If you’re not committed to learning Ikaruga’s intimate (and awesome) details, then skip it.

Overall – 6 (out of ten) Your mileage will vary since Ikaruga’s difficulty will be more solvable for experienced shooter fans. It’s far from n00b friendly, but it’s fun to shoot things and learn the patterns. The more you play, the easier it gets, and the game helps you as you spend more time with it, but those “get an A” Achievements will be unreachable for most.

Battlezone

Adding revolutionary next-gen visual spunk such as “red” and “blue” to the standard green wireframe look of Battlezone didn’t exactly catch our fancy (or tickle the nostalgia bone, for that matter). The appeal of tanks kicking the crap out of other tanks is still cool, but with such a slow pace – forward, turn, shoot, repeat – only Achievements can save the day! Too bad Battlezone’s Achievements focus too much on playing the Classic (WHAT’S HAPPENING?!) and Throttle Monkey (extra fast for ADD gamers!) modes, and not enough of the kinda-fun four player online modes.

Best Achievement – Specialist (5 pts.) Destroy a Tank by piloting a Missile Multiplayer game - Ranked match Taking over the reins of a one-shot-kill rocket is cool, but more often than not you’ll smash in to a wall before you realize what’s happening. These things are quick, so be on your toes. It’s supremely satisfying when you smash this sucker in to some unaware chump who didn’t see you coming.

Worst Achievement – Maniac (10 pts.) Score 50000 Classic game - Throttle Monkey mode There is only one thing you could possibly add to the green-wireframe nonsense of Battlezone’s “classic” mode to make it less playable: triple speed. Okay, two things: triple speed, and a high score goal. No thanks.

Easiest Achievement – Sergeant (10 pts.) Win a game Multiplayer game - Ranked match This Achievement is as simple as running out the clock in a 1v1 match with a buddy. It works out to a point a minute, so kick back and crack open your latest issue of OXM in the meantime. If you want to add 25 more points to your name, don’t get killed in the process.

Hardest Achievement – General (30 pts.) Score 1000000 Classic game - Normal difficulty If we could comprehend what was going on in the Classic game, we’d gladly rack up a million points by slaughtering a legion of polygonal panzers. This would be easy if we could see what was happening in Battlezone, but we were busy taking eye drops of bleach in attempt to recover our vector-scarred vision to bother with this monster.

Time Investment  vs. Payoff – 4 (out of ten) If you weren’t a Battlezone master walking in, don’t needlessly waste time trying to hit the high scores. You’ll get the online Achievements at the cost of ten minutes or so of your time. Ironically, the sped up Throttle Monkey game will eat up most of your time, since spawning = immediate death.
 
Overall – 2 (out of ten) There are only a few worthwhile Achievements and a painful unlocking process, Battlezone is hard to recommend. If you aren’t already a god of this stop-and-pop, noob-hating tank sim, the only Achievement you’ll be unlocking is Cornea Corrosion.

*****

Another week gone, another load of Achievements unlocked. Good thing too, because starting next week we’re going to be drowning in the waters of Liberty City and, well, not much else. You can look forward TO OXM’s GTA IV review on the 29th, and it’ll get its time in the spotlight on The Scoreboard in due time – we want to make sure we’ve been educated more than enough to start talkin’ about the Achievements. If you’ve got your own review of a recent Xbox 360 Achievement-Disc, email it in and unlock your own Achievement: badass free goods.

Congratulations on reading an entire Scoreboard without reading the vilest word ever created! It’s true! Not once did we say the word shmup! Achievement Unl—ah, damn it.