Multiplayer achievements is the worst idea I’ve encountered in a long time.

For a while, I was somewhat ashamed of my fondness for collecting achievements. To me, their appeal is similar to collectible card games and the likes: I enjoy having them and looking at them. It’s like collecting stamps, except you can’t sell your collection expensively when you get tired of the hobby. But I wasn’t really sure why I found them so enjoyable to hunt for in my games until Nick described why he found them amusing: When done right, they encourage you to play the game in a way you otherwise wouldn’t have.

Progress achievements are alright. They’re not really that great, because as long as you complete the game, you’ll get them all. Everybody always has these, too, so they’re not much fun to compare. Their only real merit is that they provide an extra incentive to complete a game that you’d otherwise just sort of stop playing in favour of something else. Grind achievements are rarely very enjoyable either, I feel – 10 lousy gamerpoints and another icon in my achievement list is hardly worth the boredom of trying to kill 200 enemies with grenades, or whatever silly task the developers have come up with.

The really good stuff is the achievements that make you explore every corner of the map, finding details a regular playthrough wouldn’t have revealed, or use every weapon or ability or combinations of same, such as the companion-related achievements in Mass Effect (although it’s kinda crazy that you have to play the game 3 times to get them all). The special zany achievements most games seem to have are also usually quite a hoot, such as Guitar Hero 3′s Tone Deaf achievement or the Paleontologist achievement in Stranglehold.

But the MP achievements just annoy me. First of all, they greatly contribute to the feeling of missing out on half the game. I like to try to get as many achievements as possible when I play a game, for largely the same reasons that I always explore every corner of each map and talk to every NPC in the game, so when half the available achievements are tied to the multiplayer, I get a little annoyed with myself and that in turn makes me annoyed with the game. Secondly, for some reason, MP achievements tend to be grindy in nature. Win 50 rounds, win 20 rounds with a shoutout, kill 150 enemies, etc. How is that fun?

How is that fun!?

Do I want to pay full price for a game where at least half the content seems to be found in the multiplayer that I will never play? If I do play multiplayer, it’s mostly out of a sense of obligation as an aspiring game designer, and once I have a grasp of how the MP component is designed, I’ll generally stop playing and move on to the next game. World of Warcraft and Team Fortress 2 are the only recent MP games that’ve managed to hold my attention for any longer period of time (and that’s probably because they had co-op (team or party) aspects in them).

I don’t really mind games having MP components, it’s only when they seem to be more important than the SP that I pause when considering the purchase. I bought Call of Duty 4 because the SP had received good reviews, and I wasn’t disappointed, I just still feel that I’m missing most of the game because I haven’t played it online. The Halo games have never caught my fancy, but people keep telling me the MP is great. Now Turok… Kotaku seems to hold the MP in high regard, but criticizes the SP experience, so now I’m not sure if I want to get it.

Thankfully there are still uncompromisingly story-oriented SP games like Mass Effect and Assassin’s Creed to keep me happy. I just don’t want to miss all these potentially amazing gameplay experiences, but on the other hand I don’t want to pay for a whole game when I know I’m only going to play half of it. To be honest, I don’t really know where I’m going with this. I guess I’m saying… don’t neglect your SP component in favour of the MP. Either you do it right, or you just release an MP game like Unreal Tournament 3.

I finished Half-Life 2. I must admit I liked it a lot more than I’d expected when I bought it; if I’d known it would be this enjoyable, I would’ve probably paid full price for it when it was released. But instead I got it very very cheap later without knowing what I was missing in the mean time, so that works for me. I will list three major reasons why Half-Life 2 surpassed my rather low expectations by far:

1) The illusion. Yes, it is linear, but it doesn’t FEEL linear. There is only one path to go with the exception of a few occasional deroutes that are ultimately cosmetic, but the path is logical and generally makes you feel that it’s the path you would’ve chosen anyway if given the choice. And the strong variation in the nature of the path prevents it from feeling like you’re just being led on even if you are. The puzzles also serve to break up the linear path.

2) The puzzles. Half-Life 2 is about 90% running around and fighting. But then at regular intervals, you’ll be forced to just stop for a moment to figure out how to bypass an obstacle. The puzzles are mostly very very well designed, the solutions are logical and almost entirely depend on your use of your surroundings and the excellent (if not perfect) physics system, and they don’t FEEL like puzzles, but rather… well, like natural obstacles. Most importantly, the puzzles provide nice little thinking-breaks in the constant hectic action. Not that it takes a rocket scientist to figure any of them out, but it’s something else than running and shooting.

3) The variation. This is the major one. The puzzles is one way Valve has chosen to vary the gameplay a little by inserting something other than action, but this is far from the main source of variation. Every time you’re about to get tired of the game, the gameplay changes. At the beginning of the game, you’re running through the city without weapons, trying to escape the police. Then you find your friends and get a suit and some weapons, and now you’re off through the city with weapons, fighting police and later zombies and other nasty critters. When you’re getting a little fed up with that, you get an airboat in which to sail around and run people over. Then you find more friends and you get the all-powerful Gravity Gun (it lives up to its reputation, it really does). Then the game turns into outright zombie horror as you fight your way through the creepy near-abandoned city part of Ravenholm, at the end of which you get to fight alongside a crazy priest. Then you run a little again before you get a buggy car with which to drive through cliff landscapes until you have to get out and jump around in a rocky area, avoiding to step on the ground lest nasty bugs appear to tear you apart. Then you get something to tame the bugs with and you lead them in battle as your own little army of pests. And it continues like that, constantly changing its nature just when you’re starting to get enough of it. It keeps you interested like that, and it works great.

The moment I’d really been waiting for was getting to fight alongside my buddies of the resistance. It was excellent to send them off into a room before me to scout the area for zombies or soldiers and then jumping in to support them if they found something hostile. Although I must say the final part where you make your way through the enemy stronghold armed only with a super-charged gravity gun was simply inspired as well. Nothing quite beats the feeling of killing an enemy by hurling his friend into him.

I’ve been playing a bit of Half-Life 2 Deathmatch with Phasmatis. The first time he owned the match right from the start and I didn’t kill him once. The second time I’d learned that sneaking could be quite useful, and I managed to kill him 4 times. The best moment was when I was creeping around on a roof and saw him walking carefully across the ground below me. I took out the pulse rifle and hurled myself off the roof, spraying bullets at him as I went, it was a horrifying surprise attack which caused him to completely panic and empty his own pulse rifle into thin air and subsequently flee down another side of the map. The shock effect was entirely worth the fall damage. I decided that if I went after him, he’d get the drop on me and finish what the fall had started, so I chose to run down through some tunnels, picking up a bit of healing as I went, and I came out right behind him as he was sneaking back towards the location of my previous ambush. I happened to have an RPG on me, and Phas went flying half-way across the map as my rocket hit him square in the back. To be fair though, he did get me 4 times as well, I had to leave for dinner after my rocket-frag and we called it a draw. His best kill by far was when he sent me the simple message “One death by tyre coming up” and surprised me from behind, killing me by launching a car tyre at me with the gravity gun. That kill had style, I must admit.

It’s not exactly an intellectual game, but I will still buy the expansion.