The Curse Of The One Point Achievement

Bullet Witch has one, FIFA 09 has one, Forza Motorsport 2 has three of them and now, DJ Hero has one as well. The one point achievement, ruining the round numbers on the end of gamer scores since 2006.

One thing that DJ Hero has done right that the others haven't is to make the achievement itself something fairly insignificant. All you need to do is to complete your first "mix" outside of the tutorial mode. In comparison, Bullet Witch expects you to beat all stages in HELL mode, FIFA 09 gives you one point for playing for fifty hours and Forza's three achievements involve collecting all the cars from certain regions. If I played a game for fifty hours and received a measly one point, I'd probably cry. Not because I only got one point, but because I'd been playing a sports game for 50 hours!

Granted all of these games do have a subsequent achievement to make up the remaining four points to round off your score again, but there's always a chance of the achievement being out of your reach. As an example, Bullet Witch has an achievement worth 99 points for playing the game for 15 hours. Taking a look at the numbers, it appears as though around 4,000 TA members played this game through to the end at least once. Around 300 received the 1 point achievement and around 700 of you played for 15 hours or more for 99 points. I played Bullet Witch, but turned it off after about 15 minutes to prevent myself from eating my own eyeballs. There's no possible way I could have made it to 15 hours, although I wouldn't have played on HELL mode either, so perhaps it's a moot point.

Finishing one mix in DJ Hero sounds easy enough, but the remaining four points sound a bit more involved. The achievement requires you to receive at least four stars on the hard difficulty. For those of us who play rhythm games, this might sound easy, but remember, this is a whole new controller and is going to take some getting used to before you can rock out as flawlessly as you would with your plastic guitar. You never know, you may decide after just one song that the game is absolutely abhorrent and take it back to the store for a trade in, then you'll be stuck with a one on the end of your gamer score for ever!

Are you guys as anal as I am about seeing either a zero or a five on the end of your score? Or does every little point count?