GamerNode: Columns - Gotta Catch 'Em All

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Of course, if every game was completely logical, we'd all be playing "Call of Duty: USA at War With No One, But What the Hell" and videogames would suck. But it just grates sometimes: the fact that in order for the developers to award me all the achievement points I can get, I have to finish the story, then go back and collect everything. I don't feel a sense of achievement when I get collectible achievements, I feel a sense of loss. I've since stopped bothering with going for collectible achievements, and if you ever find my gamertag, you'll notice I've not 1000G'd a single game. I'm a rebel like that. Give me 1000G for playing through the storyline, and you're my favourite developer. Give me 100G, and you can stick your achievements where the sun don't shine.

By far the most baffling collectible items in any largely story-driven title were the flags in Assassin's Creed. Snowflakes I kind of get. Hell, even golden jigsaw pieces in Banjo Kazooie. But flags? What the hell was Altair going to do with them? I can see the logic if he picked one up, took a javelin run up to the lip of the roof he stood on, and speared his assassination target in the chest from three side mission-infested streets away, but he doesn't. Apparently, collecting them all makes you a "Keeper" of flags. A keeper? Where was he "keeping" them? I get he can conceal a hidden blade by lopping off one of his fingers, but over seven hundred flags are going to take a little more than his appendages off the man.

This sounds like an angry rant against collectible items. It is, really, but I like to think of it as more of a passionate discourse. That and I despise the LEGO collectable items with the fiery fury of all nine circles of hell covered in Texan BBQ sauce. I cannot quite express how loath I am to conclude my part in a poorly-adapted plastic storyline, only to realise that I've now got to buy every character and get every bit of memorabilia. I know I'm not a "true Jedi" already, if I was that arrogant I'd be fighting crime, not sitting at a keyboard.

Sometimes I think developers add collectables simply to justify a few more (or in LEGO games, five times the original storyline's playtime) hours leeched from the spare time people are willing to throw at a title. Lambda caches made sense. Pokémon made sense. Even COG tags made sense, and in fact are the best example of how collectibles should be done: both saddening and enraging, collecting the ID tags of your fallen battle-brothers, honouring their sacrifice and nabbing 20G in the process.

Personally, I think there should be an achievement worth a hundred thousand gamerscore simply for collecting all the versions of the Xbox 360 due to red-ring failures. That, or LEGO games should spit out real pound coins. The choice is yours, really: cold, hard cash, or gamerscore. We both know which one you'll choose, it's the same reason anyone even rented King Kong.

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