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I Love You But I've Chosen Points

Points-mocking Flash game forces achievement-enthusiast to reflect on entire existence.

AVOID SPIKES
AVOID SPIKES
I suppose it says something about me that I keep getting instant messages from various friends that say "HEY HAVE YOU SEEN THIS FLASH GAME ABOUT ACHIEVEMENTS?"

The game, called Achievement Unlocked, is a clever meditation on the pointlessness of points, packing 100 achievements into a game about an elephant... who jumps around... and colors the stuff he touches. It's sort of like a ghetto version of Miner 2049'er, but the metagame is the real game.

The achievements are appropriately ridiculous, with on-screen pop-ups telling you that you've "found the main menu" or found "a way to move westward." There's even a hint page that tells you how to get all the achievements... aaand there's an achievement for viewing the hint page, too. The real game is seeing how quickly you can bust out all 100 of the goals. I think my best time was 365 seconds.

The crazy thing is that it totally works. It's a proper mix of stupidly easy goals and weirdly obscure stuff that you'll probably have to look up. Even as I knew my occasionally creepy love of points was being mocked, I still felt that I had to get them all.

Then I realized that this wasn't an Xbox Live Arcade game, and that playing it wasn't getting me any closer to 70,000. Still, it's a solid piece of humorous commentary on the points craze that has emerged over the past few years.

Check it out at Armor Games. Oh, and watch out, because the music will get stuck in your head. I keep humming it, and now it's spread to Ryan and Vinny, too. It's a good thing Brad is already out for the holidays. He's safe... for now.
Jeff Gerstmann on Google+