Your most frustrating achievements/goals. Also, your most rewarding.

I've been trying for the better part of a week to get the Max Payne 3 achievement...

The Shadows Rushed Me

-Unlock And Complete New York Minute Hardcore

You have to beat the whole game in one minute, with no continues. You accumulate time with headshots. Today, I reached the police station, the room with the two elevator doors from which like eight cops appear in smoke, after 2 hrs. and 10 min. I had accumulated 29 minutes. There was only that level left and the airport. But I died because my shotgun was depleted in last stand. I had five pills left and Max was just auto-switching to his pistol when some asshole shot me from the left. If I had depleted my ammo a half second earlier, I could have survived. Why can't he pull out his gun in last stand? I wasn't even mad this time. Just sad. I was so looking forward to being part of the 1 percent. I don't know if I'm gonna try this again. Partly because there are so many random crashes.

My most rewarding was probably the platinum in Demon's Souls, partly because it was my first platinum/completed ever. Also, beating the Kid's warp zone in Super Meat Boy almost made me orgasm. This isn't me:

Anyway, what are yours? Doesn't have to be an achievement. It can be a goal you set for yourself.

My most proud moment was beating Final Fantasy 1. At one point I got poisoned and managed to walk all the way back to a town and ended up with 1 character at 3 hp. It was brutal but I carried on and beat the whole thing. To be honest, I really enjoyed the game, it was a challenge and a grind but felt rewarding as well.

Since then, I always try and go back to 2 which is frustrating and doesn't play as well. Somehow the characters are less relatable/impressionable than the blank slate characters in 1. It also has a levelling system similar to Morrowind and Oblivion that I don't think works well in JRPG format.

Anyway, my longterm goal as of like 2011 is to beat all of the main single player rpg Final Fantasies. I have definitely beaten 6 of them (I can't remember if I finished 3 or 4). I'm playing through the 12 remaster and I think I might go for a platinum on it as well.

Anyway, congrats on your Souls and Super Meat Boy triumphs! And good luck with Max Payne if you go for it again.

The most rewarding achievement for me might be The Mile High Club from Call of Duty 4. Beating that last level on veteran was not easy, but definitely worth it.

The most frustrating achievement might have been getting all 69 stars in Spec Ops in Modern Warfare 2. Fuck those Echo missions on Veteran.

Most frustrating is probably getting all the achievements in DS 1 and 2, which I only did to intentionally burn myself out on those games so I would stop playing them. Some of the stupid ridiculous endgame challenges from the FF series probably rate as well(Ruby Weapon FF7, Deep Dungeon FF Tactics, Yiazmat FF12, etc). I'm sure there are plenty of others that would make the list I don't remember because I've managed to repress those memories.

Hard to choose from my most treasured, though. Getting Golden God in Super Meat Boy probably ranks pretty high.

So you reminded me of how I beat Ruby Weapon the most recent time. The core of the strat is to bring two KOed characters into the fight with Cloud (so Ruby won't eject him), then use Knights of the Round coupled with Mime+Counterattack. Then, you cast Knights of the Round, Ruby hits you, you counter with a MP-free KotR. Go make a sandwich and some coffee. Rinse and repeat until dead (shouldn't take more than a few rounds). If you need to you can Elixir yourself, but you won't if you use Final Attack+Revive.

I did something similar in FFVIII with Omega Weapon and Ultimecia. Selphie has the roulette Limit Break, Slot, and if you roll The End it'll one-hit-kill anything, even the final boss. So what you can do is roll the wheels, and if you don't like the result, press Circle to skip to the next character who's ready, and then back to Selphie to roll again. If you The End Ultimecia, she delivers all her scripted lines at once, transforming through all her forms in the process, which is hilarious. I recorded me doing it on VHS back in the day to show my friends, I knew they wouldn't believe me.

I shot all those stupid frogs in MGS 3 to get stealth camo.

I always just played the game without triggering alerts to get the stealth camo. It's a lot quicker.

Most frustrating? Beating Dishonored 1 without killing anyone. I had so much pent up frumurderstration built up, that I immidiately went out and bought a game were you could NOT PLAY IT WITHOUT MURDERING A LOT (Shadow's of Mordor). I think i missed a lot of cool shit, playing that game like that, but it was hard for my moral compass to murder anyone, when the achievement told me, that it was possible to NOT KILL ANYONE. If I ever go back to that game, or I play Dishonored 2, I am gonna murder a lot. I hope that game has cured me of any need to NOT MURDER people in video games, but I am afraid that it hasn't.

Most rewarding might have been beating Eye Doll (the boss in the first Killer Instinct) on my SNES when I was a kid. Me and an older foster child at the time had been frustratingly trying to beat him, and we were both incredibly elated when it happened.

Mine was getting every emblem ranking for MGS4, there where 40 of those but you could get multiple on one playthrough , it only took me about 7 playthrough to get them all. Still an amazing game.

''This is the liberty we have won for ourselves''

Yeah, it's Mile High Club for me. Completing World At War on Veteran was really damn hard as well. I was trying to get all 69 stars in Spec Ops solo, but I eventually gave that up. Why hasn't this mode ever come back?

Also, in FFX finishing the chocobo race with the balloons with a total time less than zero (I think?) was super frustrating.

@hippie_genocide: I understand why they do the zombies mode instead of Spec Ops, but it's just another reason why Call of Duty just isn't for me anymore.

Probably "Virtually Flawless" and "Hero of the Metaverse" in MGR, some of those were real rough. Also I know they become trivialised over time but beating the Raids in Destiny and WoW feels really good the first time you do it.

EDIT: Forgot to add beating Rodin in Bayonetta, found that harder than any souls boss fight by a wide margin.

Mile High Club in COD4 & the 7 Day Survivor in Dead Rising.....

Completing the Emerald Nightmare on normal in WoW last year. First and only time I've beaten a raid in an MMO while it was still current content.

Its both my proudest and most frustrating achievement though. Proud to have done it, but realizing afterwards that the only progression goal I now had was to beat it again and again (and on harder difficulties when I could) for the next month or so was what got me to stop playing altogether again (I had restarted after a long break a few weeks before Legion launched). Fortunately I was in a large guild and was only a DPS, so me leaving didn't screw over anyone.

Halo 3 on legendary.

That cortana level....

FUCK YES! Finally!

@ezekiel: Congrats!

In Goldeneye (on the N64), years ago, I could start a new save file and beat every level on 00 Agent, including the secret levels, and complete every Target Time to unlock all the cheats and 007 Mode, all in a single day. This is effectively everything that can be done in the singleplayer mode, all in one session. It was kind of surprising and very satisfying to one day realize that, without even consciously working toward it, I had become able to pull this off. It was the natural culmination of my countless hours spent playing Goldeneye for fun.

In Perfect Dark Zero, I beat every mission on Dark Agent, which took a couple months of semi-regular effort and was quite frustrating, occasionally to the point of being infuriating, but I stubbornly persevered to the end. Was very satisfying (and relieving) to put that one behind me.

COD4's Mile High Club on Veteran wasn't as hard as the hype had led me to believe. Only took half an afternoon for me to complete it twice. It was satisfying, but over too quickly to leave much of a lasting memory for me.

Also, after hearing many people complain about (and even give up on) getting the Platinum Trophy in Demon's Souls, I gave that a shot and found it fairly easy. The most notorious stumbling block, Pure Bladestone, took me a modest hour and a half to farm, during which I simply listened to the Bombcast. Pretty painless. So this accomplishment was a little underwhelming. I don't regret going for it, though. It was the first and only time I ever paid any attention to Trophies.

I enjoyed some Dark Souls challenge runs, especially the Soul Level 1 challenge, which was the first one I attempted and completed. The long journey from neophyte to master was really an amazing experience in Dark Souls, and the SL1 challenge was a great embodiment of it.

One of my other favorite achievements was winning an informal speedrun race of RE4 many years ago. I finished a new playthrough of RE4 on Professional (on the GameCube) in just over 5 hours. I didn't know of any skips or speed techniques or anything, so I just played the game normally as quickly as I could. My result is nothing compared to serious speedruns, but it remains the first and only time I've deliberately tried to speedrun a game, so it was very fun and memorable for me.

Currently, I'm casually working on beating Doom (2016) on Ultra Nightmare (max difficulty, permadeath) using no glory kills, no auto-aim, and no crosshair. So essentially all demons must be shot to death and aiming is handled purely by feel and reflex. Very satisfying to play. In fact, I wouldn't consider playing Doom any other way anymore. I've beaten both halves of the game separately under these conditions, but haven't yet pulled it all together on a single life, but I can feel that I'm getting very close now.

Yeah I hate that, the worst thing is the developers tout "play anyway you like" but make you feel like shit or straight up retcon your fun/chaos playthrough. All i'll say is dont play the DLC in high chaos if you intend to play the second game. I played the first game both ways and definitely had a better time not being held back by batman syndrome.

Since i've already mentioned the achievements/goals i'm most proud of i'll mention the goal i'm currently chasing and have been for over a decade and that's beating Ninja Gaiden on Master Ninja. I've beaten vanilla NG on Normal, Hard, Very Hard, same with NGB, NGS, NGS+ (NGS+ let you start on hard thankfully) but whenever I beat Ninja Gaiden on Very Hard i'm so damn exhausted that the idea of going and beating the game on an even harder difficulty is too daunting to deal with. I will do though, one of these days...

I just leveled my Steam account up to level 10 so that I could add my new Max Payne achievement. Looking for other achievements to add to the showcase made me reflect on this topic.

Akumu in The Evil Within - This was gratifying. You have to beat the game without beating hit once.

I of course added the "The Dark Soul" achievements for Dark Souls 1 and 2.

Perfect Knight - Day 2 in Batman: Arkham City. You have to beat all challenges, find all collectibles and do everything as Batman. I've done this in all three games.

Jet Set Radio's When You're a Jet. You have to complete every level with a Jet rating on every mode. This isn't really hard. I've completed the game once on the Dreamcast and twice on PC.

The last achievement I decided to add was "The Kid" from Super Meat Boy.

Thanks. The leaderboard is pretty dumb, though. Did they expect me to wait thirty minutes as my clock ran out so that my bonus time would be added to my complete time? I would think getting through the game quicker would be a bigger achievement.

I watched the world record afterwards. Well, I watched some of it and listened to his commentary. It was impressive.

@ezekiel: I don't think I could pull that mode off. My aim is just terrible.

Probably getting the platinum in Bloodborne because it involved grinding through those God-forsaken chalice dungeons which were a pain in the butt. Also it necessitated me beating the game a third time in a row to get a unique item, which in turn made playing through the DLC content I bought later nearly impossible - the only solution being.. going through about half the game for the 4th time on a new character.

Most of my arcade achievements (high score or 1CC) have been some mixture of incredibly frustrating and incredibly rewarding, this one perhaps the foremost due to the way a single mistake (RNG, player skill, or both) at a number of different significant points in the game can really torpedo the success of a 30-minute scoring run.

More recently? Getting to around 90th percentile DPS on my chosen job in FF14. It's rewarding to feel like my time spent reading guides and practicing has actually translated into success. I'm hoping my group can clear the current savage raid before it's nerfed, which would be a first for us.

Yesterday, I got a higher score in Joker's Carnival than I ever thought possible. 5.39 million! My previous score was only 1.3 million.

The quality is kind of poor. I uploaded it again a few hours later and YouTube ruined it again.

I can't find many videos of higher scores. But there is this ridiculous 28 million: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6fuiO-UuPRU

Perhaps not the most frustrating, but when people talk about achievements, I always come back to how I purposefully went for the Platinum trophy in Tales of Graces f, because it sounded like a lot of work. I'm sure you can do it faster, but I spent 150+ hours with that game, with maybe 100 of those hours devoted to completing side quests, grinding, and playing through the game from start to finish multiple times for the sake of New Game+ stats.

In the end, I still like that game and had fun doing everything, but it was a commitment.

Perhaps the most frustrated I've been with a trophy/achievement is Persona 4: Golden. One of the trophies is read every book in the game. However, some books are given to you as gifts based on conditions, like agreeing to hang out with so-and-so on Sunday (but this person will only ask you to hang out if your social link is below X). My body wishes I had that trophy so I could get the platinum, but life goes on.

It's hilarious that this came up to the top today of all days. I've just spent all of last night and all morning beating my head against The True Arena in Kirby: Planet Robobot.

For those who don't know, The True Arena is basically a boss rush against souped up versions of every boss in the game, including the extra bosses in Meta Knight's story, ending with a final encounter with a massively upgraded version of the final boss. Everything hits harder, and in some cases (final boss), they have way more attacks to contend with. And the health items they give you between bosses heal so little health that you need to remain either at full health or close to it the entire time in order to stand a chance. And sometimes they won't even give you those.

I can reliably get up to the final boss every time now, but the three bosses before him (the final bosses of Meta Knight's story) always drain so much of my health that I wind up dying on the final boss's second form. But I won't give up! I will be victorious!

Out of the ones that I've actually completed? Viewtiful Joe on Adults mode. Never again. Also beating the Yellow Devil in Mega Man 1 without using the infamous glitch was pretty tough.

Most rewarding was in AC: Brotherhood.

Achievement: Strong Closer. Take the lead 10 seconds before the match's end and win.

It was the last 10 seconds, everyone was frenzying. I was in 3rd. Saw my target, air-killed them, turned around and saw my pursuer and sucker-punched them, BARELY scraping me to 1st as the match ended. Best part: my pursuer had been in 1st, and when I got back to the lobby he was FULL-THROAT SCREAMING into his mic. Not even at me, just a scream.