When Microsoft launched the Xbox 360 console in 2005 they included a new twist that would revolutionize the way people with lots of free time would enjoy games: achievements. Microsoft would then attempt to “revolutionize” gaming further by offering both HD-DVD and Kinect support for their console and we all know how that turned out (expensive paperweights that can occasionally play a dead media format or secretly record your embarrassing workouts and upload them to Microsoft’s YouTube channel). Achievements are so commonplace these days that most of us can hardly remember a time when you’d turn on a game and not have explicit directions on what you were supposed to do to “beat” it; between the title screen and the rest of the game you knew there was a credits screen of some sort and that’s basically where you set your goal marker when you started playing.

The first few games released for the Xbox 360 featured only a small number of achievements where confused developers would issue you a 200 point award for throwing a football or for managing to sit through a loading screen; they truly didn’t know what in the hell they were supposed to do with this system and were confounded by these "achievements". It's why NBA Live 2K6 has five achievements and four of them have requirements that are met the second you plug your console into a working power source.

Regardless, once developers figured out they didn’t have to give gamers a thousand points just for pressing the B button they began getting creative with their objectives and goals using achievements to give otherwise straightforward games new missions and side quests for players to explore. Games are now no longer measured by an RPG completion percentage or whether or not you collected all of the Chaos Emeralds and stuffed them up Robotnik’s ass; if you don’t have 1,000G in an Xbox game and all of the DLC achievements unlocked then guess what? You didn’t beat it.

With that said below are six achievements who’s sole purpose in life is to make your gameplay experience a living hell. These are the achievements that, for whatever reason, are almost impossible (or in some cases are absolutely impossible) to unlock. They are “Completionists’ Nightmares”.

Hail to the Chimp is a game that strived to cash in on the lucrative “party games” genre of titles; the only problem here is this genre was over-tapped about six years prior and by developers touting bigger and better franchises. Hail to the Chimp features no Xbox franchise characters or cameos of any sort, just a bunch of random animals with ridiculously hard to pronounce names such as "Ptolemy" and "Murgatroyd" which sounds less like an animal’s name and more like something you’d see a proctologist for. The whole game itself is based upon a fake “presidential run” where each animal apparently beats the yiff out of one another for votes. The game never mentions if this is a WWF presidency or a domestic presidency.

They even make the game look like a fake news broadcast. HOW CHARMING.

Between insipid and uninspired minigames we’re treated to carryovers that make the game appear as a “GRR News” broadcast. The game is so generic and unfunny with its humor that it literally took me about fifteen minutes to realize that “GRR” wasn’t some creative or witty acronym but is literally just the “Grrrrrr” sound. Hail to the Chimp doesn’t even make an attempt at being cute, it just gives you a bunch of tired and unfunny jokes and expects you to either never have heard them before or be completely retarded.

This begs the question of who the game is for. Is it for kids? Surely it can't be because this game is ridiculously hard after the first few rounds. Is it for adults, then? No, because the jokes are such painful groaners that hearing them after a certain age will guarantee permanent erectile dysfunction. If you perform a stand up show entirely out of humor from this game you will be shot in the face by the second act. This is a both a guarantee and warning printed in the game's manual.

The cutesy characters are so one-dimensional and generic that even feral representations of actual animals are more entertaining than this game. That didn’t stop MTV, though, who said this game was funnier than The Colbert Report. MTV doesn’t even know what the hell “music” is and it’s in their company name, anything they say about video games is a lost cause because when it comes to gaming they might as well stick their thumbs in their asses and renew Fantasy Factory for another 29 seasons and start an MTV3 channel. I’d rather listen to Atari Corp’s Jack Tramiel talk about proper video game industry etiquette and ethics than ever take advice on entertainment from MTV.

Animal’s Choice is an achievement that requires you to “win the single player campaign without losing a primary”. The description is already vague enough to allow for at least three George W. Bush jokes but what the game is literally asking you to do is beat the game by finishing in first place in every single round of which there are over 50. Each round takes about five minutes to complete so with the addition of loading screens you’re looking at close to 5 hours of gameplay just for this achievement. If the game was a cakewalk this would be inconvenient at best but after a certain threshold of “primaries” the game drops its cutesy feel and becomes insanely difficult to the point where it reaches controller-smashing proportions.

To put the difficulty of this achievement into perspective here’s a link to this achievement on an Xbox gamerscore website that “weights” achievements based upon how many people actually have it. This achievement, literally worth only 50 Gamerscore, is worth 1,614 points when calculated for its "Bullshit Factor". There are over 1,000 logged gamers who have this game and out of all of them only one guy has this achievement. Animal's Choice is so damn ridiculous that out of every achievement ever created for an Xbox 360 title this one is 6th for weighted value.

Legend has it that earning this badge is the only way to ascend to true furry nirvana.

Borderlands is one of those games that people either hate or love. In my experience the title is just an exercise in how far a developer can go before they piss their players the hell off and drive them to never play the game again. Between what seems like endless collection missions and DLC about as broken as the aftermath of a drunken Alabama monster truck rally this game is just an utter mess; it’s tolerable at its best and completely infuriating at its worst. Yes, I just went there.

Upon its release Borderlands had an insanely high number of glitched achievements that simply would not unlock even if you met the requirements for them. Because of this I never unlocked the award for reaching level 30; I had to start a whole new game to get that achievement and for the longest time a handful of other menial achievements were all glitched and locked as well, but this one right here, Fully Loaded, was the very last achievement I unlocked for this game.

The requirement is painfully, and deceptively, simple: “rescue enough Claptrap robots to earn 42 inventory slots”. A “Claptrap” is a robot that drives around on one wheel and spouts out phrases that Gearbox desperately tried to make the new “Cake is a lie”. Claptraps are among the worst video game characters ever conceived and are right up there with Oblivion’s Adoring Fan on the “what the christ were you idiots thinking” list. They never shut up. Ever. All of them universally spit out the same unfunny shit and each Claptrap literally only comes with around four action phrases before they all start repeating. Broken Claptraps are hard to pass up, because you just want them to die, but the catch is that the only way to shut them up is to find a toolbox and fix them. Your reward for your troubles is a “Backpack SDU”, an item that grants you three additional inventory slots.

The issue here is that you don’t always get a Backpack SDU, it’s just random chance. If they don’t give you an SDU they’ll give you a worthless grenade mod that’s about 15 levels under your current one and drive away. There also isn’t an unlimited supply of Claptraps to fix either, once you fix one they’re gone from the rest of the game. Borderlands has two playthroughs available (“easy” and “hard” if you wish), each one has the same story and missions and each one has their own set of Claptraps. I played through both playthroughs and rescued every single Claptrap and was stuck at 39 inventory slots, and mind you if you rescue every Claptrap in just one playthrough you can get to 42 slots "easily"; I went through both and was stuck at 39 because the little bastards wouldn’t give me my required final SDU. After beating the game I was forced to turn to the DLC where only three more Claptraps existed... and the first two dispensed a worthless grenade mod as well.

This game shouldn't be deserving of standard Rule 34 treatment. I hate it.

I was down to my last Claptrap who appropriately enough was broken down right beside a sawmill. If this sack of dicks didn’t give me my SDU I was going to summon the powers of the dark lord and throw this son of a bitch straight into the decorative spinning saw blades that I could see in the background.

He didn’t give me the SDU.

The second this happened I shut the 360 off to prevent the game from autosaving (since it does that once every 14 seconds it seems). I loaded my file three more times before he finally gave me the SDU. If I had missed this achievement the only way to get it would be to start a new file from scratch and play through this monumental waste of time yet again, and frankly there was no way this was going to happen. I'll take up self-mutilation with broken Christmas ornaments and playing soccer using newborn babies before I will ever sit down and play Borderlands from start to finish again.

And remember, this wasn’t the only bugged achievement in the game. There were at least six others that would not unlock for me that I had to either start a new save file for or do over until it gave it to me. Screw this game. Seriously. 

Mega Man was a legendary game from the days of the Nintendo Entertainment System. Sure, the box art was terrifying but the game went on to be the only NES game to have five sequels released for it in the console’s lifetime. In the late 80′s and early 90′s this was completely unheard of for a game. Super Mario Bros had only one sequel (I refuse to acknowledge the existence of Super Mario Bros 2) and that was enough, as did The Legend of Zelda, but five for Mega Man? What can I say, the formula worked. The action platformer is an incredibly fun and engaging game with a difficulty that isn’t too steep but also isn’t completely easy either. It’s a winning combination and that’s why there’s more Mega Man games than there are honest bankers in the United States.

To celebrate the success of the games that started it all Capcom released retro-inspired sequels to the NES games in the form of Mega Man 9 and Mega Man 10, two games made to look and play exactly like an NES game but without the hassle of fellating your cartridges to get them to work. Each game is a reasonable and affordable 800MSP ($10) and to be honest I don’t have a single bad thing I can say about either one, well, except for the achievement “MR. PERFECT” (caps necessary for emphasis most likely). What’s the requirement?

Beat the game. Without taking any damage.

Don’t get me wrong, I love Mega Man as much as the next guy, but seriously when was the last time you made it through any level in any Mega Man title without getting hit from a stray bullet or cheap shot from an enemy that randomly appeared at the bottom of the screen? I grew up playing Mega Man 1 - 6 and even though I know each game better than I know most of the members of my immediate family I still can’t make it through even the Robot Master stages without getting hit.

I was going to make a stereotypical joke here but "Baxter" doesn't sound Japanese.

Was Capcom high when they created this achievement? Were they not aware that one of their Dr. Wily bosses is basically the equivalent of that hellspawn yellow blob goliath from the original Mega Man who has attacks that are almost impossible to dodge? Part of the reason why Mega Man is so difficult is because every enemy, not just bosses, have attack patterns that you have to memorize and keep track of because the game will quickly throw multiple baddies and multiple kinds of them onto the screen all at once.

And you’re expected to not get hit a single time while all this is going on.

No thank you, Capcom.