Editor's Note: We're hoping this is the first of many posts you'll read on Bitmob from GameSpot alum Aaron Thomas, who also helped us out with his work behind the camera on next week's Hoe Down episode. And he's leading the upcoming intervention we're planning for Dan 'Shoe' Hsu; we'll see if Shoe's ready to kick his own achievements habit. We don't think he's quite hit rock bottom yet, though. -Demian

Forgive me Father, for I have sinned. I have played Xbox 360 games for the sole purpose of artificially boosting my gamerscore. I have played terrible games on purpose; I have forsaken good games for children's games; I have adjusted sliders, stacked rosters, and played as both players one and two so that I could easily accumulate more points. My sins are too many to mention, but I shall list some of my more egregious acts here. Please be patient, this may take a while.

Cars - In February of 2007 I spent an entire Sunday playing Cars, the children's game based on the Pixar flick of the same name. It was a gorgeous day outside, but I spent it indoors tractor tipping with Mater and racing my way to victory in the Radiator Springs GP and Rustbucket Race-O-Rama. Oh, I forgot to mention I used cheat codes for unlimited boost. Sorry about that.

College Hoops 2K6 - Get 40 points with any player, six blocks with any player, 20 steals with any team...you get the idea. Remember the girls basketball coach that got fired for beating the other school 100-0? He had nothing on me. These tasks should have been fun, but what did I do? Change the half length, pit the best team against the worst, and set the game to the lowest difficulty. Even then I had to cheese a little bit and take shots from half-court to make sure I grabbed enough rebounds.

Superman Returns - In March of 2007 I put a rubber band around the right analog stick and left the game on overnight in an effort to get the Frequent Flyer achievement for flying 10,000 miles. My only justification here is that I was at least smart enough to know not to play the game long enough to accrue those miles naturally. Trust me, it's little consolation.

MLB 2K7 - I was supposed to be familiarizing myself with the game before reviewing MLB 2K8. What I did instead was edit every single player on my starting roster to maximize their stats. This probably took an hour. Once I was done with that I picked a lousy team and made them even worse by lowering all of their attributes. This ate up another hour of my time. Apparently this wasn't enough cheating to get the game's five achievements because I distinctly remember adjusting the sliders, too. More than one co-worker walked by my desk wondering what I was up to, but I just ignored them as I tried to serve up meatballs to the CPU until I eventually made a wall climb catch. Pitiful.

Avatar - The game was being passed around the office and everyone else was getting the easy points by starting the first level and hitting the attack button until they had pummeled 50 dudes in a row, why shouldn't I get in on the action? The true words of an addict.

TMNT, Open Season, NBA Live 06, NHL 07, Ridge Racer 6... the list goes on and on. Some of these games I played only for the points, while others I was playing for fun and ended up going out of my way or played longer than I intended to get some achievement points. On occasion I'd have a bit of fun mining points, but for the most part, the venture was tedious. I was playing games for the wrong reasons -- missing out on great games to play a friggin' $3 game from Burger King instead of oh, anything else in the world! Things even got so bad that I wrote an entire article designed to help other people boost their gamerscore with as little effort as possible.

Eventually I realized the absurd amount of time I was spending on this frivolous pursuit, that it was bringing me no joy, and that it was, quite frankly, pathetic. I now understand that achievement points should only be acquired honestly, in the spirit of fun, and in moderation. I'm not Catholic so I don't know how many Hail Marys you're supposed to say for something like this, but I'm repentant and committed to only playing games for fun, or if duty calls, my job.

Amen.