You cannot have a list of “worst achievements ever” and not include this one, the grand-daddy of all frustrating awards. See the guy in the tile? That’s Otis. He’s a genuinely nice old man who works as a security guard at Willamette Mall. He’s like a black and not fat version of Paul Blart. Otis keeps tabs on everybody in the zombie-infested mall via the building’s security cameras and is kind enough to let you know when he sees survivors so you can go rescue them. He sounds like a decent enough old man, so how does he reach you? He calls you on a yellow industrial cell phone that he gives you in one of the game’s opening cutscenes. It can’t be that bad, right? So what do you have to do to get this achievement?

Oh, just answer every single call this guy makes to you.

Otis calls you when he sees any survivor and he generally doesn’t like to tell you whether they’re a psychopathic boss or a stranded shopper. You have to answer every call, not just the ones where he says “so I saw a lady getting double teamed in the women’s restroom in the East Wing you should go check it out”.

Otis will call you about story-related events pertaining to the game’s main plot. If you fail the storyline you fail this achievement because you won’t get all of Otis’ calls. You also have to save certain survivors because they will request things later. If you answer the calls and just show up and murder everybody with the rake you found in the hardware store you will fail this achievement because Otis will not be able to call you with their follow-ups. There is more to this unlockable than sitting in a storage room for three days answering a phone. This is Dead Rising, not a Dell Tech Support simulator.

Obvious reference is obvious.

For a guy who mentions that he can see everything on the mall’s security system he really doesn’t understand the concept of being appropriate with the timing of his calls. On numerous occasions during boss battles Otis will call you and ask you to bring him some Taco Bell or whatever. Not really, but you get the idea. While you're dealing with an insane photographer who's trying to shove a zombie wasp larva inside of a survivor’s spread eagle ass for a good photo op (this actually happens in the game but I may be exaggerating certain details) Otis will calmly ask you what you’re doing and tell you there’s a perfectly safe woman hiding in a record store, because since she’s already safe there’s apparently a pressing need to call you right this very moment.

Oh, and by the way if you’re thinking on waiting in a location where he’s going to call about a survivor so that you can get there quickly? He won’t call. You will fail the achievement.

Capcom, you assholes.

At least they have a sense of humor, though, as in Survival Mode (where every survivor is an enemy you must fight to stock up on food and items) Otis is the very first survivor you spar with and there's nothing more rewarding than bashing him in the face with a frying pan and using the disembowel move on him 50 times in a row.

<string test> is not an achievement. Well, it is but you can’t unlock it. There is no way to legitimately obtain the achievement because its unlock parameters are never defined anywhere in the Osmos game code. Really, with a name like <string test> it already looks like a piece of messed up placeholder code, and that’s exactly the issue. This secret achievement is a last-minute insertion by Microsoft when they realized how badly the developers of Osmos screwed up the way their game would work with the existing Gamerscore and achievement system.

A brief rundown of the standards and practices for achievements in an Xbox 360 game for those who don’t know: Console and PC titles are allotted 1,000G to divide up among up to 50 achievements (99 in special cases such as The Orange Box). If DLC is planned for the game the developers are permitted to increase the game’s total gamerscore by 250G each quarter of the year not to exceed 1,750G total. With Arcade and Windows Phone 7 titles developers have 200G they can divide up between a required 12 achievements.

Osmos has only 11 achievements.

Somehow in a fluke miracle of mathematics Hemisphere Games can make a list of numbers that add up to 200 but they can’t count to 12. Rather than make a 0-point achievement called “Thanks For Buying!” that unlocks at the game’s title screen Hemisphere Games’ developers looked amongst themselves with shifty and nervous eyes asking “do you think they’ll notice”. They submitted a game with 11 achievements and the moment Microsoft’s quality assurance department (like that really exists but just bear with me here) looked at the game they said “okay, which one of you didn’t pass second grade?” It’s not Microsoft’s job to come up with achievements for games, that job is given to the developers to carry out assuming they know how to perform basic math, so when Hemisphere Games shifted their gaze down to the ground and started kicking rocks I’d like to imagine Microsoft let out a long exasperated sigh and stamped their game with this unobtainable award.

One of these hangs in every room of Hemisphere Games' offices now.

<string test> is included in this list because it’s a great example of the first real demonstration of developers not knowing what the hell they’re doing. Perhaps a mistake of this caliber could be tolerated at the launch of the console -- when the achievement system was brand new -- but we’re about six years into this system’s life. The only excuse here is “ourbad we am no counting gud”.

It's possible to get the full 200G on this game with the 11 “real” achievements, but depending on how you want to gauge "true completion" you can go by gamerscore or total achievements. If 200/200 and 11/12 is fine for you then that’s great, but for the gamers out there who focus more on keeping their achievement completion percentage as close to 100% as possible Osmos is a game that will forever screw up your ratios.

If there was ever a definition of a truly worthless game genre it’s the sports category, and yes I’m just going to be right out with it. Sports titles are a shameful disgrace to video games and their presence is just a long filthy blood-tinted skid mark on the face of the gaming market. There’s a new sports game every year and honestly when all you’re doing is playing football is there really anything more you can do to your games before you’re playing XFL? The same goes with basketball; basketball is basketball and we don’t need a new game every year. We also don’t need a bunch of FIFA games or NHL titles, how about making one good game instead and just sticking with it? Environmentally the system we have is wasteful and economically it’s its own mini disaster. NBA Live 1995 is worth so little money that if you try and look up its trade-in value at a GameStop you’ll crash the system and cause a rift in space/time because that number doesn't exist.

This game isn't even worth the material it's made from.

Because sports games are a dime a dozen infinity and because 99% of them are crapped out by Electronic Arts (a company that “has been” can’t even begin to describe) it goes without saying that their online play is tentative and fleeting at best. EA knows so little about maintaining quality with their products that their website shamelessly boasts over 550 released titles, about 500 of which are sports games. This entry in the list isn’t devoted to just EA alone however; I’m not ragging on them specifically, they just happen to be the “most guilty” since the last time they ever had an original idea for a video game that didn’t involve some kind of inflated ball was sometime in the 1990′s.

The catch-22 with sports games is their achievements are notoriously simple; the first few rounds of “2K6″ and “Live 2006″ games literally showered you with achievement points for performing completely inane tasks. Their online achievements are no different; most of them have requirements as mindless as "don't fall asleep". The problem here is that the window of time for obtaining these online achievements is insurmountably small to the point that some of them today only have a window of about a year to be completed so that server resources can be put toward the next worthless sports title. There are some games whose online servers will likely never be shut down (Halo 3, Reach) so their achievements are obtainable no matter how late you arrive to the show, but when it comes to sports games it’s not a matter of “if” the servers will shut down, it’s literally “when”. The only thing more worthless than sports games themselves are the achievements contained therein. They are the crowning example of “not giving a shit” when it comes to developers being in touch with their customers and a beacon of what can be called a "Completionist's Nightmare".

André Bardin is a freelance writer in the video game industry. Presently, he maintains a regular humor column at GatorAIDS and is employed by indie studio TrackMill. He recently published a book on games called "Nintendon't: 25 of the Worst Video Games Ever" (available at Amazon). André can be reached via email (andre [at] trackmill [dot] com) for any and all inquiries.