Welcome to reneduquesnoy.com

Hello. My name is Rene, and I'm an achievementaholic. 

Okay, maybe not that bad, but I seem to waste time playing mindless video games for the sake of earning 1000 gamer points on the XBox. I hit the eGutter over the weekend. In the middle of a few hour gaming session, I thought to myself "I hate this game. It is so dumb. But I have to finish it." What have I become? Sure there are tons of fun games out there like Assassins Creed II, Borderlands, and Dragon Age: Origins. I'm playing stupid TMNT just so I can get achievements. I'm not even halfway through, and I have become so bored with the game, I almost chuck my controller out the window to take a nap. What's wrong with me?

It all started, as most problems do, when I got injured. Brett Favre became addicted to painkillers when he got hurt. I became obsessed with achievements. At first, it was just cleaning up the games I hadn't finished. Sure, going through Oblivion was fun. Tons of nerdery in the fantasy world. Then I needed to finish Fable 2. Okay, that was fun, but not as much. Then, I went through my dumb games like WallE because I had left them unfinished. 

I hit rock bottom when I subscribed to gamefly.com only to get the super easy achievement games like NBA 2K6 and the biggest achievement crime ever Avatar: The Burning Earth. I skyrocketed past my friends achievement totals, but it became embarrassing. 

Just think of all the time I had wasted. I could have read many books, been productive at something, or even learned a language with Rosetta Stone in twoweeks! I can't believe Jaime put up with me.

So, after TMNT was finally done, I realized I had enough. I chucked that game in the sleeve and sent it back to gamefly. Then I canceled my subscription. No more stupid games. Only games that are fun and I can get into. 

What did I learn after these 3 months? I did figure out that there are basically 3 types of achievements:

1. Story - you will get these achievements by doing the normal course of the game. If the game is uber long (like Mass Effect), good luck getting all of them.
2. Skill - achievements that you can get if you are good at something. Being a bad ass in Gears of War 2 or expert in Rock Band (one, two, Beatles, or Lego) are like this. 
3. Endurance - there are achievements that take way too long to get. Seriously 2.0 is like this. I mean come on. You have to kill 100,000 bad guys? Grinding out stuff over and over again for a measly 50 gamer score. I did it.