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I was already pretty into achievements by the time it got around to Halo 3. I'd be the annoying friend that needed to recover their gamertag before playing split-screen on your console, rather than miss out on the occasional 10G. Do you remember how frustrating it was to watch somebody actually do that? Slowly typing their awful my-first-password as you waited to crack on with some Left 4 Dead. Yeah, that was me. Sorry. I'm different now.But I don't think I ever cared more about achievements than I did with Halo 3. You see, upon reaching 1000G, you'd unlock a katana to wear on your back whilst playing the game's wonderful multiplayer, and for some reason, this mattered a great deal to me. The katana didn't offer any sort of gameplay advantage; you couldn't even unsheathe the damn thing, let alone try to decapitate a Spartan with it. No, it was just there to show off. The perfect metaphor for video game achievements, now that I think about it.
Now, Peter Jackson's King Kong this absolutely was not. My hunt for a katana would prove time-consuming. In the end I must have played through the game's campaign at least three times. The first of which I did for fun, playing on the normal difficulty and enjoying the combat, the music, and even, occasionally, the storyline. Any achievements I nabbed here were just a pleasant surprise. Round two saw me come back having done a little more homework and was all about tracking down hidden skulls and terminals. But playthrough #3, that was the tricky one. I was after two different sets of achievements this time around, one for completing the campaign on legendary difficulty and one for hitting certain targets in the game's score attack mode. I'd already had my fill of Halo campaigns by this stage, and man, that felt like a real grind.
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