Cookie clicker has some fun and loony ones, also “shadow” achievements which are near impossible to get without cheating. One is “God Complex” which you get by naming your bakery after the Developer, Orteil. Another is “Click the tiny cookie” which you get for idly clicking what looks like just an image in the text. If you hack the game it will catch you, and give you the “Cheated Cookies Taste Awful” achievement.
In the SIMS if you throw a really good party, Drew Cary will show up in a limousine dancing and telling jokes. At some point there was a ladder into the clouds and if you climbed Maxis Founder Will Wright would be there and re-set all of your mood levels. I suppose those are technically easter eggs, but they had to be earned.
Speaking of achievements that you get anyway by playing through the story mode, there’s one near the end of Portal 2:
GLaDOS: Well, this is it. This is the part where he kills us.
Wheatley: This is it! The part where I kill you.
Chapter 9: The Part where he Kills You
Achievement unlocked: The Part where he Kills You (this is that part)
Not really a video game, but the Choose Your Own Adventure style gamebook application for phones “Magium” has a series of achievements called “Average Joe”. It’s accomplished by surviving each book to the end (currently 2 books are finished in the app, and a third is partway started), without having ever raised any of your stats via your stat device (all stats start at 0 and you get more stats to spend as the game progresses, however, you never have to spend any). You get one version of the achievement for each book you finish. (Not having stats makes it really easy to die.)
In Book 2/Chapter 2 there is an achievement called “Fourth Wall Breaker”. There is someone else who knows how your stat device works. This person will look at your device and ask why you haven’t raised any of your stats. The three options for your answer to the person are something along the lines of “hadn’t decided yet”, “saving for emergency”, and “trying to get the Average Joe Achievement”.
If you pick the last option, you get the Fourth wall Breaker achievement.
Prey has the “Intrinsic Value” achievement, which you get by turning yourself into crafting material with a recycler grenade.
Prey has another of my favorites as well, “Escape Velocity”. You have to copy the mimicry power of your enemies, which enables you to transform into various small objects. Then you have to mimic an object and get blasted 20 meters through the air by an explosion. (It’s safest if you also get the power that lets you fire kinetic blasts, but enemy or environmental blasts also work.)
So…it’s an achievement I got by turning into a psychic coffee cup and exploding a teapot.
You’d need a mod; there are a lot of NPCs in Skyrim that are marked as “essential”, which means they can’t die. Some of them lose the essential flag or have scripted deaths eventually, but there are quite a few that just can’t be killed.
Yup. In fact Civ V (and also Endless Legends, a fantasy 4X by another developper entirely) even has a civilization whose shtick is just that : one city allowed, period. In return, these megacities are automatically spawned in a ridiculously resource-rich area compared to the baseline and get some added tools for building taller, faster by interacting with neutrals differently than other civs.
Regrettably the AI of either game can’t do shit with those civs. It just cannot handle not being able to expand, doesn’t protect its supercity any better than usual even though it’s quite literally their lifeline, etc… And as a result they turn into big happy piñatas to effortlessly conquer for said superrich land.
But both civs are cool experiences to play as in those games though.
I think it was Fallout New Vegas (citation needed) whose operating design philosophy was “Design as if the player’s head was replaced by a giant, autofiring gun”. That is to say, the narrative and quests would/should always be able to progress and make sense even if the player simply killed every single person they came across without speaking to them. Because, y’know, if you can, some players will :).
As a result, the game has no arbitrary “you can’t kill that guy” flags nor “the villain taunts you from behind a bulletproof window just so you can’t just shoot him in the face mid-monologue” moments ; and you can’t screw yourself out of an ending by just mass murdering your way through the desert - or even (in DLC) lobbing nukes at every major faction in the game.
The Achievement Unlocked series of Flash games also deserves mention here (I think the second one was the best one). The entire game is nothing but a whole big list of mostly-silly achievements, that you’re trying to get all of.
The Division has a beloved commendation for closing 200 car doors throughout the largely abandoned post-plague New York. Just a weird silly activity while you’re fighting gangs of flamethrower and axe-wielding sanitation workers. Sadly, The Division 2 didn’t include it although there is a Uplay achievement for doing a “cop slide” over a car hood (run up, vault and slide over the hood on your ass).
I don’t remember what game it was but a few years ago there was a shooter that had an achievement for playing against someone who had that achievement.
Probably more than one game has achievements along that track but, in Team Fortress 2, there was an achievement that came with a hat. Which you got by killing someone else already wearing that achievement-hat.
Sort of the opposite of that, Portal 2 had one for playing the multiplayer tutorial with someone who’d never done it, but after you’d already completed it.
The first X-Com also had a “Plague” achievement that only the game devs had on release - players could earn it by playing against someone who had that achievement.
In addition to the question asked in the OP, I’d like to get everyone’s take on what achievements they would like to see in a game.
If you come up with some, that could be interesting on its own, give us more to understand what makes games fun, how play can be contextualized since goals tend to do that and finally, you might name a kind of achievement and then someone else reading the thread could say: “Hey! That sounds like the achievement in this game!” and then you could discover a game that has the same sense of humor or play as you. Wouldn’t that be neat?
This is pretty far out there, but one of my minor objectives in any game is to break the game. I wouldn’t mind seeing a category of achievements that are literally supposed to be unobtainable–though I would prefer that they be completely hidden, not appearing in the achievement numbers and not contributing to gamer score or whatever.
Examples:
**Uncharted **- Visit a location that is outside the game map. Nothing Is Immortal - Kill (or be present at the death of) a creature that should be unkillable. Death Wish - Die in a “safe” zone. (Some games actually have these, like Prey’s “No Show” achievement for dying in the tutorial, but those have mechanisms designed in to make it possible.)
I recognize, however, that incorporating this type of achievement would involve extra effort from developers for very little payoff. (Though they might capture some useful bug data if they tied the achievements to a log-and-report function, so they could see how someone broke the game.)
On a more practical front, I like achievements that are awarded for doing normal game tasks in unlikely ways, for those who like to set themselves odd little challenges.
Examples:
A Thousand Cuts - Kill [Big Nasty Thing] using only [Weakest/Basic Weapon or Environmental Damage]. Goat Emulator - Get past progress-blocking barrier without blowing it up/unlocking it (presumably by parkouring around it).