I hit 10,000 Achievement Points last night playing Perfect Dark Zero. Playing isn't really the best word. I was really just cheating the multiplayer, since you can get all of the multiplayer achievements using an empty second controller. It's a little under-handed, but it really exemplifies what has until recently been relatively poor design of an otherwise excellent reward system.

10,000 points isn't really a huge achievement. If you play games like King Kong or any of the launch-era sports titles (which I haven't), you can reach 10K pretty easily. I've only finished one full retail game (Viva Pinata) and 5 arcade titles (New Rally-X, Ultimate MK3, Feeding Frenzy, Cloning Clyde, and Galaga). According to MyGamerCard.net, my percentage complete across all games is 34.25. I guess that's not bad considering I don't have much time to finish a game that I'm not really in love with. I'm also ranked about 24,500 out of 450,000 game players in the country (who've registered with MyGamerCard). I guess that's kind of impressive?

It's nice to see that Microsoft has finally cemented some sort of new rule set for establishing achievements and their point values. And rumors are stirring about some kind of reward program, which would be nice. Although, I don't particularly mind that points are relatively meaningless. It gives players something to strive for when playing the games and it establishes a nice sense of progression.

The system isn't without its problems. I'm all for a challenge, but asking people to finish Smash TV without a continue or reach Wave 100 in Joust is just a bit ludicrous. And, for some reason, I can't even play Smash TV co-op long enough to earn any of the achievements before my partner and I are mysteriously disconnected and sent back to the menu screen.

I hope developers are learning from games like Viva Pinata or Dead Rising that have, at least in my opinion, established the blueprint for a proper achievement system. There are plenty of achievements for every skill level, and they're all attainable with enough time and effort.

There are a number of people I know with scores much higher than mine. Maybe I'll catch up one day. But the value of your GamerScore isn't in the raw number. It's the ratio of your total points earned to the total points possible. In my case, that's 10,000/29,800. About 34%. Nothing spectacular, but definitely worth the effort.