USgamer Community Question: What's Your Proudest Video Game Achievement?

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Alright! This week it's time for a bit of boasting, as we ask you to reveal what video game achievement is your proudest. It doesn't have to be one of those official, DING! ---[You've Just Achieved Something]--- game achievements. Nope. It can be something you just did. Perhaps you finished an old game that was really hard? Maybe you pulled off a spectacular time or maneuver? Or perhaps it was something you spent years working on?

Whatever it is, we'd like to know. While you're pondering on exactly which of your video gaming feats is your very favorite, here are ours.

Jeremy Parish, Editor-in-Chief

I could be lazy and just put "I beat Battletoads before emulators and save states existed, yo," but I don't mark that up as any sort of real accomplishment. It was more a fevered mania, really.

No, when I look back, the most I've ever been pushed to the ragged edge of failure by a video game only to triumph in the end was with Final Fantasy VIII's final boss, Ultimecia. Now, these days, FFVIII has a reputation for being a total cakewalk thanks to its insanely exploitable mechanics. If you know what you're doing in that game, you can perform some specific hijinx very early on that will render the remainder of the adventure moot.

But that's now. This is then. My first time through the game, I didn't know about any of those level-fixing strategies or how to refine certain cards into powerful spells that would semi-permanently boost your character stats to godly levels. I muddled through it like I would any other RPG, enjoying the unique systems for what they were and never really giving much thought to how I could possibly grind to cheat or whatever. And going into the final battle, I knew nothing about its peculiar traits that make it unlike any other Final Fantasy endboss. Sure, it starts about like you'd expect: You fight Ultimecia, then she summon's the main protagonist's personal totem to destroy the heroes, then she at last reveals her true form. Standard stuff so far.

But that final form is where things get tricky. You battle Ultimecia outside of time, which means that if any of your characters get knocked out and stay down for more than a turn or two, they're lost forever to the time stream. As you lose characters permanently, they'll be replaced by reserve heroes, but once all six of your party members cycle through, that's game over; you can't resummon someone who's been lost to time. But Ultimecia has an even more devious skill that takes advantage of the particulars of the FFVIII combat system. See, leveling up has very little place in FFVIII (in fact, it can work to your disadvantage). To boost your skills, it's better to "junction" magic spells to your stats, and the more powerful the magic and the more spells of that type you have stocked, the greater the stat boost. It's pretty novel, and high exploitable, and Ultimecia can do something no other enemy in the game can: She can completely deplete a character of their entire stock of a certain spell. Not only does this remove your ability to cast that spell in combat - troubling, if you lose your healing magic - but it also removes the spell's effect from the associated character stat.

And so it was that I found myself fighting Ultimecia for nearly an hour and a half with a ragged team of two, protagonist Squall and his lady friend Rinoa, the last two standing, Squall with sadly diminished magic power... and Rinoa with a bare pittance of hit points and a lousy set of magic to begin with, since she was a reserve character. I went into the battle not knowing about the permanent losses that could be inflicted, so when two of my main party members were knocked down in battle, I didn't immediately resurrect them. And a turn later, they vanished forever, to be replaced by the ill-equipped idiots who were pathetic weaklings because I never bothered using throughout the game. They died pretty quickly, too, and I couldn't resurrect them in time because I needed to prioritize healing Squall.

So it was down to two characters, Squall and his back-bencher of a girlfriend, and Ultimecia blasted away the spells junctioned to Rinoa's hit points almost immediately. She dropped from something like 5000 HP max to 1200, making her vulnerable enough that many of Ultimecia's attacks could take her out in a single hit. So Squall found himself alternating between attacking and resurrecting his sweetheart, while Rinoa mostly sat around and died. She had no decent attack power to speak of, and her best healing spells had been the ones junctioned to her HP and removed forever. At that point, I should have said, "Ah well, it was a good try," reset the game and gone into the battle again better prepared for the villainess' special skills. But no, I had to go and be pig-headed about it and refused to back down. So I took on the final boss with, basically, a single viable character who had to spend half of his time bringing literal dead weight back to life. I suppose it was neatly symbolic of the game's themes, Squall standing tall and protecting the woman he loved, but mostly it just dragged the fight to numbing length. And at any point Ultimecia could have destroyed the magic junctioned to Squall health or strength, bringing the battle to a quick end... but she didn't, and I persevered, beating the final boss of the game in my first shot despite the overwhelming odds against me.

These days, though, I'd totally just reset. What was I thinking?

Jaz Rignall, Editor-at-Large

I've been playing games for eons, so I have quite a choice when it comes to achievements. Back in ye olden days of the very early 80's, I notched up World Record scores on games like Defender, Missile Command, and Pole Position, amongst others. I'm definitely proud of those early days, but if I'm really honest, when it came down to World Record scores, it was less about skill, and more about having access to a location where you could play uninterrupted for what was sometimes days on end. Sure, you still had to be good enough to clock a game so you could play it endlessly, but there was more to it than that. You also needed the mental and physical constitution to endure that kind of punishing marathon gaming session. My friend broke the Robotron 2084 World Record, but after playing for four days straight, his immune system failed and he was bedridden for a fortnight, and sick for months after. At the time we had no idea something like that could happen

Unfortunately, all my records were fairly quickly beaten, because I was capped at around 20-hours of gameplay. I was allowed to enter my favored arcade with the service people at 7:00 am, and could play continually through until 3:00 am the following morning, thanks to the fact that the arcade was attached to a nightclub and the owners were happy to let me stay locked inside after midnight until they closed the whole place down a few hours later. I couldn't stay any longer, because local ordinance required the arcade to close for at least four hours a day.

Even though I managed to achieve some pretty cool scores within that time limit, I'm just a tad more frustrated than proud, because I know I could have gone on for at least another day or two before keeling over from exhaustion. So instead, I'm going to talk about something that happened in the very, very early days of Unreal Tournament. It's easy to forget that it's just 15 years since UT introduced one of my (and many other's) favorite, most-obsessed-over game mechanics - the headshot. Yes, good old BOOM NO SKULL FOR YOU!

Anyhoo. Me being a sneaky sniping bastard, and Unreal being the sneaky sniping bastard's gaming equivalent of a heroin cupcake with PCP and cocaine frosting, I played that game to death. In the process of playing the veritable buttocks off UT, I became rather a dab hand at it. Especially when it involved staring down a scope at potential victims' noggins and pulling the trigger at just the right moment. So much so that in one particular game, I managed to notch up 51 consecutive headshots in a row. BOOM!

I'm sure there are plenty of other gamers who were capable of racking up similar or better consecutive brain-venting numbers, but for whatever reason, I'm really proud of my effort. Fifty-one popped melons. Fifty-one enemy groans of annoyance. Fifty-one moments of deep satisfaction.

Mike Williams, Associate Editor

Karazhan, oh mighty Karazhan. The dark Tower of Medivh, trapped in the area of Deadwind Pass between Duskwood and Swamp of Sorrow. Karazhan was a unique dungeon for its time. See, in vanilla World of Warcraft, a raid dungeon meant you found 39 other friend and slam your head against difficult raid bosses and trash mobs for hours. You farmed your gear, you got attuned, it was a whole line of mess just to get the chance to see the damned dungeon.

When the first expansion for World of Warcraft came around, 2007's The Burning Crusade, Blizzard decided to throw casual raiders a bone. If you didn't have the guild to field a 40-man raid - 25-man raids were the top tier in Burning Crusade - Karazhan was your alternative. Karazhan was my alternative. And I tanked the entire thing on my Blood Elf Paladin.

It was my first taste of solid raiding, hours and hours of methodically killing trash in a specific order, of dying against all 12 raid bosses (except Attumen the Huntsman, that scrub), of falling in the wrong spot or pulling the wrong mob. In the time that it took my guild to clear Karazhan the first time, there were definite stumbling blocks: The Wizard of Oz Opera Event, Netherspite, and The Curator come to mind. But at the top of the tower stood the Eredar Prince Malchezaar, who was the hardest encounter I had tanked up until that point. Night after night we fell. Night after night we got really close. Random deaths to the Enfeeble/Shadow Nova combo, the Infernals, or those stupid flying axes. It was a hell of a fight.

And one day he just fell. It was the greatest feeling, like a weight off my shoulders. Honestly, I think anyone first completed raid dungeon is like that. At the end we collected our loot - I didn't get anything from Prince that time - cheered a bit… and prepared to do it all again next week. That's the raid life.

Kat Bailey, Senior Editor

The time that I won the Super Bowl in Madden NFL... in a league with 31 other teams.

A little context: In early 2013, I was a pretty good Madden player, but I was struggling to actually win a championship. See, I could always make the playoffs; but once there, it became a game of inches, since my competitors were roughly at my skill level. Previously, my two best runs had ended with fumbles on the final drive. I had played well, but the breaks hadn't gone my way.

In Season 2 of our Madden 13 league, I had a very good Minnesota Vikings team helmed by super quarterback Mcleod Baltazar "Highlander" Bethel-Thompson, but I was stuck behind the Green Bay Packers, who had beaten me four times in a row at that point. I just couldn't get around Jermichael Finley and his pesky corner routes. So right before I was set to meet the Packers in the playoffs, I basically locked myself in my living room and practiced until my eyes burned, determined to put an end to their reign of terror once and for all.

Then, when the big day came... I utterly destroyed him. It was a stunning fall for a team that earlier in the season had been on the verge of going undefeated. I went through to the NFC Championship Game, where I dealt the same treatment to the San Francisco 49ers (helmed by another Packers fan), and I suddenly found myself in the Super Bowl for the first time ever.

Waiting for me was Joystiq's Mike Suszek (yet another Packers fan), who helmed a powerful Houston Texans of Milwaukee team. It was a tough and somewhat contentious game, but my Vikings eventually came out on top, and I watched triumphantly as Highlander and his coach Prince lifted the Lombardi Trophy. I've been back twice since in smaller leagues, but nothing will top that dream run through a full league stacked with competitors at the top of their game.

And yes, I did save the video of the Super Bowl for posterity. And you're right, I am a tremendous dork. This is probably as close as I'm ever going to get to seeing my actual team win it all, so I might as well enjoy it as much as possible.

Bob Mackey, Senior Writer

My greatest gaming achievement might be shared by thousands upon thousands of others, but it still marks an important turning point in my relationship with video games.

Seeing as I didn't buy a PS3 until the summer of 2010, I hopped on the Souls train a little late. I'd been following message board threads about the import-only version before Atlus decided to bring it over here, and the massive amounts of praise it received convinced me to pick up my own copy that fall. At first, it seemed like a completely straightforward action-RPG, but after a few hours passed, I knew I was in way over my head. It's not that I hadn't played complex games before-I just wasn't used to relying on an online community for support, being the lone wolf I am.

So I struggled and sputtered my way through Demon's Souls on my own, gradually picking up on its unexplained mechanics. It took me an embarrassing amount of time to figure out co-op, and even longer to understand how to fire off a single magic spell. I destroyed valuable equipment by taking it down the wrong upgrade path, boosted my character's stats haphazardly, and gradually stumbled my way through Demon's Souls inch by painful inch.

Of course, there were times when I thought I'd have to give up, and Demon's Souls would find itself shelved for weeks-even months-as I moved on to games that didn't present so much of a challenge. Its Valley of Defilement, one of the nastiest, most punishing levels in any video game ever, had me thinking Demon's couldn't possibly be finished, so I naturally assumed anyone who claimed to have done so was nothing but a filthy liar. In case you haven't experienced its poisonous horrors, the Valley makes Blight Town from Dark Souls look like a McDonald's playground, even though nothing is scarier than a cornered Grimace.

In the fall of 2011, I'd been assigned to review the upcoming Dark Souls, which gave me the motivation to finally make it to Demon's Souls bloody end. And by the time I saw the credits roll, I looked back on our tumultuous relationship as a real learning experience: Demon's Souls wouldn't budge until I took the initiative to figure things out myself-and once I did, I wanted all of my gaming experiences to feel exactly like that. This trial by fire immediately gave me nothing but disdain for any game that didn't show the same degree of confidence as FromSoftware's RPG series, which began a new age of unrealistically high expectations. Speaking from personal experience, there's no better way to be constantly disappointed.