Reviews have been attacking The Warp Pipe from all directions this week, but I'm sure by the time you're sitting down to read this, I'm taking a much needed break. It hasn't really been a very interesting week in the world of video games - we're lucky that those big Xbox 360 leaks hit the wire on Tuesday, or the industry would have been about as exciting as a 24 hour Today Tonight marathon.

This week we're going to take a look at some of the more impressive Xbox 360 Achievements, revisit Bethesda's Terminator: Future Shock and finish up with another new section called Removing the Rose Tint.

The A-List Achievements

The Xbox 360 Achievement system cops a bit of flak from some gamers. The reason? Microsoft saw it fit to force everyone to attach an arbitrary numerical value to each game, and as a result, some games made it a whole lot easier to get points than others. Even the weakest of gamers can rack up a 5,000 point gamerscore in less than a day with games like Avatar: The Burning Earth, Lost: Via Domus, NBA 2K6, Fight Night Round 3 and Fuzion Frenzy 2. This week, I thought I'd dedicate the column's main topic to pointing out a handful of achievements that require a reasonable degree of skill to earn; collect-a-thons and online kill grind-fests need not apply. Now the list isn't meant to be all inclusive, so if you have any you wish to share, post them up in the comments thread.

Earth Defence Force 2017 All Stages Cleared (Inferno) - Defeat game on Inferno Difficulty 300G Earth Defence Force 2017 is largely known for pitting single soldiers against ridiculous amounts of enemies. In the regular difficulty levels, the player can withstand a bit of punishment from the alien invaders and can kill most enemies with a few well aimed shots. The Inferno difficulty ups the ante by considerably increasing the enemy's strength and health. They can take a crapload of punishment, and even the weakest of enemies can kill you after 2-3 hits. This achievement is unlocked when you beat all 53 of the game's levels on Inferno. Training, a shedload of armour pickups and a co-op partner are mandatory if you want to have any hope of getting this one. Half-Life 2: The Orange Box Little Rocket Man Launch the Garden Gnome into space. 30G This is probably the least difficult achievement on the list, but it does take a bit of commitment to remember to carry the little gnome around for the first 2/3rds of the game, particularly when you need to get the little bugger into the car, and when you need to stick him in the rocket to accompany LaMarr out into space. This is the type of achievement that we need to see more of in the system. Halo 3 Campaign Complete - Defeat game on Legendary Difficulty 125G The Legendary difficulty on Halo has always carried a bit of prestige, so it's probably only fitting that it's on this list. The third game does allow you to play Legendary in 4 player co-op, but it's still a pretty stiff challenge. Try playing it with the skulls for even more hair-tearing fun. BioShock Brass Balls - Defeat game without using a Vita-Chamber on Hard Difficulty 100G A lot of people complained that the Vita-Chambers in BioShock made the game too easy, due to death having no real associated cost. This achievement ups the ante by eliminating your use of the Vita-Chambers. People will tell you that this achievement looks easy since you can just quicksave and load as much as you want, but the truth is that you still need quite a bit of moxy and a lot of patience to take out those nasty Big Daddies and the endless supply of splicers that occupy Rapture. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare The Shot - Complete 'All Ghillied Up' and 'One Shot, One Kill' on Veteran difficulty 40G Call of Duty's veteran mode has always served to separate the men from the boys, but this particular section in Call of Duty 4 should see it listed under "hell" in the dictionary. It's the part at the Ferris wheel at the end of the chapter that really earns this one a place on this list. I had a hard enough time beating it on the normal difficulty, so big ups to anyone who has this one. Dead Rising Saint - Get 50 Survivors out of the Mall 20G Getting out of the Mall alive in Dead Rising is a reasonable challenge in and of itself, but Capcom decided to give players many different options as to how to play the game. What makes the Saint achievement difficult is that you pretty much have to play through the story without failing any of the missions while ducking off to rescue people as soon as Otis gives you the message. That means you're constantly going to be accompanied by people - and having eight people with you when you take on a boss is a whole lot of trouble, not to mention the fact that some of them will no doubt be injured. There are a few good walkthroughs around that provide good advice for obtaining this achievement, but actually getting it is another matter entirely. Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock The Inhuman Achievement - Beat DragonForce's Through the Fire and the Flames on Expert 15G Guitar Hero III made smashing buttons on a plastic axe unnecessarily difficult by providing note patterns that make very little sense. Now add that to a song that not even the original lead guitarist can play perfectly on demand. If you can make it through the intro, you're in good shape. 2006 FIFA World Cup Complete All Scenarios - Exactly what it says 500G Sports games are just as bad as kid-friendly games when it comes to easy achievements, but this one requires you to beat 40 challenges of varying difficulty. 38 of them are very easy, two of them are almost impossible. Australia v Solomon Islands doesn't sound particularly difficult, but try having to score 7 goals in a half on the top difficulty. You've also got to defeat Brazil using Sweden on the top difficulty, too. At least it's a big points payday when you do get it. Crackdown Psych Out - Complete all time trial levels at the Psychotic difficulty level 100G Running through the time trials and defeating the bosses on Psychotic doesn't seem all that difficult at first, then you hit the Shai-Gen levels. The Shai-Gen kingpin, Zuang Lun Wang resides in a rather large tower, full of his best troops and somehow you've got to climb up to the top. It's difficult enough climbing up there, but these guys seem to infinitely respawn, and are packing heat seeking rocket launchers. It's a little easier with the downloadable content and a co-op partner, but still something worthy of praise. LEGO Star Wars II: The Original Trilogy Death Star II Undefeated - Beat the Death Star II level without dying 20G People like to write the achievements of kid-friendly games off as being easy - hard to blame them for that when they mostly are, but LEGO Star Wars II has some doozies that require you to beat each level without dying. Death is a pretty frequent occurrence in the game, but can be avoided on most stages by using the Force Ghost characters. The vehicle stages have to be done legitimately though, and the Death Star II is by far the most difficult to beat without death. You've got to take out three Star Destroyers, fly through the inside of the Death Star, and destroy the reactor, all while avoiding attack from an infinitely re-spawning squadron of Tie Fighters. Then you've got to get out of the structure without colliding into anything. Geometry Wars Retro Evolved Survived 1 Million - Earn 1 Million points before dying 30G It was the first achievement in the system that carried a degree of prestige, and nearly 3 years later, it's still one of the more difficult ones to unlock. The common enemy in Geometry Wars is worth about 20-250 points. The key here is to build your multiplier all the way up and the attempt to stay alive as long as possible, using bombs wisely when you get surrounded. I'm yet to break 500K regularly, let alone a million without dying. Street Fighter II: Hyper Fighting 7 Stars - Beat the game on the top difficulty level 20G I was trying to stay away from games that are janky or broken, but I couldn't resist the opportunity to list Street Fighter II. Playing on the easiest levels is hard enough when your opponents can suddenly execute frame skipping moves and hit you with 10 light punches in the space of a second, so I can't imagine how to beat the game on its hardest difficulty. Perseverance, I suppose. Robotron 2084 Wave 100 - Reach Wave 100 45G Robotron 2084 is the original dual-stick shooter, and an almost psychedelic experience. Players have to rescue the humans and destroy the incoming horde of robots. Sounds pretty easy, but it becomes as hard as nails rather quickly (maximising arcade income, and such). Getting to wave 100 is a nigh on impossible task, generally considered to be the hardest achievement currently in the system. Only 47 users on MyGamerCard have it, and who knows how many of those are game saving bastards.	This is Ground Control to Major Tom
	You'll fear Big Daddy a lot more when you don't have your precious Vita-chambers
	Even when being a saint, Frank can't save everyone
	Harder than Calculus
	The Shai Gen like to juggle. With rocket launchers.
	You know a song is hard when the person who wrote it can't play it perfectly

Artistic License

It's been a long time since the Terminator was good.

When most people think of Bethesda Softworks, the first thing that comes to mind is the Elder Scrolls franchise. The series of fantasy RPG might be their most successful, both critically and financially, but the company also had a particularly good run with the Terminator franchise in the mid 90s. This run started with an adaptation of the original movie, and ended on a particularly high note with the future-based Terminator: Future Shock and its standalone add-on, Terminator: SkyNet.

Terminator: Future Shock was released in 1995, developed by Bethesda on their in house XnGine, which also featured in The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall. The action takes place in 2015, with the player taking control of a human that has escaped the clutches of the machines, and fallen in with the human resistance movement led by John Connor. Over the course of two dozen levels, you'll blast the crap through a variety of different SkyNet weapons, from the basic indoor mech and classic Terminator endoskeletons, to the massive air Hunter Killer units. At certain points you even get to hijack one of the machines' Hunter Killers and take it for a spin. Future Shock is most notable for being one of the first shooters to encourage players to use the now mandatory keyboard and mouse control style; other shooters of the time which were almost exclusively keyboard driven.

Following the relative success of Future Shock, Bethesda released Terminator SkyNet, a standalone expansion pack which added higher display resolutions, a couple of new single player maps and a fully featured multiplayer mode. Though only basic Deathmatch and teamplay were offered, the multiplayer mode allowed you to play as the terminators, complete with infrared vision, auto-targeting and code scrolling down the side of the screen. As fun as SkyNet's multiplayer was, it happened to be released at the wrong time - not too long after the release of Quake, thus dooming it to obscurity. But hey, compared to the vast majority of the other Terminator games released, it's a gem.

Removing the Rose Tint

Great graphics will always provide the perfect cover for bad gameplay

Nostalgia is a tricky thing. Many gamers will swear black and blue that the games they loved 10 years ago are better than what's coming out now. Of course, the truth of the matter is that some of these games were always terrible, and pretty graphics or a fancy new gameplay feature kept people from making this realisation. This section was created to highlight some of these games, and it's going to start off with the most obvious one.

Killer Instinct hit the arcades in 1994. At that time, there was nothing that could match it graphically; its pre-rendered characters were beautiful, and animated wonderfully. The stages were massive, highly detailed and aesthetically pleasing. Players could pull off ridiculously long combo strings, and there were many different finishing moves, based on the character used and the stage played. The game even promised that it would be available for Nintendo's then named Ultra 64 console.

The reality of the situation was that Killer Instinct ran on a customised hardware set that had nothing in common with the Nintendo 64 hardware. Underneath Killer Instinct's pretty visuals lay an extremely shallow fighting game that quite obviously relied on shock value from its graphics and violence, rather than providing quality gameplay. Those cool combos and death moves you saw required no skill to pull off; just a simple sequence of button presses no more complex than a Street Fighter fireball. The game's difficulty was purposefully poorly balanced so as to suck your gold shrapnel at a rapid pace while you drooled over its visuals and got pumped over the upcoming Nintendo hardware.

The Killer Instinct series has not been seen since the release of Killer Instinct Gold, which received a cold critical response, no doubt due to the fact it couldn't mimic the visuals of the arcade game, and the Nintendo 64 pad was crap for fighting games. Yet the people still cry out for further remakes and sequels. Hopefully these calls will continue to fall on deaf ears.

Next Week

It's the last weekend in June which means we're halfway through the year, so a little bit of reflection is in order.