Forum Overview :: Half-Life II ??? :: Because I talk a lot about ants in this doesn't mean I acknowledge the ant post.

[quote name="Dream Cast"]<a href="http://www.xboxachievements.com/game/the-orange-box/achievements/">Here's the list of Half-Life 2 achievements I'm working from.</a> At some point it must've been decided that none of the achievements could be challenging, at worst they could be tedious. This runs pretty contrary to my own achievement preferences. However, one clear standout emerges. Keep Off the Sand requires players to cross the antlion beach without touching the sand. Half-Life 2 already had a soft penalty for touching the sand, in that antlions would eventually come out and threaten Gordon, but it was arguably TOO soft. There were plenty of places you could touch the sand a bit without spawning the antlions, and even if you did spawn them, it wasn't the end of the world. This achievement makes it the end of the world. It creates a pleasant tension for people who enjoy that sort of thing, without in any way compromising the experience for those who don't. It's an A+ optional objective. (One weakness of Lambda Locator becomes a strength of Keep Off the Sand, and that's how the whole thing plays out entirely within your own mind. You won't get any kind of failure notification for setting a foot wrong; you probably won't even feel a warning rumble, since those antlions are pretty tolerant of minor mistakes. You reach the end of the beach and either get the achievement or you don't. It's like the clouds parting for a mentally ill man, God's Balok voice booming down from the heavens "Good work not stepping on any cracks today! I will allow Jennifer Love Hewitt to live... <i>for now.</i>") BONUS: ANSWERS TO QUESTIONS NOBODY ASKED If I could add two achievements to Half-Life 2, I would add one for playing the entire game on the hardest difficulty, and one for playing the entire game on any difficulty without loading a save file (ie, in a single sitting, without dying). I like achievements like those because they don't ask you to play the game in a way it wasn't built to support, they just ask you to play it a little better than you're ordinarily forced to. The best achievement in The Orange Box as a whole is unquestionably Little Rocket Man, which you get for carrying the garden gnome found in the shack at the beginning of Episode 2 all the way to the launch vehicle at the end. It's fun and funny, and an experience I still remember ten years later.[/quote]