The trained Monkey

A trained monkey. That’s me.

Recently I got my second platinum trophy, this time for Mafia II, 2KCzech’s open-world Goodfellas-simulator. What did I have to do to get this coveted virtual proof of being awesome? Here is the game’s trophy list. Lots of hoops to jump through. Us usual, some trophies are easy, some are difficult, a few are very hard. But one is simply ridiculous. I’m talking about Card Sharp, whose description innocently reads “Find all of the Wanted posters”.

There are 159 Wanted posters.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I know there are other games with large numbers of fetch-items. The Assasin’s Creed games come to mind, with their many flags and feathers. Or my personal favourite InFamous with its 349 Blast Shards. But these items are always positioned in such a way that you will come across most of them during regular gameplay. Yes, there will always be a couple of hard-to-gets for the obsessive completionists (like me), but the majority of fetch-items are usually accessible for normal players. Common sense seems to say “Keep it challenging but don’t make it impossible”.

Enter Mafia II.

Many reviewers commented on Mafia II’s strange dichotomy of giving the player a large sandbox world to explore, while at the same time presenting a very linear story through missions that rarely leave any time to stray from the scripted path. There are no side missions in the game, so there is no incentive to walk around and stumble over a Wanted poster. Most of them are hidden completely out of sight and finding them requires being in places where the game itself never makes you go. You really have to go out of your way to encounter them.

The most notorious example is one poster located on a roof and getting there involves driving a car on the freeway, crashing through the guard rail, landing on the roof and breaking your momentum with the chimney, because otherwise you’ll slide off the roof before you have a chance to get out of your car!

Are you effing kidding me?

There is really no way to get all the posters without strong determination and a good map. Thankfully, IGN and Achievement Hunter had some excellent maps available – but even then it turned out to be a chore. Since there is no in-game map showing the location of the posters (like in InFamous), there’s no way of telling whether you had found all poster in a certain area or not. Also, the in-game numbering of the posters doesn’t correspond to their location, so even a systematic approach to collecting (like starting with an area and clearing it before moving on) won’t tell you if you have missed anything.

So, if getting this achievement is such a drag, why did I do it? Because one day I suddenly found myself with all the trophies under my belt except that one. I hadn’t really planned on 100%ing the game – largely due to the absurdity of the Card Sharp trophy – but now that I was so close to it I sat down with IGN’s map open on my iPad and started actively seeking out the missing 80 or so posters. Like a trained monkey I roamed a virtual city in search of virtual items to obtain a virtual price that would net me virtual bragging rights in the end. It wasn’t even fun. But like a good monkey I soldiered on and finally the double *pling* of Card Sharp and Platinum Trophy signaled that I had persevered and could go to bed now.

After the immediate rush of pride had died down (Card Sharp also happened to be my 1000th trophy), I started to wonder what I had done there. I had spent hours with a tedious task that was decidedly unfun for what exactly? Virtual glory? A trophy that nobody could see as soon as there was a power outage? An achievement that wouldn’t help me in a job interview or any other real-world situation? I imagined the developers in Prague and Brno laughing their asses off as they monitored how people around the globe unlocked the Card Sharp trophy, giggling and hi-fiving each other as tiny light bulbs lit up on the giant world map in their secret underground lair … “Ahhh, another one!” “Pass me the vodka, Marek!” “Told you we should have made it harder.” “Look, there’s one in Germany, he even got the platinum now.” “What a tosser!” Something like that. Then I went to bed, feeling exhausted, stupid and awesome. I had done good.

Like a trained monkey.