When US gamer David Harr got frustrated with being 60 points short of completing a 360 title, he decided to take drastic action by building a robot to do it for him.
Harr drew upon his car mechanic experience and electronics know-how to construct a robotic device, which he named the xBot, to gain the 60 points he needed in order to complete Perfect Dark Zero.
Well you know what the Americans can be like, they always tend to take things to the extreme, but there’s method in this madness.
It would normally have taken 40 hours to unlock the points and can only be done by playing 2,000 offline deathmatches. All the xBot had to do was to press two buttons on the Xbox 360 controller that would repeatedly start and restart each of the 2,000 matches required.
“I reverse engineered the problem and came up with the xBot,” he told the BBC. “I calculated that it would take about 40 hours of gameplay just pushing two buttons to start and re-start a game. With my electronics experience, I wondered if there was something that could push those two buttons for me so I could go about my daily life.”
Using £32 ($60) worth of electronics parts bought from a local shop and some parts he had ‘just lying around’, Harr’s xBot invention was born in about 10 hours.
Some gamers, writing in online forums, have accused Mr Harr of cheating, but he’s adamant that this is not the case.
“This is not playing online on Xbox Live - it is not playing against other people. That would be unethical. If I was recording button presses and joystick movements and duplicated that to help people bump up their scores, then there is money involved - that would not be ethical. This is a one trick pony, getting you just 60 points. It's not stepping on anyone’s toes.”
Personally we think he’s a few gamer achievement points short of a gamertag.
So, on that note - how far would you go, or have you been to gain Achievements and Points? Place your answers below or head over to the forum to have your say.
