A frustrated gamer has employed a clever method of unlocking one of Xbox 360's more mundane Achievement awards - just build a pad-hugging robo friend to do the boring work for you.

David Harr, a mechanic from Seattle, had one final task to complete in Perfect Dark Zero: Play 2,000 offline matches. As an achievement, this clocks in at a whopping 40 hours of spirit crushing menu juggling nonsense as you start and then quit, and then start another game in the desperate hunt for those 60 precious points.

Above: Face it, you wish you thought of a way to get easy Achievement Points

Instead of reducing his life to such tearful monotony, however, he "reverse engineered the problem and came up with the xBot," David told BBC online. A deceivingly complex bundle of circuit boards, button-pressing pads and motors, the xBot was built to pump the two buttons needed to start and restart the required 2,000 games. David turned it on, left it running, and 40 hours later had unlocked the achievement.

Predictably, forum-ites are appalled, branding David's ingenuity as cheating. Still, if we'd just spent 40 horrible hours pressing two buttons for the honor of earning 60 intangible points, only to find someone else had "thought outside the box" and avoided such tedium, we imagine we'd be pretty pissed off too. Well done, David. You smart ass.

February 27, 2007