I am unsure if this has been known, but I'd like to post my efforts in hopes it might be useful for someone. You know the game that briefly lived in your hateful, dusgusted hearts, and on our XBOX 360 called Yaris? Do ya?! Well, it's a game. Bad one. Real bad. But it was free in a time where free stuff was always welcome. And we were achievement whores. That's why we got any freebie and easy 200/1000 gamerscore game. Even this. Also, you can install it now, using the game dump floating around and you can get all of the achievements legitimately. The game has no licence validation, so you just install the thing and suffer like we did. I demand it. Same thing as other free games ike those Doritos ones (but those were at least moderate quality). This game (Yaris) has a really dumb achievement that wants you to get 1,000,000 coins. Not points, COINS. It's almost as retarded as "Seriously..." from Gears of War. But I've been returning to XBOX 360, and that game had that pesky achievement to get. This is what I did... I fired up this game after getting another XBOX 360. I noticed that the scores were saved, but I had no save (the last time I played the game was in 2009, or something... on a different console). What fun! I had my work cut out for me! From 126,296 coins, I just had to get the remaining 873,704! With at most having 20k coins per race that would just take 50 races! But I alwas die in that particular track! And the one I survive I get at max 5000 coins on a very good run! I started hipothesizing... Maybe this is somehow connected to my gamer profile. And then the work began... I downloaded Horizon (from wemod.com) and investigated my HDD, searching for that amazing piece of gameware named Yaris. And my assumption was correct. No save present. But the scores and coins were not lost! Away I went and checked my profile: Hm... there's those .gpd files that are connected to the achievements for the games I have played... Let me just search for the game id... No surprise there! it exists! Let us extract it, and because I am uberleet hackeroo kangaroo, I'll open it in HxD, like a boss. A way down under, the file presents this kind of text: Hm... Interesting... For giggles I converted my coin amount to HEX (windows calculator) and confirmed that the values are present in that file! I did what I had to. I'm sorry, guys... I manipulated the file and inserted a number close to that million, dammit! I WANTED TO TRIGGER THE ACHIEVEMENT!!!! Saved the file and replaced the one present on my profile with the edited one using the funtion on Horizon. I then press "Save, Rehash, and Resign", for good measure. Loaded up the game, and my coins were at 998,534, a run away of reaching the elusive million! I did so. The achievement triggered, and I had lunch. I believe all cumulative counting achievements can be triggered like this. I had no discernible reason to spend HOURS droning away at this fricking game, and it's not worthy to spend money for Live Gold (or whatever it is called now) and boost the achievement. Either way, it would be kind of cheating anyway. Also, I believe Microsoft won't screw my gamerscore because of a delisted free game, and that wasn't even competitive, and I took it upon myself to trigger the achievement while online. Regardless, care must be taken. This game is trash. But was part of my routine and thoughts for so long that I almost feel bad for closing this chapter.
Nice work on figuring out where the coin count was saved. I think that's a game I loaded up once back in the day as it was free and never had any desire to play again! Not sure I actually got any achievements in this, so you are dedicated to come back to this over a decade later. The Doritos Crash Course game was pretty fun with 4 people crammed around the Xbox, I remember having some good fun playing that at a family gathering with my cousins.
Thank you! Well, If a game has fully offline achievements that I still don't have, little reason to not pursue them. But this one was special. First, the difficulties associated with getting that many coins, second, the game is crap. Also, it was my last achievement for this thing. I had to. I have a few targets more, as I believe Undertow has achievements like this. And the enormously irritating Bejeweled 2.