Looking at the Achievement breakdown of Command & Conquer 3 on the Xbox 360, it seems pretty decent.  Sure, they could give a few more intermediate rewards, but usual gripes -- too many impossible Achievements or too many multiplayer Achivements -- both seemed pretty reasonable.  So I set out to play it through on the hardest setting, doing all the optional objectives.

As it turns out, that's somewhat do-able.  Unfortunately, there is an unforgivably poor implementation of save games in C&C3 on the 360.  I have no idea how it even passed TCR.  But failing a mission, and reloading, takes OVER TWO MINUTES of real time.  So when you get to a mission (of which there are several) that involves 30 seconds of gameplay and a mission failed, spending 2+ minutes for 30 seconds of gameplay proves to be a recipe for pure frustration.

The only upside is that it has forced me to question my commitment to getting these Achivements.  On the one hand, the game looks and controls a lot better on the PC, and doesn't have the annoying load times.  But on the other hand, I really love Achivements.  Also I feel kind of compelled to play on the 360 just to have a more detailed view of the competition for Halo Wars in the console RTS domain.  So I think I'm headed towards a compromise, of not sweating the perfect playthrough and just living with a less than optimal set of points. 

The saddest thing is that the challenges presented by playing on hard and going after the optional objectives were quite fun -- but the inexcusably bad save / load code just shoots the whole thing in the back.  And really, there is NO excuse.  Reloading the same map on the console should be taking 10 seconds tops, start to finish.  Sad.