I throw this open to the universe, although I'm not entirelycertain anyone in teh universe will actually read this...

I've been a bit late to teh xbox 360 party, and I'm only just now starting to complete the games I have and retrace my steps and get as many of the achievement points as I can.

However, my partner, Nic, thinks that it's not ceompelling enough to collect achievement poins and I feel views the whole things as slightly pointless.

As I see it, completeing the single player campaign of a game and having the satisfaction, and more importantly, the reward of the credits (wow!) is not enough anymore. Sure getting to the end of Super Mario Bros on the Nintendo was amazing back in the day. I nearly cried the day I first finished it. It wasn't just that I'd beaten Bowser, I had defeated my sister, the electricity queen, with whom I had to do daily battle in order to retain my right to leave the damn thing on while I went to school, paused, because I was halfway through a level and couldn't save it.

After Bowser, all the greats fell beneath my mighty fingers of doom.

But the more games I completed, the more I wanted them to never end! Fair, enough this was probably my highly addictive personality rearing its ugly head (again) rather than anything else, but nevertheless, there was a longing for something more.

Thankfully, the wonderful people at microsoft have found a way for me to fill that whole, with achievements! Thank GOD for Microsoft...

In reality though, once I and the rest of the masses have beefed our insignificant, meagar gamerscores up tot eh level of the elites, we'll get bored of this fad too and crave more.

I think, personally, the next gen method of rewarding gamers should be actual, real life power ups that make you better. I know this a lot to ask, but hey, Microsoft can do anything, can't they?

Personally I want to fly, how about, complete the next Ace Combat, get the ability to fly? Sounds good, no? Sells itself I'm telling you! So please Microsoft, can you fix it for me.

In the meantime, I'm going to try to crack the 1000 mark on my gamerscore (the shame...), whether its a waster or time or not, GIVE ME THE GLORY!

Hazy