My god am i bored!

have come back from Uni for a 3 week holiday and all ive got to do is work! its like i never left.

and i have a correction to make on my last post. the january slump is no longer from january to march. it stretches all the way into may.

though there is light at the end of the tunnel. operation flashpoint 2 and prototype come out in may/june so at least the wait wont be for nothing.

the subject for this post is one that i think most xbox 360 users will run into at some point. "adicto-achievementus" otherwise known as the achievement junkie. these are the people that play games, not for enjoyment, but for the sole purpose of getting the highest possible gamerscore, either on particular games or as the total sum of gamerscore.

i have run into a few of these over the years and must say that the experience was not enjoyable. the first true AJ that i ran into was in shadowrun (godawful game) where we were, truth be told, padding some of the more impossible achievements on the game, i was just pissing around the map because i had been invited and saw that it was a padding match and so went around with the sniper and seeing how many i could kill before i was kicked. then the AJ sent me a message saying in essense "do you want some achievements easy?" so i said yes and got a few achievements. he then went on to make another match due to the other one being a bit annoying due to bad connections and asked me to help him get a few achievements then he would do the same. so i helped him out but when i came to my turn, he immediatly quit and started on another game. i tracked his gamercard for a single day and in that day he got over 2000 gamerscore. how? he had basically bought or rented almost every game for the 360 (there werent that many out back then) and got all the easy achievements on them. at that point i assumed he was an achievement junkie and deleted him off my friends list.

there were a few in between, on chromehounds and GRAW2 but none compared to one of my old school friends. it arose in a match on gears when my friend came into a player match with the full gamerscore on gears(including all the map pack ones) . considering he had only had the game for about 4 months, this was impossible so we asked him how he had got them. he had glitched it but he said that he didnt know how to do it so he had contacted someone who could do it and paid him in microsoft points (sent him the code in an email) to perform the glitch which did involve giving this completely random guy/gal his email account and his password. all for the sake of a few achievements. it then became apparent that he was indeed an AJ. so far this year he has bought and sold over 80 games, including the likes of monopoly (who the hell plays that?), BAJA (which he himself said was a load of horse s**t) and HAWX (which was a good game but he played it for a sum total of about a day, got all the achievements he could on it and never played it since).

now, i play for fun. achievements are a way for me to see what sort of progress i am making on a particular game. and the numerical value of the gamerscore doesnt concern me in the slightest. i go for specific achievements that would make me say "hell yes, that as good" like the completionist achievement in mass effect (that takes dedication) or any achievement in dead rising (they are mostly all hard).

the main problem is that due to gamerscore giving you nothing other than a sense of progress, there is no real reason why achievement junkies exist. if gamerscore gave you somthing, like a new profile picture after every 10,000 gs then i would fully understand but it doesnt. its completely useless and i cant see any reason why people would become obsessed with getting achievements. one of the less shining examples of what the xbox 360 does to people.

right thats all for now but i will try my best to get another blog up by the end of the month. ciao!

Hi again!

Its been a while since i posted in here. lets get you up to speed.

At the moment i'm in university studying Forensic Computing which is a great computing subject and fully recommended if anyone suddenly wishes to go to Uni.

I have also come to post one or two slight issues that i have been having about the games industry. the first is the january 'slump'.

because of the mass panic of trying to release every game in development before the christmas period, it sort of leaves a void between january and march which almost no games come out in. i find this displeasing because there are no new games to try out but also fills me with joy since my local game store has a clear out of all the older games. bargin time baby! so for this year i bought burnout paradise (because my friend was nagging me to get it), chromehounds again and star trek legacy which im happily enjoying but as im playing my mind is always saying "you could be playing a really good early 2009 release right about now" and it really drives me up the bend. however the DLC market never seems to slump. the release of burnouts paradise's surf island and all the new cars AND free update which improves the games physics, graphics and gameplay is more than i ever imagined.

my last concern is with the release of halo:ODST. me and my group of friends argued quite extensivly over this. should companies bring out a full priced game that is basically and expansion?

this goes back to the roots of expansions in PC gaming where an update or collection of new units and maps was impractical to release over the internet due to it being too big so companies started releasing expansion packs which were priced considerably less than the original game. over time the prices of expansions weighed heavily on the content but it seemed to level out at about half the price of the original game, if priced at all (like the EVE expansions).

but ODST is taking it to a whole new level. an expansion pack that is priced at £40? just sounds to me like they are starting to milk this one. i would not have cared (because i dont like halo past number 2) if they had released it as a DLC priced at 1200 MS points (like oblivions shivering isles) but £40 is taking too far.

now im not saying to boycott it but if you can justify using £40 (and equivilents) on an expansion then go right ahead. just dont expect a full game when you get it (like left 4 dead, ooohh low blow).

well, finally got round to another blog.

well, im at University now and enjoying every bit of it. the bugdet is not as bad as i thought and ive managed to get dead space, far cry 2, gears 2 (limited edition of all things) and soon to get fallout 3 with trade-in of dead space, farcry2 and MGS4, hopefully ill have enough left over to get endwar as well but ill keep my sights low.

anyway, after left 4 dead the autumn/winter flow of games ceases so i can build my bank balence back up.