360 is a good thing

[FatherJack]

Two things I recently spotted:

1. My Vaio, which is always turned on charging my wireless 360 controller, suddenly spotted the controller was there and did a Windows Update. Hopefully this means I can use my wireless 360 controllers on PCs using only the charge cable, rather than forking out for the wireless adapter.

2. You may be aware of XBox360 Achievements. These are online-viewable credits given to you for completing various tasks in 360 titles. Some view it as a cheap trick to keep you playing games you'd otherwise be bored of, but the BF2 series has proved the tactic to be a winning strategy.
More observant viewers will have spotted the achievement system has carried over to the PC with the recent TF2 beta, so it was a tantalising glimpse of what's to come to find this: http://www.xbox360achievements.org/achi ... gameID=308

It's the Orange Box achievement list for the 360. May contain spoilers (the BioShock one sure as shit does), and some are purely HL2-related, which I doubt will be transferred to the PC, but all-in-all provides an excitement-generating view into Ep2 and Portal, plus shows promise of some shiny new badges for us to show off to each other.

Conclusion: A++

[HereComesPete]

Shiny new badges? What about wanting to show off my rusty sheriffs badge?

[spoodie]

Achievements are a Very Good Thing™

It can make you feel a whole lot better about wasting your time playing games: Look! I'm achieving things!

[Lateralus]

Achievements are a Very Good Thing™

It can make you feel a whole lot better about wasting your time playing games: Look! I'm achieving things!

QFT. Whenever I was getting bored in Beef with just trying to win rounds, I went on a badge/ribbon collecting spree, and would spend the evening focusing on getting a given badge/ribbon instead. I did this many times as a way of renewing interest, and reckon that most of my badges were earned this way rather than through normal general play.

[FatherJack]

I was undecided, but fall generally on the side of good thing now.

As my 360 game card's pitiful gamescore shows:



even having an achievement system cannot entice me to play games that I'm not that interesting in playing right now, and some of the achievements in games that don't have much to do with regular gameplay are good fun in themselves.

I do think the 360 ones generally cater too much to the obsessive, completist gamer or at least people who have a fuck of a lot more time than me, and the only game I'm likely to get even remotely close to all the achievements on is Forza. These new ones in TF2 are a much more realistic set, and entertaining to go for.

[spoodie]

How do you have no Halo 3 achievements?

[FatherJack]

Umm, I don't know, maybe:

- I used my other profile by mistake
- Network was saturated by PC upstairs
- In moving my furniture around have accidentally disconnected the 360
- My 360 is busted (not red-ringing, but does hang in the menus viewing other players profiles)
- I suck

I thought maybe I'd played it on easy, but I'm pretty sure stuff popped up at the end of the levels. I'll kill the savegame and start it again sometime, since I didn't look for skulls or anything.

[spoodie]

I thought maybe I'd played it on easy, but I'm pretty sure stuff popped up at the end of the levels. I'll kill the savegame and start it again sometime, since I didn't look for skulls or anything.

pffft, yeah it looks like you need to play it on normal or above to get anything.

I didn't even know about the skulls or terminals until after I finished the game. It's short enough to do again though. I'm not sure about bothering with Heroic if I'm on my own though.