The early bird got the worm, and another spontanious blog post, and a list!

Well it is currently 8:42 and I've achieved the achievement of waking up at a half reasonable time on a Sunday, which if you know me, is a considerable feat for myself.

Which in a way brings me to my latest topic for rambling, a surprise if you will as I only have just sat down with a tea and a bowl of my favorite artery-clogging cereal, which is not cigarette puffs (Though there could be a market for that kinda thing).

SO the video game industry gimmick of the 21st century seems to be achievements, and the absolutely useless points that are implemented so players can engage in the inevitable "Mine is bigger" competitions, as usually partaken in by sufferers of large tumors. The video game platforms Steam, Xbox-Live, PS3 and the bastard step child called Games For Windows, who aside from its initial implementation of stealing Halo 2 from the hungry masses only to cater to the rich and not necessarily famous lead to its unimpressive performance of being sent to the corner and only being called over to the adults table for verbal abuse, that and huge run on sentences.

But ignoring my run on sentences, achievements are here, in some cases they are implemented well, (Portal for example, and the later Team Fortress 2 packs) and in some case they are not; real life . Achievements add a whole heap of replayability to the latest titles, with Team Fortress 2 managing more achievements you can shake a sanvich at. These little nuggets of tacked-on gameplay help us feed our craving for gratification from the little screen we stare out for hours on end, or, in the case of the MMORPG, days on end.

While I've been singing the praise of TF2, it also understandably susceptible to one of the main pitfalls of achievements, the "Do this obscure thing 20 times which will never actually happen in normal gameplay but might if you keep playing for hours and hours." This was an understandable problem with their system as the whole concept was relatively new at the time, and have shown they realised their cock-up with their latest releases being relatively cock-free which is good for all those feminist lobbyists and better for the gamers. The more unrealistic of the achievements were a major factor in the release of the fan-made achievement servers, where people could congregate and help each other and reach their common achievement (haw haw). These servers appealed to the lazy who were seeking access to the new weapons, the dedicated who were seeking to gain an edge and the downright twats who also spend their spare time ripping the wings off flies and killing anybody actually doing what they were meant to.

At the end of the day, if blogger were to implement achievements for doing 10 posts a day, I would most definitely be tempted to attempt this easy target. But I've always been known to spend hours and hours on something with no real return apart from being quite fun and a money sink.

Stuart out, I've got achievements to get!