CollegeHumor has been coming out with some pretty funny videos recently. Check this one out.

Although video game achievement systems have only cropped up in the past few years, the notion goes back to arcade games that displayed high score lists. Then, you’d enter three initials that would remain on the screen until someone else played the same cabinet game and got a higher score, or until someone unplugged the machine. Today, you have a persistent online identity that retains your score and your achievements.

What Makes Achievements Valuable?
At their core, achievements are about bragging rights. Having an online record of what you’ve accomplished in a game allows you to show off what you’ve done. Some people place the greatest value on gamerscore, some on completion percentages, and others like myself simply like to have a publicly visible permanent record of what they’ve been playing.

A big part of the value of achievements is that you have a single spot that collects information about multiple games – there wouldn’t be much value in the system that tracked only one game. So how much more value would there be if the system could track all games across all platforms?

What’s Out There
XBox is the major player in the achievement game. Your gamertag holds XBox achievements and gamerscore, and also ties directly into GFW live. Microsoft is the father of the modern concept of achievements, and they still have the most robust system. Sony is playing catch-up with their trophy system, but Playstation Home has been a miserable failure, and in general people seem not to value trophies in the same way that they value achievements.

The other major game consoles have no real achievement system: Nintendo has nothing comparable for the Wii or the DS, and I’m not aware of any PSP trophy system. Aside from GFW Live, which is a bit of a train wreck and certainly has a poor adoption rate amongst development studios, there is no good equivalent system for PC achievements. The best I’ve seen is Steam’s achievement system, but because it’s based on the Steam distribution platform, it’s far from a unified system for the PC. Valve games like Half-Life 2, Left 4 Dead, and Portal make great use of the Steam achievement system, but as soon as you talk about third-party games, Steam achievements are seldom implemented, and it’s nearly always possible for those games to play them on the PC without getting them from Steam.

To add to the confusion, Bioware and Blizzard have created developer-specific achievements. There are also non-networked achievements in some specific games such as Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena, Scribblenauts, and Desktop Tower Defense DS. Many in-browser flash games also now offer achievements.

Is A Unified Achievement System Possible?
The current achievement frameworks are console-based, distributor-based, and developer-based. It seems to me that any unified system for tracking gameplay and achievements would have to be internet-based with a web page front end. It could have a PC/Mac client, and could eventually have systems for integrating with consoles in the same way that Facebook and Netflix does, but it would need to originate on the PC.

Games for Windows Live had the best shot at accomplishing something, but they failed by providing a terrible user interface and by failing to persuade developers to adopt the Games For Windows standard for their games. It’s as if Microsoft placed no importance on Games For Windows, which is unfortunate since the onus of developing a coherent achievement framework would seem to fall to the creator of the platform: Windows.

The next best (last, greatest?) hope for a unified system is a service like Raptr. Raptr has done a good job of gathering information on gameplay from disparate systems, but it still has a long way to go. As a programmer, I understand: a large part of the problem is that Sony and Nintendo don’t make their information easy to access. And while Nintendo and Sony making this information available would enable huge strides forward in creating a unified system, it still leaves out any Windows games currently implementing Steam achievements or developer-specific achievements.

Going forward, Raptr should look to ps3trophies.com, as that site has succeeded in gathering Playstation 3 trophy information. If Raptr can duplicate what ps3trophies has done, it would be a big step.

In my dream world, somebody invents an open xml format for listing achievements, and that same format is picked up by the Playstation 4, XBox 720, Nintendo Foo, and whoever else wants to make use of it. Also in my dream world, naked women hand out free candy.

I’ve got no idea how this video escaped me until now, as it’s apparently been on teh interwebs for six months or so. Imagine if enemies from all your favorite video games came to life and destroyed your city in a Cloverfield-like manner. For an amateur video, this thing is very well produced, has fantastic effects, and better acting than you’d expect. Pretty damn funny too.

Part One

Part Two

Balloon in a Wasteland is a mashup of tower defense and sidescrolling shooter. You face waves of enemies while you work to repair your hot air balloon in order to escape. In the meantime, you can upgrade weapons, build fortifications, sleep, or set traps.

Fun little game – I played it a bunch last night. At first, you’ll think it’s impossible, then you’ll try something slightly different and win.

Play Balloon in a Wasteland

I finished playing Heavy Rain on Tuesday night, and I’ve got to say that I loved it. It’s odd though – while I expected to want to immediately launch into a second playthrough as I did with Dragon Age, I’m finding that I’m content with the story I’ve chosen. Since so much of the game’s thrill is not knowing what might happen next, a second playthrough couldn’t compare to the first.

Heavy Rain’s story has been called ‘dark’ by some. And upon reflection, I suppose it’s hard to term a game dealing with the murder of children as anything else. But until I heard that, I hadn’t directly compared Heavy Rain to Dragon Age. A big part of the reason I loved Dragon Age was because it was a mature story. And by mature, I’m referring to more than just the sex and violence. I’ll grant you: Dragon Age may have had too much blood, and Heavy Rain may have had a bit too much nudity, but it’s more than just these that I’m referring to when I discuss the games’ maturity.

Even apart from the choices/consequences facet of the gameplay that I’ve already discussed, the fact that the game doesn’t pull punches, doesn’t ruin the surprises by heavy-handedly foreshadowing, and uses strong language and violence in the same way that non-broadcast shows like Dexter do works in its favor. The game isn’t for kids, and that’s not just because it has language and violence. It’s because kids wouldn’t necessarily appreciate the theme of fatherhood and be able to put themselves in a position to understand the gravity of the decisions you need to make in the game.

My compaints about the game are few. For one, while the quicktime actions in the game were intuitive, simple walking was very often the most challenging part. Even when the camera angles were good, it was sometime difficult to walk across a room in the direction you intended, which got very frustrating when there was time pressure. And when multiple actions were available, it was generally difficult to determine what action might result from pressing right and what action from pressing X. In cases like this, you were being asked to make a decision. For me, more often than not chance would decide, as I wasn’t sure what the result of a button press would be.

More and more as the game progressed, I realized how much work must have gone into the branching story. So many characters who influence the storyline heavily might have died. How differently would the story have unfolded without their presence?

I loved Heavy Rain. Even without any of the other factors, it’s a hell of a murder mystery.

I took an online survey recently about what kind of gamer I am. Turns out I’m a survivor/collector. I do remember specifically being asked a question about which of a number of options I’d most enjoy doing in a game and selecting “Fleeing from a terrifying enemy”. I totally admit to being a fan of survival horror games. But how many “terrifying enemies” really exist in games? I can think of so few that I could actually qualify as truly terrifying. Cracked magazine has a list, but I don’t think any of the ones they’ve listed really work for me.

I came up with three game enemies that have terrified me. Keep in mind that these are not video game chase scenes – that’s a different list entirely.

Fallout 2: The Enclave
Just after you help a bunch of ghouls repair their broken nuclear reactor, you end up in a chat with a member of The Enclave – an organization whose members all wear advanced power armor at a time when you may still be in leather armor. The following video shows the conversation. In retrospect, it doesn’t seem terrifying at all, but at the time when I was playing it, I remember thinking *oh shit* – *oh shit* …and yeah… this video is not safe for work. At all.

Dark Messiah of Might & Magic: The Cyclops
In Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, throughout the course of the game, there are a few segments in which you fight a cyclops. They’re big, bad, and ugly. The guy fighting the cyclops here was all about showing how good he is at fighting it, so it never actually picks him up, but when that thing grabbed me, picked me up, and roared in my face, I think I may have screamed back at it in fear.

Resident Evil 2: the T-103
Yes – this is a game moment I’ve written about many many times before. It is simply epic. The following clip doesn’t do it justice, mainly because the guy playing obviously isn’t as scared as I was, and also because he hangs out in the inventory screen long enough to kill the mood. I didn’t stop to shoot at the T-103. I just ran my ass off.

Start watching no later than 7:30. You’ll want to keep watching until at least 9:30 for the good part.

This one made me laugh. I’ve got a lot of DS games on my list right now, but I might check this one out.

I have a special love/hate relationship with game demos. I love the fact that they exist. I tend to think of it as good omen for a game if the publisher releases a demo as opposed to forcing you to make your purchasing decision strictly off screenshots and online reviews. Kinda like how bad movies don’t advance screen for critics, to me the lack of a demo puts up a red flag. However, the one thing I hate about demos, is just how poorly they tend to represent the game they are selling. I suppose it’s just a limitation of the format, how can you really show everything a 20 hour game has to offer in fifteen minutes? Some demos for great games just left me cold, such as Batman: Arkham Asylum or Dead Space. The games themselves are exceptional but the demos just didn’t work well enough to make me say “damn, I want this game!”

This has been a constant sticking point with me and demos for a while. At least it was until I played the God of War III demo last week. This, gentlemen, is how you create a demo that not only left me pining for more action, but so thoroughly convinced me of GoW 3’s awesomeness I’d have ran out that instant and bought the game if it were available.

The demo is perfectly scripted. It’s probably representative of the first 15 minutes of the actual game, but it hits a number of marks that need to be present in a great demo. First, it introduces you to the core gameplay in a way that is easy for newbies to the series but also serves as a great refresher if you’ve played the first two games. It doesn’t babysit you at all, but teaches pretty much everything you’ll need to play the full game in just a few minutes. Second, the action never lets up. The pacing keeps you constantly moving, fighting, and gazing at the insanity all the way up to the dramatic conclusion. I don’t think I’ve played another demo that felt so much like a polished mini-game the way that GoW 3 does.

So there you have it demo people. Make your demos as exciting, polished and well paced as God of War III’s and you will sell lots of games. You have my Personal Guarantee!™

Ham Sandwich RPG is a fun little game put together this summer in a 48 hour game competition. Craig Stern and Tyler Schmal did a good job with it, although I never could get my hands on the power of love. Maybe I should ask Huey Lewis.

Download Ham Sandwich RPG (requires Adobe Air)

Keepers is a weekly segment in which I discuss the games that I’ve seen fit to keep after playing. I’m a self proclaimed pack-rat and collector, but if I ever had to sell my gaming collection to feed my family these are the games I’d hang onto. If my wife let me, anyway.

I never realized it until I played this game, but I’m a sucker for SRPGs. I’ve always had a soft spot for turn-based RPGs but the slightly puzzle like structure and chess piece maneuvering of a good SRPG will keep me utterly enthralled. Jeanne D’Ac was actually the first game I bought for my shiny new PSP two years ago, and thankfully I got enough quality gameplay out of it to tide me over during the initial lull in games the little system suffered at launch.

Jeanne D’Arc had all the hallmarks of a good RPG: the underdog heroine fighting for all that is good and pure, the wolfish rogue destined to win her heart, the loyal warrior protecting her back, etc. However, this game tossed up a few unexpected twists that really kept me pushing through to see how the story would unfold. And all along the way it did so with excellent hand drawn graphics, some sweet anime style cutscenes, and still some of the best SRPG battles I’ve ever played. I still replay this little handheld gem, there is an entire post-completion dungeon to finish with über gear and a special unlockable character, whom I really missed when I lost her in the main storyline. Whenever I travel with my PSP, this game travels with me.