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Attack of the Achievements!

Achievements… all old hat by now. We all know that when it comes to the Xbox 360 you can’t escape them, (unless you really really suck!), and now the PS3 has trophy whores begging too. I was amazed to find the other day whilst playing some “casual games”, (aka Shockwave games that inevitably end up on Xbox Live if they’re any good), and an achievement popped up. Now, don’t worry Microsoft haven’t hijacked Shockwave. It didn’t make the noise or pop up in the all too familiar box, but it was there. Intrigued I delved deeper…

The game in question is Bumper Stars; a highly addictive puzzle game in which you have limited shots to bounce your bumper round to collect fruit with various barriers and the like. You begin life as a beaver, (hey I can think of worse animals to start as), but this beaver is incredibly obese and is therefore your starting bumper. As you continue the game blissfully clocking up the hours you start to notice a few things pop up. The more games you play the larger choice of bumpers you have to pick from, with my current choice being a rabbit in a crash helmet!

Additionally skilled shots warrant a picture appearing at the top of the game window alerting you to the fact that you have just unlocked an achievement! Some create new bumpers and some seem to be there simply to boost your pride, working in a similar way to the Microsoft achievements.

A lot of people have argued that eventually people will stop caring about achievement points/trophies/whatever they come up with next, but if I can no longer escape them even on shockwave.com aren’t we all doomed to have more and more of our lives taken over by them?! …Coming soon “achievements at work day.” Greet 10 people in a polite manner before taking a seat = 20 points. Reach a thousand points and go home early; why not you must have finished off most things!

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Zoey

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5 responses to “Attack of the Achievements!”

  1. Lorna avatar
    Lorna

    Wow! Shockwave achievements – who’d have thunk it? 😀 I wonder if smaller PC games and such like could integrate a universal achievement system? It’s a shame handhelds probably wouln’t go down this riute until connectivity is easier and more par for the course but mobile phone games…may work. Probably not though.

    I’ve actually ben working on little achievement pics for my own website along those lnes, but stuff like ‘Let 3 cups of tea go cold’, stole last Jammy Dodger, and the stealth cheev for avoiding phoning a relative…

  2. Dave avatar
    Dave

    Great post Zoey, I had no idea Shockwave did achievements.

    Funnily enough, our editorial team at Square-Go had out weekly MSN debate on achievements and trophies and we came up with some interesting ideas.

    Like, can achievements be incentivised? People wrecking ranked deathmatches by only caring about achievements instead of teamwork, using them to rank gamers on skill, rather than length of play time, cashing in points for avatar items and so on.

    A lot of good ideas, but none we reckon microsoft or sony would ever adopt. Check out the site next weekend for the debate feature, should be a cracker!

  3. Duncan Aird avatar
    Duncan Aird

    I liked the exchanging achievements for extra free content (avatar clothes, gamer pictures, stuff for Home etc.) – but they’ll never do it.

    I do like the achievement idea though (I dislike the trophies though, they were just too ‘tacked on’ to try and compete with Microsoft), it gives a feel of… well, achievement!

    Just wish developers would use them as such – I’m looking at you THQ!

  4. Tony avatar
    Tony

    How could you like achievements but not trophies? Sure, they were late to the party, but they’re roughly the same idea.

    In principal I like the idea of trophies more. Take someone with 5000 Xbox points as an example. Have they aced five games or played five hundred? With Trophies you can instantly see if all of them are bronze or whether they’ve got fistfuls of Golds and the odd Platinum…

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    Rochell Guinyard

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