It Feels a Bit Like Cheating

Firstly a bit of background. I fucking love gadgets, an affliction my long suffering wife will attest to. Now this could be a very expensive problem to have but thankfully it is tempered by my love of a bargain. In recent times I made a bad choice of mobile phone, after a short affair with the excellent HTC Hero I ‘upgraded’ to an Android Wildfire on a contract, as it turns out the screen on a Wildfire is a pile of shit and it made me sad to look at it. As it happens Kirsten was upgrading her iPhone 3G to a 3GS at the time so rather than flog the 3G to Mazuma I kept it and sold the Wildfire on eBay. Financially it worked out well, I got a good price for the Wildfire and have used the 3G since.

The 3G is a pretty old phone now and over the past few months updates to the iOS and apps made using it a stuttering, laggy chore. So get an iPhone 4, right? Well maybe, but with the new iPhone 5 due soon and being tied to a contract it’s not currently an option so I went on the hunt for a bargain. The rest of this story is long, frustrating and boring, but the conclusion is that I now have a new HTC 7 Mozart phone.

The key here is that number 7 – the Mozart is a Windows Phone 7 device. I like it a lot, the interface is very modern and intuitive and it runs like a dream but that isn’t what this blog is about, this blog is about Xbox Live, of course. When it comes to gaming, Windows Phone 7 is fully integrated with Xbox Live. In a short time I had my Gamertag on my phone and could see my avatar dressed in his Scott Pilgrim T-Shirt and playing with his Guilty Spark. Nice, but hardly revolutionary. My friends list was there too… and my gamerscore.

I am not what anyone could call a Score Whore, I often strive for achievements in a game I’m enjoying but never really go too far out of my way. Like many people, I’m not a finisher, but I do like that plink. I’m sure you can see where this is going.

There are games on the Windows Phone 7, way less than on iOS devices but more than I expected and the ones that have Xbox Live integration all seem to be of a reasonably high quality, and following the XBLA rules, they all have trial versions. I say integration, I’ve not come across much in the way of full integration. Full House Poker allows you to keep your progress between the mobile and XBLA version of the game and I believe Fable Coin Golf lets you earn money to use in Fable III but one thing they all have is achievements, real ones! I guess I knew this before joining the Windows Phone 7 crowd but it still surprised me. Once my phone was up and running I fired up the freebee game Flowerz, a match 3 game of sorts. It’s not a great looking game, I’ve since played several games since that make it look quite terrible, but the full version was free so it made a good test subject. I played one level and when I completed it there was that noise and a message in the notification area of my phone.

Achievement Unlocked – First Bloom – 5G

It felt pretty special, a taste of the future perhaps? I fired up my 360, and checked my profile and there it was, pushing me up to 39,960, a mere 40 points from the big four-oh(oh-oh-oh).

But then, as the title of the blog suggests, I felt a little guilty. Was that a legitimate achievement? I’ve earned easier ones and not felt guilty, I’ve earned achievements on free games and it never felt like cheating. It must have been that I wasn’t on my Xbox, I remember feeling the same when playing Street Fighter IV on Games for Windows Live.

There’s only one thing for it, I’m going to play a fucking ton of Windows Phone 7 games until it feels normal again. I’ll come back and let you know how I get on.