Excellent.

I really don’t like all that notification stuff, because it breaks immersion. Even a simple thing like the font being completely different to what the designers have decided the game should use annoys me.

It’s the gaming equivelant of one of those annoying stickers you get on a CD cover or the huge garish MTV graphics covering the edges of an otherwise brilliant Chemical Brothers video.

Obviously, he should steer well clear of those.

Books are 10/10, no doubt.

I just meant that he dosn’t need to worry about really ‘offensive’ things like points, achievements and pop-up messages telling him that he did something right in a book.

“Achievement Unlocked: Book Read.”

What’s wrong with books?

Just ask anyone who’s got the Mile High achievement on COD4 (ahem… me!) just what it meant when they unlocked it and you’ll see what I mean.

Why do you even bother playing games!?

You sound like you’d be better off sticking to books.

Nobody’s FORCING you to get them.

For the record, no, you can’t turn them off, but you can turn off the notifications of getting them.

The whole idea of scrambling, wide-eyed and frothing at the mouth after utterly irrelevant ‘e-points’ pointlessly shoe-horned into perfectly fine single player games just puts me off completely.

Also, can you turn off those mood-breaking notifications you get which tell you which annoying prick has signed into Xbox Live/PSN or worst of all, which one has collected their OWN boring ‘e-point-credit-BADGE/e-Rep-enhancment-TOKEN’, which to ‘acheive’ they’ve simply had to kill 10,000 of the same enemy in a certain way along with trading in their dignity?

CAN YOU?!

Full credit to MS for building such a feature into each game though. Chasing achievements or trophy’s is a great excuse to go for that second play through.

There’s been many rumours that Sony were going to start offering real world rewards for Trophies. Personally I think that would be a master stroke. They’d have to re-double their efforts to close any loop holes which could lead people to cheating trophies out of games, but I imagine that if the rewards weren’t completely meaningless, it could have an impact on people choosing which multi platform game to buy.

I’d like to know that, too.

If by that you mean implementing trophies, then yes, I agree.”

I meant integrating Trophies; that’s why I wrote that

As in, into games (WHY ARE THERE GAMES STILL BEING RELEASED WITHOUT THEM) and into your PSN profile. If you format your drive and get your PSN nick back, they’re gone.

The whole thing just seems half-arsed.

The internet has’nt helped at all either, it can be a nice surprise doing something silly and getting a reward for it out of no where because of a secret unlocking itself, internet loves listing every last exacting detail though just for people to rack up numbers.

Im hoping we will see some Achievments that give you something special for your avatar some day. Like getting a special achievement in gears and getting a gears Logo T-shirt or a ripper gun.

I don’t agree with that. I think it was a case of “that’s a good idea, let’s do our own take on it,” as MS did with Avatars etc.

Any business who doesn’t copy good ideas will soon no longer be a business.

If by that you mean implementing trophies, then yes, I agree. It is a bit of a botch job. The PS3 never really needed trophies, and the whole thing was a bit of a forced effort to try and draw in the XBox crowd. Entirely unnecessary.

I had hoped they’d pull the project, but it’s too late for that now, especially seeing as how they’re going to make trophies mandatory in January.

Trophies and achievements were always a cheap gimmick which detracted from the value of a game for the sole purpose of allowing loud kids to e-peen with their gamer-scores and whatnot. I can’t think of any game that had trophies or achievements that were as insane as Ratchet & Clank’s skill points (which actually required some semblance of skill and/or intelligence to acquire). Mostly it’s just “Hey, you did something in the game … something everyone is going to do (because it’s easy and part of the game-play), and you get a trophy for that!”, it was a bout of faux ego-massaging and a method to get people to buy games.

So I hate the damned things, and couldn’t care less if this particular bug never gets fixed. Sony would’ve had a better image amongst ha–err… non-casual gamers if they’d just left that idea on the drawing board, I’d say.

/Heavy sarcasm