I’m far from being a gamerscwh0re who mines every game for every last Achievment, but nevertheless they’re fun to get. I like the ones that encourage you to do something memorable rather than the rather less imaginative “complete game on difficulty X” or “scour the world to find all of item X”.
Having picked up a number of games for Christmas I’ve had something of a boost recently, but last night while playing Assassin’s Creed II (which is a vast improvement on the original which had great atmosphere and free running mechanics but was riddled with tedious repetition and hence I never finished it) I completely accidentally landed on precisely 10,000 gamer points at the end of the night:
How can I possibly play anything else now? I’ll never, ever have a score that perfect again! 
I’m not sure why my gamercard is currently in German (‘Bereich’), thanks dodgy XBL site localisation.
January 13th, 2010 at 6:09 pm
Steve, why is your reputation so low? Have you been bad-mouthing the annoying 10 years olds again?
This seems like a good post to break the topic and ask:
1) What did you think of Avatar in 3D? You did watch it in 3D, didnt you?
2) What do you think of the amazing looking Unlimited Detail ( http://www.udt8.com/ ) and how is this going to impact on the future of Ogres design?
January 14th, 2010 at 12:07 am
@Paul: (question #2)
Interesting technology, but too “not polished”. Actually it’s just a ray tracing with only one bounce. I’m not convinced unless I see a demo running in my PC with more than “unlimited” geometry (how it plays with lighting, shadows, animation?). Furthermore the website is vague and doesn’t provide much information. Even if this were the future, without much information regarding the technology, there couldn’t any Ogre design to discuss because we don’t have anything solid to talk about.
See http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=557528 which discuss it in depth
Cheers
January 14th, 2010 at 10:37 am
@Spannerman:
“Steve, why is your reputation so low? Have you been bad-mouthing the annoying 10 years olds again?”
Hehe – no, it starts at 3 stars and basically I never play online with people I don’t know. That half a star increase from the base 3 is from when I briefly played Halo 3 online a couple of years ago. I guess I could ask the few people I do play online with to rate me but it never seemed important.
1) I haven’t seen Avatar yet, and we don’t have a 3D cinema here anyway, our cinema is rubbish. I could go to the cinema when I’m away on business or holiday but to be honest it’s the last thing on my mind. I generally don’t bother with the cinema these days and just watch stuff on DVD.
2) I hadn’t seen Unlimited Detail before but I agree with dark_sylinc. It’s using the same arguments every voxel system before it has used (polygons suck, they’re so angular and flat dude! – while completely ignoring that they can look good when you use the right approaches).
I’m skeptical because they’re using snake-oil style marketing, treating the reader like a moron and giving precious little in actual information. There’s a total lack of any metrics (how much data they actually need), the fact that their shading is actually very dull and not at all comparable to the quality of the polygon systems they deride (by, I might add, using models from about 1998 which doesn’t exactly reinforce their argument) means they have a lot of convincing to do. Their ‘explanation’ videos are tortuously patronising, truncated before they actually get to anything interesting, and give the informed user zero concrete information. So, not impressed – yet.