I was just chatting with a friend about how I’d never once consciously tried to get an “achievement”.  I’ve always been an exploration player, never a score player– I could care less if I have 600/1000 or 800/1000 for Mass Effect, or if I have all my Azeroth achievements unlocked on my Death Knight (unless it gives me a faster mount).

Days later, I stumbled across Achievement Unlocked, which turned me into a bona fide achievement whore.  I absolutely had to get every last achievement.  What’s the difference?  For starters, the achievements are all listed along the right-hand side of the screen, with obvious indicators of which ones you have and haven’t completed.  There’s no hunting for your next goal: there’s a list of ‘em right there.

Also, many of the achievements require a bit of cleverness, especially if you try to figure them out without reading the hints.  (Note: there’s one achievement you can’t get without reading the hints– namely, the achievement for reading the hints.)  So, there is gameplay in many of the achievements, even if the game is ostensibly trying to show how achievements detract from gameplay.

But what about the obviously gameplay-free ones, such as the achievement for jumping for 10 seconds?  I still completed those.  Why?  Logically, I could clearly see that jumping for 10 seconds would complete the achievement, and that that would complete my 100% achievement.  Maybe I’m not as immune to completionism as I thought.

The top-selling XBLA games of 2008 are right here.  The top 4 are IPs that originated in the downloadable game format (XBLA exclusive, or XBLA+PSN): Castle Crashers, Geometry Wars 2, Braid, and a Kingdom for Keflings.  It’s extremely promising news for the platform, as long as the new IPs can survive Microsoft’s royalty cuts.

This late entry is stiff competition for game of 2008 (against You Have to Burn the Rope, of course).  It’s hard to discuss it without ruining it, so… just check it out.  It’s more than worth the 5 minutes.

And yeah, it took me a couple weeks to actually getting around to playing it.  Downloading games is hard.  But don’t trust me, trust Mr. Koster.

“Windows 7 Reviews Mixed On Pirate Bay“

We deploy a lot of WordPress sites for clients.  Tags are a great new tool, beyond the basic blog use.  For example, clients can tag their pages (requires a plugin), allowing us to display related posts in the sidebar.  (Useful note, if you’re doing this: get_the_posts() does accept a post ID, and does work outside of the loop, documentation notwithstanding.)

Tags are still a bit new by WordPress standards, so you may have to deal with some bugs.  In particular, you can’t search for posts that belong to category A and have tag B (more information in WordPress trac).  Luckily for us, the bug was already fixed in August.  Unfortunately, the fix hasn’t been incorporated into release, and somehow this bug has been marked as an “enhancement”.

We all know what “enhancement” means in a bug database, so I’m uploading a fixed query.php for WordPress 2.7.  So far, we haven’t noticed any issues with the fix, and we’re enjoying the new functionality.

37 hours, 45 minutes, with normal play (no crazy powerleveling, items/cash sent from an alt, etc.).  Even with 55-58 being pretty quick gimmes, that’s less than 3 hours a level.  Leveling time basically ramped up from 55 until 68, then ramped down for 69-70.  (And then 70-71 was dreadful.)

The leveling was over about 37 days, so I think that average shows an admirable amount of restraint on my part.

David Rosen over at Wolfire has created three awesome game “design tour” videos.  (Okay, I don’t actually know that all three are awesome, since the third just popped up.  The first two were awesome.)  He walks through each game for a bit, pointing out small, specific aspects of design that made a big difference in the game.

He’s walking through fun, 2D, indie games.  So pick a favorite– he’s done Gish, Knytt Stories, and World of Goo!

If you’re busy now, why not bookmark or star ‘em, then come back and watch over the holidays.

I just enabled Genius for iTunes.

Now, iTunes will not launch, forcing me to use Winamp.

It’s pretty hard to argue with that.

(BTW: “Use Winamp Search as my default search engine”!?)

GamesIndustry.biz managed to out-repugnant the usual press release.

Redundancies hit Turbine following latest launch

Lord of the Rings Online developer Turbine has made a number of staff redundant at both its Massachusetts and California studios.

GamesIndustry.biz understands that the positions were in QA and Account Management.

[More solid gold BS]

First of all, how do your QA and customer service staff become redundant, unless you’re making fewer games, and attracting fewer customers?  Unless you’re planning to make shoddier games, and hence fulfill the second condition.  Did they just get their programmers to promise to stop writing buggy code?  Because I don’t think that’s a promise they can keep.

Second, “redundancies hit Turbine”?  I’d make fun of that if I could parse it.

This proves that writing such copy really is a permanent character defect.  They don’t even have to cover anything up!  We get it– the economy sucks.  You’re cutting back.  Yes, it will affect future development.  No, you’re not “adjusting” your “resources”.  Turbine– you’re a good company!  You make some sweet games!  Don’t do this.

P.S.  And since my recent posts have been overly negative, here’s a funny picture of a monkey.

Allow me to offer my interface expertise, on an issue I’ve heard from several people about recently.

Question: How do I check a checkbox in a Word form?

Answer: Double-click, then select “checked” from the menu.

Question: If this is a feature of my application, should I still ship it?

Answer: No.