For those of you who popped Halo 3 into your 360 today, you might have noticed some changes. Namely, the game’s second title update. It has upgraded you’re copy to a few changes we’ve talked about in the past (achievements) and other Halo 3 tinkering.
Bungie has givens us the full rundown on their site’s blog. Most interesting from the bunch are the “Vidmaster” achievements which will NOT give you achievement points, but Bungie hints that unlocking them should be a worthy investment of your time. Might they finally grant regular folk the flaming Hayabusa helmet (seen above) that only developers — and “special” people — have been privy to?
We all remember how pretty much any “2006″ sports title had achievements that were practically handed to the player. An infant could get 1,000 achievement points those days. It looks like Madden 2009 has gone back to those days. I was actually surprised when I had earned every possible achievement after about 5 games. While I am not a huge supporter of achievements, I feel like developers should still use them responsibly. Why not make players earn their score? You can sell a crap game if it has easy achievements and they know this. I’m sure Madden 2009 would have initially sold just as well with harder achievements though. These easy achievements will certainly boost sales once the game is older.
Out of all the achievements from Madden 2009, only one was a slight challenge for me to pick up. That was achieving six sacks with one player in a game. I pulled that off on my 5th game. If you are half-decent at Madden, you should be able to get over 400 gamerscore from the first game alone, especially if you play against a rival.
Tomorrow’s PS3 Update will include the addition of trophies. This will basically be Sony’s version of Microsoft Achievements. While I know many people are excited about this, I could honestly care less. It’s a cheap marketing ploy just like the system Microsoft has in place. If you think gamerscore and achievements mean a lot, you probably have an inflated gaming ego anyway. It has been my opinion for a long time that achievements actually tend to ruin the fun in games, particularly online achievements. Many gamers are inclined to change the way they play just to obtain these fake credentials. The simple fact is that achievements and trophies are designed to get players to buy more games and play the games they have longer than they normally would. Some developers are also inclined to include easily obtained achievements to sell a game that normally wouldn’t sell at all…
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