Steve

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  16. Posted · Edited by Steve

    In the dark future of Idle Thumbs 2019, technology reigns and chaos rules supreme.

    A trash-choked alley lit only by the glow of a thousand neon ramenhutch signs. Grease-gray water pisses down from above-- toxic rain, or the runoff of the hyperdense plate city suspended above the hiveshacks? Video "Games" Rodkin trudges through the slime, his black mylar hexweave combat boots kicking aside discarded 10mm dataclips like so many dead leaves, the castoffs of a speedculture that uses up and trashes information as fast as it can be generated. Through the overlaid haze of a multisense psychostim projected through his eyeband vis-visor, Games spies a Wirebox propped against the base of a rusting codecast signalspanner. He wrenches one hand from the pocket of his gunmetal-silver polyfiber bodysleeve and unspools the dialwire from his interskull earjack. With the speed that only comes from a topline blackmarket chemtweak job, he flicks the jackbead into the Wirebox commport. A lightningstorm of pure datafeed bitscream crashes across his vis-visor, his consciousness a maelstrom of dialup squealvoice. He jacks into the CryptoNet BBS and pulls down the current infobuild binary. The requested reconst code crackles instantaneously across the netgrid. Games jacks out as the Wirebox dotmatrix finishes its reconst job. He rips the hot Screamsheet from its carbonslot. The vis-visor decodes the printed cyberglyphs in realtime. The call had gone out from the net. It had entered Games' brain. It decoded as an ascii art drawing of Samuel L Jackson's severed arm I guess, I dunno I only wrote all that because I wanted to establish that in the dark cyberpunk future of 2019, people have the given name "Video" and the nickname "Games."

  20. Posted

    Excellent episode.

    Talking about those "achievements". They used to be eastereggs or secrets in games. For example, nowdays collecting the D.I.P. balls in R.O.T.T. would be considered an achievement rather then receiving the 100,000 points, or Scott's mystical head (2,764,331 points).

    In general I think achievements are kind of lame. A lot of them are simply doing X a bunch of times rather than doing something really special and unique. I'd rather get some kind of in-game "reward" for doing certain things than unlocking a picture on my profile. And with reward I mean show some interesting cut scene or open up some non gameplay altering area. You know, what eastereggs used to be.

    Yeah but you are a curmudgeonly old fuck who A) references Rise of the Triad B) as R.O.T.T.

  21. Posted

    I don't necessarily see how this is a bad thing for game studios or publishers. All they gotsta do is get you to grab another one of their games, rather than one of their competitors.

    Where did achievements initially come from? Is it an Xbox thing or a Steam thing? They seem to be here to stay as a controversial game staple of dubious value (or at the very least, no clear consensus about good practices). I dunno how I feel about that. Are there any games of note that do not include achievements?

    They started on Xbox 360 (and then were picked up as Trophies by PS3.) They are required by MS/Sony for all games that ship on those platforms, so the only games of note that wouldn't have them in recent years would be PC/Wii/portable-exclusive games. As we've seen with Steam/Starcraft 2, people are starting to invest in them even when not required.