Van Hemlock.com

In general I’m in favour of achievements in games. The 360 implementation is good with them feeding into gamerscore, the PS3 version is perhaps more interesting with it feeding into gamer levels and steam has… Well to be brutally honest I’ve never got an achievement in a Steam game.

What I don’t get are the game specific achievements. I’ve been playing Mirror’s Edge on the iPad and it has badges that are just for that game. They unlock wallpapers, which almost makes them useful but when they are just a measure of how well you’re doing in an individual game then they’re not really much more than something like leaderboards. They lose that something that pulls a platform together.

This week on Xbox Live Arcade they released a game called Limbo. It’s a gorgeous black and white indie puzzle game that is well worth a look. Being on Xbox there is a requirement for it though: It has to have achievements.

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This weekend I ordered PlayStation+, the subscription service from Sony that's like Xbox live, but not quite. Why did I do it? Automatic updates mainly. My biggest complaint about the PS3 is that whenever I want a quick game there will have just been a patch to the OS, or I'll have not played a game like Little Big Planet in a while and it'll download and install excruciatingly slowly while not allowing me to do anything else on my PS3. For me automatic downloads are worth the cost.

Saturday night I buy the thing and set the download of Wipeout HD going as it's bundled in and I never actually grabbed it before. It downloads really slowly of course so off goes the PS3 and I go to bed hopeful that in the morning it will have switched on overnight and downloaded the game.

Cut to Sunday and Wipeout is downloaded. And patching 120mb because of course Sony don't update their master game images with patches. PlayStation+ didn't patch it, which seems like a no-brainer for them decision wise but since I hadn't actually started it maybe it wasn't installed properly or something.

What did get me was that it decided to download two demos over night but didn't manage to finish either. The first was ModNation Racers. Um, I own that game guys. It's on my profile, there is no way that pushing that to me is a good idea, you could have at least looked for save games first.

The second demo? Heavy Rain. I own that game too so the same complaints stand. The really big one though is that I also have the demo already downloaded. It was trying to push me content I already had!

So now I can't trust that they aren't going to keep pushing me content I already have and crush my Internet download limits each month and so automatic downloads gets switched off. There are no controls to say what should or shouldn't be downloaded. Brilliant. 

I want to be positive about Sony, I really do. They encourage creativity while Microsoft crush it. It's just that everything that they do is half cocked. Every idea they implement is only half thought out, and then left broken. Trophies get put in, but they don't automatically upload to the servers, you have to do it manually if you want anybody else to see what you've done. Home sits there as a center for abuse and cybering while its potential is untapped. Every time it's the same, they don't improve things they just implement something and move on. Hey, that sounds like CCP. 

I wonder how many people with 5gb download caps will buy this thinking it's a good source of getting a game a month and all those annoying patches stream overnight instead of getting in the way when they want to watch a blu-ray. They're screwed.

Sony, don't download content I already have please. Of course that'll never happen.