Bioware conventions
There will be a pre-main quest where your companion dies immediately.
You will encounter a mentor who is later killed.
You will find a warrior to offest any weaknesses in your main character, as the game is designed to be played as a warrior. No balance for other characters.
You will encounter an evil love interest who only likes you more when sacrificing little girls to demons or torturing puppies. No moral scale or motivation to be ‘evil’ for some reason.
You will encounter a good love interest who requires you to be nice to everyone and go on a ton of sidequests.
You will start quest that turns out to be more complicated than initially seems and you have to do a further quest to complete. You can never go ask someone for help who is able to give it there and then.
Although main quest is time sensitive there still plenty of time to spend days wandering the countryside and helping kittens stuck in trees.
Each of your party’s character’s motivations only extend to the couple of hours that it takes to do their side-quest.

Game Problems
Useless AI instructions.
After 10 hours of play I feel like I’ve played for 2 and watched for 8.
Forced into areas so small that enemies close you down in less than 3 seconds so can’t be a ranged character. Most enemies don’t even show up until you’re upon them/load area.
Areas are highlighted that are not important “yet”.
Auto-save is not smart enough to save in each new area you enter. No reason not to save on the fly every area change and can lead to huge frustrations when you’ve done non-quest specific tasks for a while and then are randomly killed by bandits.
The D20 mechanics it’s grown up on are archaic for modern video game RPGs. Randomly missing in a fight means the character would not have lasted this long anyway.

At about 11pm one of my flatmates (J) and our unofficial 4th housemate (K – she only lives a couple of streets over) come stumbling in, completely trollied with KFC. After they mumble incoherently at me for a bit I deduce they’ve been thrown out of the pub (a first for a Walkabout I think) and are drunk.

After about 10 minutes my other flatmate (M) stumbles in, takes 2 bits of KFC and immediately vomits before passing out face down in the living room. Also as part of this arrival K’s boyfriend (KB) comes in and starts violently wrestling with J, resulting in her going face first into the armchair (and leaving a pretty good bruise round the inside of her lips the next day).

At this point it’s all a bit much for me so I retire to my room.

About 20 minutes later I hear what sounds like a window smash. I listen for a few minutes but the music continues and there’s no screaming so I assume they’ve managed to upend the small table with everybodies drink on it. Things quiet down after a few minutes and I assume they’ve calmed down or even that K and KB have gone home.

10 minutes after the smash I hear a knock at the door and initial thoughts are J has gone to the off license or even walked K and KB home and forgotten her keys, alternatively I’m expecting the neighbours about the music. So I nip downstairs to let her in or apologise to the neighbours and open the door to 2 paramedics! They ask me if I called an ambulance and I tell them I don’t think so, but let me check.

Wandering into the living room I’m confronted by a bit of carnage. J is rocking herself in the corner like Rainman’s less intelligent cousin, there’s blood all over the floor and KB has the oven mit strapped to his wrist which is dripping blood everywhere.

I usher in the paramedics telling them they’ve got the right place and while they attend to KB I check that J is alright. As I offer soothing words and confirm she’s alright the paramedic not busy strapping up KB asks me over the table if I was talking to the dog. Well… :p

At this point the police turn up being fairly accusatory towards KB asking why he punched a window. Not having been in attendance I don’t offer an explanation straight away, but as it becomes apparent that there’s no sense to be had in the room I explain the earlier wrestling and that it was likely a continuation of that that’s ended badly. They all pack up after a couple of minutes and KB is rushed to the hospital.

J is immediately up suggesting we continue to drink but I soon send her to bed, after finding out where the mop and bucket is (women’s work, why would I know?) and begin cleaning up. The problem with blood is as soon as you add water all you have is more blood, so after about an hour of mopping and sopping up blood with kitchen roll the kitchen no longer looks like a crime scene. Of course I took photos before hand. It’s times like this that the iPhone’s 2MP camera doesn’t do it justice.

Of course now we have a gaping hole where the window was and while the back garden is completely enclosed I’d hate for burglars to get in just for lack of watching it, so I set up camp to sleep in the living room. Luckily I did because for some reason the iron was on which would have involved unwinding the cable, moving the sideboard and plugging it in. What was going on last night?!

At about 4am J wanders down looking for her phone, which I provide and then as we chat I bring up that you know it’s a good night when the police and ambulance are called. She stares at me blankly and it soon becomes apparent she has no recollection of last night’s activities, much beyond 6pm actually. So I explain what happened and she wanders off to bed.

Later M comes down and had no idea about the night before’s shenanigans so I briefly fill her in and show her the pics.

As more of the story comes to light the next day it seems as if my assumptions about the drunken wrestling were correct, but after slicing up his arm KB didn’t notice and proceeded to punch out the rest of the window slicing up his other hand in the process. Quite how you don’t notice slicing your wrist so badly it severs the tendons and cuts the artery I don’t know, but after losing a litre of blood and passing out it was a good few hours of surgery to put him back together.

You wanna see it? …

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Nice.

4 Wheel Thunder

4×4 Evolution

Bangai-O

Code Veronica

Blue Stinger (this was almost certainly rubbish)

Burning Justice Academy 2

Caesars Palace 2000

Carrier

ChuChu Rocket!

Crazy Taxi

D2 (I never played it and appreciate that it was totally different to D on PS1 but I’m putting it in anyway)

Dance Dance Revolution

Daytona USA 2001

Dead or Alive 2

Dino Crisis (poor man’s Resident Evil)

Draconus: Cult of the Wyrm (Pretty sure this was god awful as well)

Evil Dead: Hail to the King

F355 Challenge: Passione Rossa (This was brilliant and ridiculously hard)

Fighting Vipers 2 (I’m not sure if I played it or not :s)

Grandia II (still no Grandia I)

Headhunter (This was the nuts)

Hidden & Dangerous (this was hard as chuff too)

The House of the Dead 2

Hydro Thunder (quality)

Ikaruga (get it on XBLA)

Jet Grind Radio (awesome!)

Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver (this got me into the series)

Maken X (forgot about this too. Made me feel sick. Forefather to red steel?)

Marvel vs. Capcom 2: New Age of Heroes (another one to get on XBLA, though they’ve given you all characters from the start)

MDK2 (don’t think I ever managed to complete it)

Metropolis Street Racer (yessssssss!!!)

Mortal Kombat Gold

Mr. Driller (great!)

NBA Showtime: NBA on NBC

The Next Tetris: Online Edition (maybe rose-tinted but I think this was actually the only decent… no, wait, I’m thinking of the N64 version)

Omikron: The Nomad Soul (David Bowie, I never got it)

Phantasy Star Online (a glimpse at things to come)

Power Stone (was decent)

Quake III Arena (played this a lot)

Re-Volt (ha ha, brilliant)

Rez (XBLA it up)

Samba de Amigo (Damn! This was brilliant)

Sega Bass Fishing (Strangely addictive)

Shadow Man (Can’t remember if I got this on N64 or Dreamcast)

Shenmue

Shenmue II (Almost crying they’re not bringin out part 3. Literally have tears in my eyes)

Silver (this was decent actually)

Skies of Arcadia (Brilliant)

Slave Zero (pretty sure this was shit)

Sonic Adventure (never ‘got’ it)

Soulcalibur (brilliant)

Spawn: In the Demon’s Hand (loved this)

Starlancer (brilliant)

Stupid Invaders (oh, totally forgot about this)

Super Magnetic Neo (I owned this, it was shit)

Sword of the Berserk: Guts’ Rage (pretty sure thsi was shit)

Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2 (quality)

Toy Commander (pretty guff I think)

TrickStyle (oh yeah)

Virtua Tennis

Wetrix Plus

Ah, memories.

1. People get knocked out if you so much as look at them funny
2. Amnesia genuinely happens every other week and isn’t just a lazy plot device
3. Lex Luthor has ‘resources’
4. Relationships between teenagers and billionaire friends are so complex it’s often best just to forget about what’s happened last week and keep the same level of tension for years at a time
5. Also, if you do something bad whilst ‘not being yourself’ it’ll be awkward for 10 – 45 minutes and then it’s all water under the bridge
6. Even though the meteors have given 100s of people powers the government and general populace are blissfully unaware
7. Kryptonite which should have an area of effect on Superman actually only kicks in when he also has a direct line of sight
8. Borrowing £50,000 from a billionaire is like borrowing £10 from your normal mates and it’s always given without expectation of getting it back
9. If you work on a farm and are struggling to make ends meet you’ll always still have enough money for a brand new truck and to replace that beam in the barn that people habitually fall through
10. Regardless of the height you fall from Clark Kent’s arms are so soft it’ll cushion the impact sufficiently that you can just walk away afterwards

Almost anything that’s online/ranked. I don’t say this just because I let my Live! Gold membership slip, but because it’s too reliant on the skills of others and is subject to boosting.

Things that just require you playing loads. Gears of War Seriously achievement, where you had to get 10,000 kills for example.

Playing through a specific way/ replay to get an achievement. Mass Effect with certain characters, HL2 Defiant, Bioshock Good/Bad. This simply shows people how you played the game, not that you’re any good at it.

Anything that requires you to scour every last inch of a game. Lost Odyssey Seeds.

Things that are just luck. Virtua Fighter items.

Completing a game on easy.

Completing the game as player 2. Gears of War Dom, Guitar Hero 3 Bass.

Things that are just fucking ridiculous

Guitar Hero in general. 20 gold stars on expert, button masher, buy a guitar already, 5 star every expert song, 5 star all co-op expert etc, etc.

Anything that requires you to beat everyone else in the world. Burnout Revenge Celebrity status, DOA 4 SS ranking, PGR 3 tournament qualifier (I imagine this’ll be a bone of contention and some may say they’re the only true achievements on the Xbox).

Beating everything the game has to offer 1,000 times. Virtua fighter arcade clearances.

Things that seem ridiculous but aren’t.

Hexic. Grand Pearl poobah, there’s a system. I can’t do it though.

Things that should work but don’t (usually).

Complete a game on the hardest setting not unlocking lower difficulty achievements too. Conflict Denied Ops.

Missing something and having to play the whole game again to get it. Assassin’s Creed, Conversationalist.

Getting achievements just for completing the game unavoidably. Fight Night 3 (at least King Kong tried).

Other annoyances

Not being able to delete a game from my gamercard. Let MS keep the details but I don’t want my 0 score from a shitty demo I downloaded cluttering up my gamercard. 

What achievements should be.

You vs. the game – Take the best the programmer has to throw at you and beaten it.

Progress chart – I can put up with completed stage 4 etc.

So, this is the start of my new blogging regime. It was hasty and not fully developed, but this is my opinion on achievements and you’re free to disagree. In the future I may make a list of the best and worst achievements or develop my ideas on what achievements should be further but for now I’ve written about something that bothers me and expressed myself. I encourage all bloggers to do the same.

I then discovered Facebook, after keeping clear of it for a long while, and decided that the future of blogging lay in apps. Lots of short updates on many things. To some degree I still think it is, but I think there needs to be a dedicated CMS to such a thing, where you simply go into a back end and update your day, with where you’ve been and what you’ve done. I knowsome people manage to do that without a structured CMS but I think a gap is there for those that want to blog, but can never think of something to write about.

Third part of blogging is to write something people want to read. Some popular blogs are just about that person’s life, however I’m socially aloof and don’t engage with others in that sense. What I would read about is that person’s thoughts on various topics that has engaged them during the day. So I don’t care if work was shit and allyou want to do is hit the pub, however I would care if you read something in the paper and put your own thoughts on the matter down.

To that end I think I’m going to start blogging much more properly. Every time something interests me I’ll make a note of it and then write it up after work that day before I go home. I fully believe that if one person feels one way about something (in this instance about what people would like to read) then there are others out there and a market can be created for it.

So, I’m going to write up a piece on Xbox Achievements next, because it’s annoys me how crappy some achievements are. Then I’ll write up numerous science related pieces, perhaps give my views on some movies I’ve watched or games played, but what I’m not intending doing is just giving a chronicle of my life any more. Well, not that I wrote often enough anyway.

Click here to view the embedded video.

After contacting Twilight Creations about their intentions to create a XBLA game version of Zombies!!!, the creator, Todd A. Breitenstein, replied saying that very project was in the works.

I informed Joystiq, who later caught up with Todd A. Breitenstein at comic-con and they made a post about it with a little credit coming back to me at the end.

Linkage.

Not really focused on putting forward a decent portfolio yet but suppose I’m going to have to. Started a new site who’s URL I bought a while back but seems quite pertinent to some recent changes in the SEO world. You can see what I know about optimising Flash at Flash SEO and if you think that’s any good feel free to hire me for various projects.

I just started it last night though, so gimme a bit of time to get some content up