Fable 2 - Great for Boosters!

Boosters all around the world are probably rejoicing. Lionhead Studios has released the official achievement list for Fable 2. But these achievements are definitely different than most achievements. You can get an achievement simply by seeing another player complete the achievement!

This seems lame to me. I don't have to do anything to get the achievement? I just join a friend's game and follow them around and get achievements not by actually doing the thing? Lame!

Opinion: Xbox 360 Achievements Should Be Stackable!

I got Battlefield: Bad Company when it came out. Great game. A lot of fun. But it suffers from a problem that a number of Xbox 360 games do: non-stackable achievements. There are achievements for beating different levels on Normal and Hard. I beat every level on Hard the first time through, but the achievements aren't stackable so I don't get the achievement for beating the level on Normal unless I go back and play the levels again.

Like I said, this isn't just a Battlefield: Bad Company issue. There are many games that do this. Do the developers think that if I beat the level on Hard I won't be able to beat it on Normal? Or is this just a cheap way to get more replay value out of the game?

Vote for Prince of Persia Achievement

Ubisoft is bringing achievements to the people! Kind of. For their upcoming Prince of Persia game, Ubisoft is looking for gamers to vote on one of the achievements for the game.

The options are:

1) Free fall
Longest Grip Fall: Perform the longest grip fall in the game.

2) Marathon
Marathon: Run Prince run! Run the whole map then keep running.

3) Combat King
Combo Specialist: Master every fight combo in the game.

Voting ends July 1st.

A Look at CoD 4 Achievements

The list of Call of Duty 4 achievements have been released. I like to look at the lists in order to see if there's anything unusual. Just a quick scan because I don't want to spoil anything in the actual game. But I found the CoD 4 achievement list very interesting.

After playing the beta for weeks, I expected a lot of multiplayer achievements. Maybe achieving a certain rank or number of kills... Possibly killing so many people with Last Stand or shooting down so many enemy helicopters... The possibility for achievements in the multiplayer portion of the game alone are astounding.

So imagine my surprise when I looked through the achievements and counted how many seem to be multiplayer... zero.

That's right. It looks like all 37 achievements are achieved in the single player campaign alone. Which normally I would like because I do much better on the single player achievements than the multiplayer, but it just seems weird since multiplayer is such a big part of CoD 4. I guess this will cut down on players boosting with other people(Josh...).

Help Create the SSFIITHDR Achievement

Capcoms blog has announced that they will let everyone give their input for the achievements for the upcoming Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix. So visit the blog and leave a comment on the blog and they will consider it. Maybe Capcom should have thought about this first because the comments section is flooded with entries like:

1. 1st comment--5 perfects
2. Wah?? No screenshot??? =(
3. Achievements? Xbox360? I'm on PS3, so what does that mean? Im not sure what Achievements means, but If it can be done, can the Akuma sprites be made in to Goken?

Gears of War Achievements

Tonight fans will be able to download a patch that fixes some bugs, but also includes the new achievements. The achievements are related to the Annex game type as well as the latest map pack.

Annex-related achievements:

• THIS! IS! ANNEX! -- Complete 100 multiplayer matches of 3+ rounds in Annex and capture 3 objectives in each match (40 points)
• Inconceivable! -- Win 20 rounds of multiplayer matches in Annex by fewer than 5 points (30)
• Nub Pwn3r -- Win 20 rounds of multiplayer matches in Annex by shutting out the opposing team (30)
  

Hidden Fronts-related achievements:

• You Down With E.P.I.C? -- Win a multiplayer match of 3+ rounds in any game type on 6 different downloadable maps (30)
• Green Thumb -- Win 20 multiplayer matches of 3+ rounds in any game type on the Garden multiplayer map (30)
• Mind the Gap -- Win 20 multiplayer matches of 3+ rounds in any game type on the Subway multiplayer map (30)
• All That Juice -- Win 20 multiplayer matches of 3+ rounds in any game type on the Process multiplayer map (30)
• Purdy Mouth -- Win 20 multiplayer matches of 3+ rounds in any game type on the Bullet Marsh multiplayer map (30)

Some of these will be pretty hard to achieve, but hey the hardcore should be rewarded for being crazy good.

PS3 Home Trophies Optional

In our most recent podcast(#4), we talk a lot about PS3 Home. I stumbled across some further information today so I'll post it up even before the podcast is live.

While the Xbox 360 requires all games to have achievements, Sony is considering making trophies optional for developers. They are leaning towards not forcing companies to come up with trophies for every game they make.

I, however, think this would be a mistake. As we talked about in Podcast 3, achievements really bring something to gaming so knowing that there are trophies for every game would also help Sony.

Sony also said if they did make it mandatory, it might be something as simple as getting a trophy for owning the game. To that, I say lame!

Microsoft/Xbox bragging rights

Microsoft has released a stats sheet letting everyone know how well they're doing.

Some interesting things I saw were that since the 360 came out, over 300 million achievements were achieved for over 7.5 million gamerscore.

Also, more than 6 billion Microsoft Points have been purchased. After using the handy Microsoft Points Converter website, I found out that 5 billion MSP is equal to $62,475,000. (I also discovered that the converter doesn't covert numbers higher than 2,147,483,647.)

And out of the 10 million Xbox 360s out there, 6 million of them are members of Xbox Live.

Most the stat sheet boils down to "Yay! Xbox Live kicks ass!" And I actually agree. Here's to you, Microsoft.

Electronic Gaming Monthly Rumors

In the rumor section of Electronic Gaming Monthly, there were two interesting rumors.

The first one is that Gears of War is trying to change their achievements so they don't require "ranked" games. I don't know if this is possible, but it'd definitely help me out since I play mostly player matches.

The other one is that they want to release a version of Dead Rising that is co-op. The rumor mill also says that there would be a patch which would be downloadable to make current versions co-op as well. That would be awesome. However, I highly doubt it.

XYBA Podcast Ep 03

Here is XYBA Podcast 03, where we are joined by Jeff and Bryan. We change the format a little to give some room for some Crackdown talk. This is the longest podcast so far clocking in at one hour and 23 minutes. Here is the breakdown.

0:00 - Open and Intros (Johnny Cash)
0:01 - Games we are playing
0:07 - Video Game News
0:24 - Bryan and Jeff talk about Wii's VC content not transferable to a new Wii
0:30 - Round table discussion about achievements and entitlements and how it has changed gaming
0:45 - Crackdown review
0:57 - Games we are looking forward to
1:05 - Rants start here
1:19 - Shout outs and outro (Rick Ross)

Thanks to Jeff and Bryan to for coming out. You can be their friend on X-Box live at:

I'd post their Wii friend codes, but we've run out of room. Enjoy.

powered by ODEO
Download XYBA Podcast03