I really like achievements and trophies. A lot of time after I finish a game I will go back and play it again to  get some that I missed. Before I would hardly ever do that so its's adding to the value plus I always discover stuff I didn't the first time through.

I like them when they are done right but I won't spend my waking hours trying to get them all for every game I play like some players. I'm not saying anyone here is like that though. I personally like being rewarded for my skill but some of them are pretty shameful or horrible! Has anyone ever seen the list of achievements requirements for a game called earth Defense Force? WOW

Trouble with a lot of these so called achivements, is that they are often on-line based, ie awarded for hours spent playing or feats pulled off online, so, if you pick up a game cheap, few years down the line, chances are servers are shut, thus making them impossible to achieve.

Not games related but...

Sony going to be marketing a range of 'Mastered in 4K' Blu ray films, but they won't be in 4K res, just normal 1080P, they've just been mastered from the original 4K res.Film stock, which sony then put onto Blu-ray in 1080P, to be played on an upscaling Blu-ray player on a 4X TV set......

Sounding like the 'HD ready' fiasco all over again, consumers being sold something with a tag on it, without having a scooby what it all means...

Trouble with a lot of these so called achivements, is that they are often on-line based, ie awarded for hours spent playing or feats pulled off online, so, if you pick up a game cheap, few years down the line, chances are servers are shut, thus making them impossible to achieve.

whole heartedly agree with that one, its often ridiculous to expect people to be able to get online achievements for a game like Tron Legacy 2 years after its released because the online is just dead!

Trouble with a lot of these so called achivements, is that they are often on-line based, ie awarded for hours spent playing or feats pulled off online, so, if you pick up a game cheap, few years down the line, chances are servers are shut, thus making them impossible to achieve.

whole heartedly agree with that one, its often ridiculous to expect people to be able to get online achievements for a game like Tron Legacy 2 years after its released because the online is just dead!

And...IF your spending all the hours needed for 1 achivement on Game X.....chances are by time your get round to buying, then playing Game H (which has dropped rapidly in price) the servers have been closed as everyones playing game Z these days, so your shafted getting all the achivements for it.

all very true, I'd love to get all the achievements for Transformers War For Cybertron but now that Fall Of Cybertron is out they will probably close the old games servers or it will just be a grave yard if they are still up. Either way your screwed

and then there's the kind that REALLY annoy me where like in Halo 4 you get an achievement for doing all the challenges online in one week? What if you have a life and can't spend an entire week playing? your fcuked basically

Thread bump, on subject of Achievements, some bizzare ones include:

Bullet Witch, once you've unlocked and then completed this (wretched) game on Hell Difficulty, you get an achivement- a SINGLE Gamer Point!.

DOA4:3 achivements worth ZERO points were unlocked, if you lost enough consecutive matches when playing online.

Dead Rising:Zombie Genocider-Defeat (at least) 53, 594 zombies, in a single playthrough.Why that odd number?

It's the population of Willamette, in which the game is set.

Eat Lead on PS3 awards a trophy the first time that you pause the game. Another for watching the credits from beginning to end. A few other 'humorous' trophies in that game too... most are easy to unlock.

The more interesting side of trophies are the ones that are truly difficult to unlock. The gamercard site that I use tracks the % of their users who have unlocked each trophy in each PS3 or Vita game. This lets them assign each trophy with a difficulty rating from 'Very Easy' to 'Near Impossible'. And, your on-site profile shows the five rarest trophies that you've unlocked as well as the difficulty % for each of your platinums. ie only 6% of the ~43,000 players they've tracked on Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 have unlocked the platinum so it's a 'Hard' trophy.

To me, it's more fun to unlock a trophy that only a small % of others have accomplished than to grind out endless platinums in kiddie games.

More 'money grabbing', in a manner of speaking by way of Sony's woeful financial state.

Coming on top of the $5.1bn annual loss last financial year, over a decade of yearly financial losses and a share price that's been on a consistent downward slope for several years we've seen them laying off thousands of staff this past year and undertaking a massive organisational restructuring programme.

Now comes futher news to highlight their desperate financial plight. Sony are now selling their North American HQ office building in New York in a sale and leaseback deal to net them $770m to try propping up the Profit and Loss Account.

So desperate are Sony to paint a rosy picture of the company's financial position that they're already using this income to window dress the projected P&L statement in a way that puts the company back into the black.

Link to support that claim: http://www.sony.net/SonyInfo/IR/news/20130118E.pdf

Ten year share price record: http://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&c ... HOaCwAOSBg

Main story link: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-21073668

DOGMA edging one step closer to the endgame? Fingers crossed it is! 

It should be noted on the above that this has nothing to do with Sony Computer Entertainment as they are run from a building in Foster City i believe.

The building up for sale here is used by likes of Sony Music, Sony Pictures etc, Sony looking to make 4X the money they paid for it when they bought it from AT+T (for whom it was built for).

Sony really needs to ditch the TV and camera sides of the company as well as things like it's chemical arm, as these have been loosing money hand over fist for years now.

The games division and things like Sony Financial Services are turning a profit, thing with Sony, it's become far too much of a lumbering Hydra-like creature, so no wonder few heads getting chopped off.

Industry as a whole in dire state of affairs, most recent news stories i've read in past few days:
Job Losses to go at CODEMASTERS, Atari US looking to get shot of the French side of Atari (Infogrammes).

Just means even more job losses.

Seen likes of Psygnosis, Argonaut, Bizzare Creations, Ensemble etc go to the wall, stores like HMV, Blockbuster, Comet etc dissapear or in danger of....THQ still in dire straits, Acclaim gone.

Lot of the names i grew up with, no longer with us, i'm NOT a fanboy, just feel industry needs a degree of competition, find it baffling so many of my friends will keep buying latest Apple device, just because it's new.So that'll be new device every 6 months by look of things and they like i do with my iPad 2, just use it for web browsing, music and video, basically.

I will honestly be soo happy if the Playstation is finished after this gen. Seriously I know I'm "flaming" or "trolling" or whatever other label you wanna sling but I will always feel in my heart that Sony ruined the gaming market in general, turning it from a place of creativity and fun into a financially driven sales behemoth with all the shit they spurted out on the PS1.

I know they aren't the only guilty party in this current get but when the Playstation came out video games were fun and video game fans were regarded with disdain in the most part, then the Playstation arrived and suddenly it was COOL to play video games... BUT ONLY if you owned a Playstation. If you had a Saturn you were looked upon almost as if you had two heads and lived under a bridge.

but at least we had our wonderful hobby that wasn't stained with the likes of Tony Hawks 23, Fifa 756, tiger woods 89 and all the other franchises that they milked dry for their millions.

Bring back the good old days of creative design and no pressure to make something that would sell. That's why the DC will always be my favourite console, it was the last bastion of hope for video gamers in a world driven by financial gain rather than video game originality/creativity

I know they weren't the only ones that contributed to the current situation, but they certainly had a massive hand in instigating the change to the industry in 96/97 when the PS1 took off

To be fair, Sony this generation gave 'us' the likes of LBP (which whilst i hated, did encourage creativity), Flower, Flow, Journey, Infamous 2-User Created content etc.

Plus it kept the PS3 region free, allowed MODS and Keyboard and mouse support for things like Unreal T., lets you put any compat. HDD in your PS3 etc

Compared to MS which wants 360 to remain a very closed system.

The Playstation era, did a lot to take gaming out of the 'geek' culture, into the mainstream, but that was very much a double-edged sword i feel, start of games getting dumbed down, something likes of PS2 Eyetoy, Wii, Kinect etc have helped further.

No-ones flaming or trolling on here, we're just taking a look at whats happened to and going to happen to our past time.

I welcome further disscussion.

well like I said this generation Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony are all as bad as one another, but I agree that Sony have done a lot differently this hardware gen, guess I just miss the days when it was Sega and Nintendo and playing games made you a nerd and not a social butterfly... if you had enough money that is lol

well like I said this generation Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony are all as bad as one another, but I agree that Sony have done a lot differently this hardware gen, guess I just miss the days when it was Sega and Nintendo and playing games made you a nerd and not a social butterfly... if you had enough money that is lol

As a gamer, it saddens me to have seen the likes of:Hudson Soft, Psygnosis, Bizzare Creations, Factor 5, Ensemble, Clover, Team Silent, Pandemic, FASA, Pandemic, Zipper Interactive, people behind Panzer Dragoon Series,  and Pivotal Games be no more.

Sony closed Zipper+Psygnosis.

MS Ensemble+FASA and canned all Rare's WIP games to put them onto Kinect projects, a superb looking 360 sequel to Freelancer was also canned by MS (Gutted, as love Starlancer on DC+Freelancer on PC).

There honestly is just so much talent and creative minds being 'lost' in this industry year after year.Studios now turning to knocking out party games, shovelware conversions, iOS/Android games etc.

Big name franchises being given to the cheapest bidder etc.

People honestly think things would be ANY different IF Sony did 'bow out'? your kidding yourselves.Look at Sega these days:

Puts a stop to SOR:Remake, restructuring means they are focusing on 5 Core franchises (likes of Total War series, AVP, Football manager etc), seems to have no interest in bringing likes of Baku Baku or Chu Chu Rocket to PSN/XBL, sadly.

The 'worst' Sonic games were the biggest sellers over past few years, so i guess question is:Do punters really want creativity anymore?.