A few days ago I was on my way with a friend to go see a movie at our local Theater, and we both realized we were a little ahead of schedule and would kill some time by stopping in Best Buy, which as almost any gamer would agree with me, is pretty much the closest place to heaven. We’re casually looking at TV’s, and speakers, and a number of items that we knew we had no intentions of actually buying. However, with pretty much every trip to “heaven”, I find the need to NEVER leave the store empty handed (I’m sure many of you out there share this awful disease with me… and yes, it is a disease!). I wander into the gaming section, and I’m looking at Xbox360 games and absolutely nothing looks appealing to me. However, despite the distasteful menu, I eventually cave in and end up buying “NBA Street Homecourt”. The NBA Street franchise at one point was actually a very fun and tasteful series back when it first came out during the Playstation 2 era. Some of you old time gamers probably remember its origin from the old NBA JAM series! To save you the grief of even giving you any details about this game, I will refrain and simply say DO NOT BUY IT. The game was and still is awful! So the real question you’re surely going to want answered, is why I ended up playing the game for 20+ hours over the next few days?! I do have a theory!

Attaining achievement points on your Xbox360 profile is clearly futile, yet for some ungodly reason, I have found myself playing certain games solely to achieve more “gamer points”. During the first hour or so of playing NBA Homecourt, I had attained some simple “Achievement” awards for my gamer profile, and immediately experienced a sense of accomplishment. Am I insane? Why the F, do I care if I attain gamer points? It’s not like their useful, or for that matter even mean anything! It’s merely a scoring system that keeps track of your history log for that particular game. Who cares!? Well, apparently I do, considering I continued playing this awful game simply to attain more points.

It was after I realized I couldn’t play this game anymore, that I wanted to dig a little deeper and figure out why Microsoft had incorporated this system. Microsoft defines an achievement as "A game-defined goal that is stored and displayed in your gamer profile. Achievements can be as simple, complex, or off-the-wall as a game wants." Basically, achievements are exactly that; an achievement or accomplished goal within a game. You earn achievements by successfully completing specific objectives within a game. For all your hard work, you receive an achievement which can then be shown to the world, proving that are a true gamer. Can you lose an achievement if you fail to meet the achievement's criteria again or simply start playing poorly? The long and short answer to that is no. Once you have earned an achievement, it is yours to keep. Gamerscore is another term you need to understand. Microsoft defines a “Gamerscore” as, "a cumulative score of all achievements that allows you to quickly gauge and compare the accomplishments and experience of other gamers."

Ok, so we can accumulate the points from all of the games we’ve played over the last few years. Do we get to keep these points after the next gen systems emerge? Despite my trash talking on Achievement points and how pointless they are, I truly do enjoy amassing Gamerscore points for my system. I just believe they’ve only come half way with their thought process for this point system, and maybe if there was more purpose for attaining them, people would be going ape shit for them. A few simple ideas:

1) Every 2500 points you attain, you get credited Microsoft Points towards XBL Arcade games.
2) Give your Profile Avatar a little more status with new looks, clothing, and style. The more points you earn on your profile allows your Avatar to be suited with more extraordinary items. We all know that gamers want to stand out and feel special!
3) Similarly to #2, you can allow access to a number of special dashboard backgrounds that are available in a tier system. Every 1000 points you’re eligible for a group of new wallpapers.

Whatever it is they choose to do, make it a little more worthwhile! I’m already losing interest in my quest to have the most Gamerscore points of all my friends (almost up to 8000).

Share your ideas out there guys, I'd love to hear what you all have to say!

I’ve been feeling the need to write about gaming lately, and I’m not sure why. I have a feeling it has something to do with these other informational gaming websites (like IGN and Gamespot) that have no backbone. It’s like they gather all the useless information they can find around the internet and slap it onto their front page. The written content is generally sub-par, and the only reason people come back for more, is because their audience wants to know when their most anticipated game is coming out. Let’s be real here… rarely do they have something to say that’s vital.

Occasionally there are a few articles that discuss the real topics of gaming, and it definitely stimulates a good thought process. Honestly, these sites have a simple solution, and it’s to make it FUN and exciting. Bring in a little passion! Maybe they need to get a little bit more talk from the gamers themselves. For example: I want to know what the underground gamer has to say. The gamer that finds him/herself immersed in a game for 15 straight hours and doesn’t even realize the day is over, or even beginning, whichever. If you presented some controversial topics about a game that particular gamer is passionate about, I can guarantee you that you’ll get some thought provoking discussions started.

Anyway, I felt the need to vent about these sites, and figured there may be someone else out there that feels the same way, or even strongly disagrees with me. The whole point is to stimulate some conversations. I’ll be back to write more later this week!

-Wolfy