I am a self professed achievement junky on Xbox. They are gamer-crack. Not only are addictive, but I find that well designed ones end up making you enjoy the game more because they encourage you to explore areas of the game that you may not have otherwise, or to play the game again to pick up some things that you missed, etc.

However, with this power comes a drawback. I’ve run into a number of games where the achievements actually harm the enjoyment of the game. Designers should be aware that many people are going to look at the achievement list before they start playing, and use it to guide their gaming. Therefore achievements should not be designed that actually harm the gameplay, or frustrate. A few games come to mind.

The most recent was Mass Effect, which while a great game, had a few aspects to the achievements that hurt it. First of all in order to get all the points you need to pick 2 (of the six) companions and use them all through the game, even though the structure of the game is designed around the ability to change your companions on a regular basis based upon the mission. Also, to get ALL the points you would end up needing to play the game at least 4 full times through, using varying character classes, etc. It becomes painful instead of fun. So I actually had to ignore one of the more interesting aspects of the game (companion switching) in order to get achievements.

Assassin’s Creed is another example. In the end of playing it, I had gotten so frustrated at the constantly repetitive missions that I had to do. Save the citizen, climb the points, run around collecting, backstab someone, etc. Of course, while doing this, I realized that I only HAD to do 3 missions per citysection, and then I could have gone on. Had I done that I would have enjoyed the gameplay much more as it would not have felt nearly as repetitive. However, I wanted those gamer points, and I didn’t want to have to play through the game again, so I was doing every repetitive mission.

Call of Duty 2 was a great example of achievements that frustrate. You got 50 points almost immediately for completing the training. Then you had to beat the entire game before you got any more points! Even then, you only had 200/1000, to get any more, you had to beat missions on the hardest difficulty possible. The equivalent of ‘ridiculous’ level.

I could go on, so I will. How about Guitar Hero III and the “Play the game using the gamepad instead of the Guitar” achievements? Or Project Gotham Racing 3 where it appears you need a few million hours of gameplay to earn a decent number of achievements.

So what is my point? My point is that my enjoyment of many games has been lessened by the existence of ‘bad achievements’. And some new games (Mass Effect) don’t seem to be learning the lessons from older ones.

So to any Xbox game designers out there. When you come up with your Achievements, please consider a few things:

• That people WILL do specific actions and play in certain ways in order to get those achievements.
• In my opinion, at least half the points should be obtainable via normal playing through of the game.
• It’s fine to add in some very time consuming or really difficult achievements, but don’t make them worth so many points that people feel the need to achieve them.

Ok, this blog post is officially too long. Sorry, but I got ranting, and wrote this over the course of weeks.

I’ve been asked a number of times in recent years by (usually) High School kids, as to what exactly they should do to end up being a programmer at a “Cool Web 2.0″ website (or something like that).

My response to them is almost always the same:  Go get a Computer Science Degree

I then perhaps go into a discussion about how when I’m hiring and looking at resumes, especially of people without 5-10 years of solid experience anyway, that they quickly get sorted into piles of “Computer Science Degree”, or not.

Most simply put.  Someone who has a Computer Science degree, has been taught the theory of programming, of algorithms.  They have been taught how to ‘think’ like the computer, heck they hopefully even had to write some assembly code.  They understand programming and they understand good program design (Even if they may have some ‘interesting ideas’ because of what their teachers specifically harped upon).  They also understand the theories of Software Engineering and how to work as a team.

To contrast this, the other degrees, or lack of a degree … People in those categories MAY understand all of this.  But it’s not guaranteed.   Typically Computer Engineering students have learned much more about hardware and their programming knowledge was to allow quick one-off projects that were meant to work on chips.  Computer Information Services students usually have a business degree, and were ‘also taught how to write code’.   Those people without any degrees at all, may be very good at hacking out lots of code, and code that works, but not code that they deeply understand, which leads to problems later.

Yes, people without Computer Science degrees can have these skills.  And as I said, if someone is giving me a resume and they have 10 years of deep coding experience, I’m not going to bother looking at the degree at all.

But in my opinion, having a true Computer Science degree under your belt is the best thing that someone without deep experience can have on their resume, and is an excellent use of 4 years of your life.

Digg wants you! Please apply at jobs@digg.com or go to http://digg.com/jobs/

For those that don’t know, I’ve used Mac, PC, and Linux interchangeably for a long time.  Having one of each at home for a while.  However; my main machine has been a windows box the whole time.   I recently moved to using a MacBook Pro as my main machine for work.

It’s made me get ‘deep’ into the system instead of just using it for specific things or testing.

I will post some other thoughts later, but one thing that just came up to me again this weekend has prompted this post.

I’m really amazed at the difference between software available.   On Windows, the open source community had really embraced the platform, and not only could you find any open source software that you wanted in a pre-compiled binary for Windows.   But there was also just a ton of free software just for Windows out there as well.

On the Mac, it seems that the open source community has abandoned it.  While the Mac is BSD at it’s core, the X-system is subpar, as it doesn’t fully integrate into the OS unless the application has been ‘aqua-fied’.  But very few projects have bothered to do this, like they have for Windows.   Which leaves you using fink or macports to compile the software natively, and having a very bad UI experience.

At the same time, there is a ton of Mac specific software out there to be had, but it feels to me like the Windows community 15 years ago, where everything is shareware, instead of freeware.

Shareware on the PC really died off in favor of open source, or straight freeware.  Yet on the Mac it reigns supreme, with any potential software I want to use costing me $10-15

It really boggles my mind, simply because the Mac ever since OS/X has really been embraced by the programming/technical community as ‘the desktop machine to have’ … yet it doesn’t have an according philosophy with the applications that run on it.

It’s been a while since I did a game review, and I have a few thoughts I want to share on the game that I am currently playing, Metroid Prime 3 - Corruption on the Wii.

Personally, I am enjoying playing the game, because I am invested in the Metroid Prime storyline. I played the first two versions of this game on the GameCube. So I’m really enjoying getting another chapter of the storyline be fed to me and learning more of this universe.

However, had I not played the original two, had I not been hooked already … I think the game would be driving me nuts. In general, I think the problems fold down into two main issues:

1. It’s the exact same game engine

   Here we are, 5 years later since the original Metroid Prime. I know that the Wii at it’s heart is actually not much different than a GameCube. Fine. But come on, they are using the EXACT same game engine with the same bugs. Most annoying are the broken doors. 80% of the time when you shoot a door to open it, it doesn’t actually open, leaving you moving forward and back trying to find the magic distance that causes it to open. It was annoying in the first game, it sucked in Echos … but why does this bug still exist 5 years later on another system?

2. The interface, with the Wiimote, is broken

   I’m sorry, but the Wiimote was not designed to be used like this. You don’t just aim by using the Wiimote, but you turn left and right using it as well. You might think this works. But it’s broken. The biggest problem is that to turn, instead of aim, you have to aim the Wiimote near the ‘edge’ of the screen. That would work well; except, if you aim too far, you leave the sensor bar and the game doesn’t know what to do. This is a major issue in large battles when you are panicking and moving around quickly.

   It seems that the coders realized that this method was going to be jumpy and wild to control, so they slowed down the response of the Wiimote, making it ‘trail behind’ your actual movements, so that small movements don’t make you jump around. It was a good compromise, but it leaves the controls very sluggish. You end up being much less maneuverable than you would with a normal controller. It then seems that the coders realized this … so what did they do? They made you a tank. It seems like you can take TONS of damage compared to previous games, because they realize you aren’t going to be able to dodge effectively, and that you will be standing there taking tons of damage while shooting back.

So in summation? It’s a good game, but the controls just do not work. This ‘aim to turn’ concept just seems broken, at least in this incarnation. If you loved the previous Metroid Prime games, go get it, the storyline is wonderful. But if you haven’t played them … you are better off with something else.

Ok, after just dropping $10 at the airport for an adapter for my iPhone so that I can use my good headphones while on the airplane … am I the only one who thinks that apple really dropped the ball on this? I mean, would it really have changed the phone size THAT much to have a normal jack?

Looks like Zend has put an audio version of the presentation I gave at ZendCon last year online: High Performance PHP & MySQL Scaling Techniques

This was the biggest audience I ever had for a conference talk.  It was standing room only, and due to bright lighting I couldn’t see anyone in the crowd.

Go give it a listen, but I swear that their audio technician found a way to accentuate my accent.

Ok, it’s very old news as this was posted over 7 years ago because of the Netscape 6 ‘debacle’ at the time. But it’s the first time I’ve read the post. Every software developer should go read it. It’s a wonderful post by Joel Spolsky on the benefits of NOT rewriting code that happens to ‘be a mess’, but instead keeping it in place.

My thanks to Keith Casey for pointing this out to me in his similar themed blog post about the Broken Window Fallacy.

Recently (for my wife’s birthday), our house according to our Son inherited two robots.   More specifically, we now have Roombas.

As my son went around yelling about how we had a Robot, and how it was sweeping the room for us.   It got me to thinking.   Remember back in the day when we all watched the Jetsons and wished for the day when we too had a Rosie to take care of our house?

I realized that while we don’t have a humanoid robot doing it for us, we do in fact have ‘robots’.   I mean, I have robots now that sweep my floors.  My ReplayTV takes care of knowing what shows I want to watch and recording them for me.  Various X10 appliances in my house can automatically turn on or off.

So I guess we have reached that day, just not exactly in the way we originally dreamed of it.

Ok, Amazon is in my opinion just one of the services out there right now. An earlier post of mine already said this, but this Christmas I’ve had more good experiences.

First of all I ordered some jewelry for my wife that was the wrong size. No issues, went online, a few clicks had me returning it for ‘wrong size’, and a new piece of jewelry was on the way. Oh, and they paid my return shipping!

Secondly, my wife got me an HD-DVD drive for my xbox 360. It worked for half-a-movie then stopped working. I tried calling Microsoft support 5 times, and got cut off every time. Finally I realized she had bought it through Amazon, and they have a 30 day no matter what return policy. She went online, clicked to return just as easily, printed out a free UPS label, and we had it on it’s way.

I got the new one and it worked fine. She even got an apology letter from Amazon stating how bad they felt that they shipped her defective merchandise.