Achievements

Roccat's new mouse features achievements, including one called "Sultan of Scroll"

Owen Hill at

What the lol? Come on now Roccat. You guys know this is a bit silly.

Roccat's Savu - which I'm sure is very nice to use - has a built in trophy system. It's called the ROCCAT™ Achievements Display – or R.A.D. for short - and will track how many times you click, scroll and more. Hit a milestone and you'll get an achievement for your efforts. The mouse also features "No sweat side grips."

I enjoy levelling up as much as the next man, but getting a trophy for scrolling my mouse wheel seems a bit like getting rewarded for being affected by gravity, or casting a shadow. Still, we're yet to test out the Savu, and it could be the first in a long line of innovative peripherals. Possibly. Check the official website for more.

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World of Warcraft Protip: Killing critters for fun and achievements

PC Gamer at

In this Protip, Josh explains how to snag three WoW achievements with the help of furry little nature friends. How you proceed just depends on how thirsty you are for the blood of the innocent...so, how many critters do you want to kill?

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Portal 2 Secrets Guide

Matt Purslow at

Valve have a great, mischievous sense of humour. Their games are often full of little secrets, surprises and other easter eggs for players to find. Of course, they’re not always in the most obvious of places. Enter: The PC Gamer Portal 2 Secrets Guide. We’ve scoured Aperture Laboratories in search of all the cool little extras Valve have hidden away, and put them in this handy little guide to help you discover them for yourselves. Look, there are even fancy videos to show you how to get to the trickier ones! Some of these secrets are quite far into the game, and in order to show you where they are, we have had to include a few minor spoilers, so be warned!

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Minecraft might feature achievements

Matt Purslow at

Despite being the most fun you'll have with a sandbox all year, Minecraft is still a beta project, which means there's still plenty of features to come before the game is considered complete. Among future projects, it's been revealed that achievements may be on the cards.

Since entering beta, Minecraft's developer Notch saw a significant increase in sales, despite expecting a lull in sales due to the 25% price hike. "...it went up from four to five thousand sales a day to ten thousand sales a day. It kind of went against everything that I'd be told by other developers," explained Notch to Gamasutra. He continued to say "I've had the idea to make achievements kind of like the in-game questing. So you'd be able to see the first achievement in a tree of achievements, and you have to unlock the top ones first before you can unlock the ones further down."

Would achievements add to the Minecraft experience, or would this simply be an addition for the pure reason that achievements are the 'in thing' at the moment? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

[via Big Download]

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My mad quest for SC2 achievements

Dan Stapleton at

I’m not an achievement whore by nature. In fact, generally I find the very existence of achievements abhorrent. Most of them, in my experience, are just there to reward repetition of mindless tasks or to give me a meaningless pat on the head for doing things I was going to do anyway, like complete a level or build a unit. And I have no patience for most games that force me to do some task X number of times to unlock new content - and yes, that includes Team Fortress 2.

But with StarCraft II, I’m out to get them, but not just to have them. I'm using them for a different purpose: to make the game harder.

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TweetTalk: Do Steam MMO achievements matter?

Josh Augustine at

Fallen Earth, the post-apocalyptic MMO prized for its crafting system, gritty setting, and skill-based shooter mechanics, announced this week that they were adding Steam achievements. And in typical MMO "go big or go home" fashion, they rolled out with over 500 of 'em, ranging from straight forward exploration ("Tourist: Lost City - Take in the view at Lost City") to skills ("Expert Scrounger - Raise your Scavenging Skill to 164") to generic grinding ("Curing the Blight - Kill Blight Wolves").

This got me wondering--are Steam achievements going to catch on for PC games, becoming the wild inferno fueling impulsive game buying for the sole purpose of earning achievements, like they are for the XBOX trophy system? I have my own opinion, but I took the question to Twitter to see what you guys think.

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Laser death cat punishes Team Fortress 2 grinders

Tom Francis at

People make maps in Team Fortress 2 specifically for grinding achievements. Bleak, joyless rooms of endlessly spawning bots and resupply crates, where people don't play the game, they game it. But in one of these, achievement_all_v4, the author's added a surprise. A violent, horrific, hilarious surprise of biblical proportions. Here's a clip.

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