Perhaps 'suggestions' to try different game styles would be better, delivered like any hint on a loading screen? Personally, I hate achievements and ignore them by simply not looking at the list; Basically, pretending they don't exist. Not always possible though, sadly. In FTL you need achievements to unlock variant ships. It's a particularly terrible game to use this in too, because it's highly random. You might be trying to win using only drones, but if no shop selling drones appears... Ruins what might be a perfectly playable run-through and goes against the 'play the hand you're dealt' mindset of Rogue-likes.

Ah, it's a Typepad thing. If you sign in to comment with a Google ID it fills in some hashed junk, which doesn't seem to have any link back to your name or email address. Might as well be anonymous really, which kind of defeats the object of the sign-in. Oh well.

Wasn't the variable reward schedule more effective? McDonalds use that instead with their scratchcard promotions, and I think Mars did recently too with the occasional free bar reward, although it's difficult to get vending machines to accept the vouchers. Perhaps the G rewards should be based on a variable schedule too. I mean, if you're going to have an annoying rewards scheme why be half-hearted about it? CdrJameson (Got bored at Deadly, I think)

'Story' - the details of who says what to whom - matters a lot less than 'Setting'. 'Story' may well not be settled early on in anything other than broad plot arc. 'Setting', as you point out, is integral. Except to some Eurogames, it seems.

My Commodore 64 had exceptional hardware supported high-performance full screen anti-aliasing on all games with no drop in frame rate. It was called a TV set. Perhaps running your monitor in a non-native resolution would have the same effect?

Interesting points, but a couple of examples to consider how they affect your arguments. Firstly, there are highly succesful turn-based third-person shooters where each gun counts: Sniper, UFO:Enemy Unknown and Jagged Alliance all come to mind. They can be far more tense than FPS games, as each bullet counts. Secondly, the problem of 3D was more one of view/targetting than of movement. Although Battlezone has two sticks, this is an aesthetic choice; Each only had one axis, and the game could easily have made do with a single controller. Better examples might be flight simulators & space shooters, both of which managed true 3D navigation with a single stick, combined with a (low interactivity) throttle. Shooters became highly playable when two sticks were available, but then you could disconnect the view/firing direction from the movement direction. However, this is more akin to 2D Robotron than 3D Battlezone. CdrJameson