Besides the strength of the titles themselves, and the strangeness of paying something I usually download for free with MAME (get your red hot intelligent cube iso warez here.) I find the games on Xbox Live Arcade strangely appealing. I think it has something to do with the fact that unlike MAME which makes my roms invalid after each time I upgrade, XBLA games just work.

So my girlfriend is sitting here playing Joust, earning achievements and bolstering my gamerscore. Before this she was playing Robotron 2040 doing the same thing. Looking through the list of achievements just to find out what needs to be done to unlock them.

This kind of rewarding gameplay is really interesting, she also plays Advance Wars DS for the S-rank medals she gets there.

Obviously not all games have such obvious rewards. A cool gun is rewarding in the way that it kills bad guys, and an unlocked character is rewarding to see a change of style. Solid Snake with a crocodile hat is also another amusing reward if you’ve spent the time to get the hat.

Along the same lines, also in Metal Gear Solid 3 is the ability to get an invisibility cloak if you happen to go through each area shooting the available frogs hidden throughout.

So all these rewards have to mean something. The high-score in a game in my house never meant much. The high score among my friends on Xbox Live is appealing.

I’ll keep catching the frogs in Metal Gear Solid 3, but I keep wishing I got a fruit salad like in Battlefield 2 for catching them all in addition to the satisfacton of enhanced sneaking. My girlfriend will keep playing Astropop now that she has gotten all of the interesting achievements in Joust.

Somewhere there is a tester sitting in his cave, living in partner net making sure that each of these achievements is activated by the right trigger in the game. Another makes sure that the toast pops up with the right message when the achievements are activated.

The focus on achievement satisfaction and other pretty end-user elements of the 360 UI shows us exactly what kind of testing the console gets. The 360 routinely locked up for a short period twice during the path from system turning on to Robotron. This isn’t an uncommon occurence So with the focus on end-user happyness you break…end user happyness!

Test everything equally and treat your testers like useful people instead of a disposable value proposition and maybe you’ll have better testing. Metal Gear Solid 3 hasn’t locked up on me once, neither has my Playstation 2. I realize that other people have had these problems, however I know far more people who have had problems with their 360.

Anyway, I’ll keep looking for little tiny frogs…

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