Click here to listen to the Replay show.

We also took time to revisit Sensible World of Soccerand look back at some of the video gaming highlights of 2004.

I’d had several aborted attempts at playing Dead Rising before, as I picked it up a few years ago when I bought my first 360. Each time I was thwarted by what I thought was a pretty daft save system.

I kept on re-rolling my character and trying again but each attempt followed the same pattern. I’d get to a point pretty early on in the story where I’d either die helping Brad fight the boss in the food court or I’d complete that section and then die before I got back to a save point. The convicts riding round in their machine gun equipped jeep were responsible for an annoying amount of deaths.

It’s only after revisiting the game for Replay that it’s finally clicked with me. The feature of being able to salvage the experience from my aborted playthrough and roll it back into a new character helped ease me back into the game, as did just focussing on following the main story path, at first, rather than wandering off to follow every scoop I was presented with.

But the main thing that helped me enjoy the game was chilling out and not trying to do everything perfectly; treating the playthrough as an experience and going with the flow, rather than constantly reloading and doing each section again and again, trying to nail it spot on.

It was only then that I realised how great the save system actually is. When your health is critically low and you’re escorting a group of survivors it really makes you make the hard choices. Do you stop and try and help out the survivor that’s been swamped by zombies, risking all of your progress since you last saved, or do you leg it to the nearest save point and save your own skin? Do you desperately try and save every one of a group of survivors, or are you satisfied with a loss or two along the way as long as the majority make it out alive?

If you could save whenever you wanted then you just wouldn’t experience these choices, or the situations certainly wouldn’t be as tense. The save system doesn’t add anything to the story missions (which still should’ve included some decent check-pointing) but it does add an awful lot to the experience of surviving in the mall.

I’m glad I managed to learn to like the game. Although I messed up the story, in my Replay playthrough, I still made it to the end of the game and I’m looking forward to revisiting the title in the future to try and improve on my performance.

Click here to listen to the Replay show.

We also took a quick look through some of the games released in 2001 and went through the nominations for March’s Replay (Rainbow Six Vegas, Bully and The Club)

If you’d like to get involved in TGS Replay next month then pop along to The Gamer Scene Forums.

Click here to listen to the Replay show.

We also find time to share our gaming highlights of the year 2000 and make the nominations for February’s game of the month.

My game of 2000 was Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force. A strange choice, perhaps, considering the other possible contenders but it’s a game I look back fondly on as being both a decent first person shooter and also a effective (and different) use of the Star Trek license. My nomination for February’s Replay game was Overlord. I don’t think it’s got much of a chance this time round.

If you’d like to get involved in TGS Replay next month then pop along to The Gamer Scene Forums.

To me it seems that complaining about Activision producing Band Hero is a bit like complaining about Walkers making Cheese & Onion crisps because you only like Ready Salted. Or it’s like complaining about Ferrari making cars in yellow because you think they only look good in red. The fact is that if you’re moaning about Band Hero then it’s probably because it’s not aimed at you.

Nothing about the way the game is marketed would make anyone think it has been produced for the consumption of your average rock fan. Band Hero (unlike the other spin-offs based on Metallica, Aerosmith and Van Halen) is targeted at a completely different audience. They really should’ve called it Pop Hero, but I guess that was a little too close to a certain TV show’s title. Band Hero is squarely aimed at people who haven’t played Guitar Hero or at those that have bought one of the original titles even though they don’t particularly like rock music (and so end up playing the same three songs again and again).

Band Hero isn’t the product of a “lazy” developer or a particularly greedy publisher (in this one instance Activision isn’t guilty of that). It may have been developed concurrently alongside the latest Guitar Hero, and share its technology, but it’s a proper game in its own right.

For starters it features a full complement of sixty-five songs. That’s less than the eighty-odd in most of the main Guitar Hero games but considerably more than the 40-50 tracks in the other spin-offs. Does the tracklist justify its own disk? Couldn’t it just have been downloadable content? Perhaps, but it would have weighed in at over eighty pounds at current DLC prices and putting it on a retail disk makes it more accessible to the game’s target audience.

There’s also nothing wrong with the way Band Hero plays. It’s based on the very solid Guitar Hero 5 engine, a game I much preferred to the awful Guitar Hero World Tour. It features all the regular features such as full band drop in/drop out play, multiplayer modes, on the fly song difficulty and instrument selection.

What about the criticism that the music doesn’t fit the game because it’s not guitar orientated enough? I’m not completely convinced that you can argue that hitting buttons on a pretend plastic instrument somehow fits the sound from a guitar any more than it does that of a keyboard. You don’t have to play guitar on each track anyway. If the song hasn’t got a strong, or fun, guitar part then you can simply switch instrument! Most of the songs have decent drum or bass parts and you can always choose to sing. Even without instruments, Band Hero is a perfectly decent karaoke game. Yes, it may retail for over twice the price of a Singstar title but it’s also got over three times the content in terms of the tracklist alone.

In my opinion Band Hero is a perfectly decent game and one that a large number of the expanded game audience would be better off buying than the regular Guitar Hero. Real heavy rock fans shouldn’t hate it. They just shouldn’t buy it. In a way they should be glad that Activision commissioned Band Hero. Having two distinct game series, catering for completely different musical tastes may stop them further watering down the soundtrack in the main Guitar Hero games. Then again, looking at the poorer sales figures for Band Hero, it may be too late for that. I imagine we’ll be seeing songs like ‘Agadoo’ and ‘Shaddup You Face’ in Guitar Hero 6.

Microsoft may have popularised in-game achievements but reward badges, both in single titles and across multiple games, have been around for ages. My first proper full-blown obsession with a reward system was in the game City of Heroes.

City of Heroes is a superhero-themed Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game that launched back in April 2004. Its badge system arrived several months later as part of the second free update of the game. It was a seemingly minor inclusion at the time, alongside the more headline grabbing embellishments such as power re-specification, the much requested inclusion of capes and two brand new game zones, but the reward system was arguably one of the most important additions ever made to the game.

City of Heroes’ virtual badges are handed out as rewards for a whole host of different actions. They can be earned through zone exploration and the completion of key missions. Some are unlocked by defeating specific types of enemies, by taking a lot of damage or by healing others. There are also special badges for completing task forces (a long series of linked missions requiring several players working together) or by reaching character level milestones. Although most badges are just for show, a few do grant the player access to special powers and abilities. Unlike Microsoft’s achievement system there is no overall “gamerscore” although a player might choose to boast about his or her overall badge count. If they’re particularly sad, that is.

What was pretty much universally laughed at, as a concept, on the game’s forums quickly became one of City of Heroes’ most popular features, particularly as the MMO was “loot free” at the time. Whole communities and websites based around the system sprung up and in-game chat channels and groups were formed, dedicated to working together to earn rewards. People hacked into the graphics files to find undiscovered badges. They created online databases and ancillary programs that helped record player progress.

The system initially launched with a small collection of badges that has been built upon and added to over time as new game features have been introduced. There are now awards to show how long you’ve been playing the game, badges for crafting and trading, rewards for producing and playing user generated missions and medals for taking part in special seasonal events. There are currently almost 700 different awards to obtain on hero characters and over 600 rewards for villains.

The success of badges in City of Heroes showed how a reward system could not only encourage gaming but, for some players, could actually become a game in its own right; the game within the game. Badges kept many users interested in playing as it gave them mini-targets and goals to work towards, especially at the time when new content updates to the game were few and far between. It extended the game for those who had reached the level cap. It promoted grouping with others, particularly higher level characters teaming with lower levels, and rewarded those players who took an active part in teams.

Although the impact of the badge system was overwhelmingly positive there have been some negative aspects associated with its introduction.

Any reward structure is open for exploitation, by those looking to cheat or bend the rules, and there are plenty of potential “shortcuts” to earn badges in City of Heroes. Popular activities have included healing farms (where players set up their characters to attack and heal each other while they’re away from their computer) and damage boosting (which usually involved finding a suitable mission with a lava pit and leaving a character in it for hours). They’re the same sorts of activities you’ll see in many other MMOs and similar shortcuts to ones you see people trying to find in Microsoft’s achievement system.

The introduction of badges also increased the tension between different factions of the player base; provoking squabbling between those who loved the rewards and those who couldn’t see the point. These conflicts could become particularly heated in the game’s free-for-all zones where those hunting for badges were forced into direct contact with those specifically interested in player versus player combat.

Badges did demonstrate that they had the power to unite good and evil, though. The arrival of the companion title City of Villains in 2005 saw new villain rewards introduced, the majority of which couldn’t legally be earned by characters on the hero side. Of course that didn’t stop a lot of obsessive badge collectors coming up with clever ways of obtaining them.

The most impressive example of players working together involved the badge that was awarded for defeating Longbow. At the time, Longbow were an NPC group that could only be encountered by heroes in one specific Player vs Player combat zone. Unfortunately, from a badge hunting point of view, they couldn’t be attacked by heroes as they were fighting on the same side. Obtaining the badge on a “good” character therefore involved convincing a friendly villain (with a specific type of character) to cast a confusion spell which would, extremely briefly, allow the hero character to target and kill the Longbow as enemies. This very time consuming process required a lot of effort and coordination between large groups of players and was made all the more difficult as PvPers in the zone were happy to treat all the “badgers” standing round as potential targets.

Just like the rest of the game the badge system has evolved and changed over the past five years in response to the actions and requests of its audience. A way was granted, for example, for hero characters to officially earn the Longbow badge without using the glitch described above.

The recent arrival of the Architect Entertainment System, which allows players to create and publish their own missions, added a large number of rewards but also introduced a large number of potential exploits. Many players created missions just to farm the new badges, which clogged up the mission search system in the same sort of way that trophy missions first swamped Sony’s Little Big Planet. Players formed badge cartels, ganging up to rate each others missions as five stars in order to quickly earn certain badges, which artificially inflated the rating on poor content and made it difficult to find some of the really great, imaginative user stories being created.

This provoked a decision from the City of Heroes developers to not only remove a large number of the new badges that were being exploited, but also rethink what they wanted to achieve with their 5-year old rewards system. They decided to avoid adding any “count” badges in future that required repetitious tasks, aberrant play styles or gave the illusion of “grindness”. Instead they will be adding badges for one time accomplishments and achievements that they say will be obtainable by the majority of players. In Issue 16, the latest content update of the game, a selection of older awards have had their requirements reduced in line with the new ethos.

Overall though, the badge reward system introduced in City of Heroes, and copied by other MMOs, has had an extremely positive impact on the game and has undoubtedly helped extend its life. The badges still have a slight hold on me today, even though I rarely play the game any more. Each content update sees a new collection of rewards I’ve yet to earn; tempting and trying to lure me back in.

Perhaps as a reflection of how popular City of Heroes reward system is with its core group of players, the developers are rewarding loyal active COH users, who didn’t jump ship during the launch of rival super-hero MMO Champions Online, with – yes, you’ve guessed it – exclusive badges!

Games like Crackdown, Assassin’s Creed, Grand Theft Auto IV and Red Faction: Guerrilla have all featured large, expansive playgrounds as have RPGs like Oblivion and Fallout 3. Titles such as inFamous, Prototype and the outings of more traditional characters like Spider-Man and The Hulk have been set in sandbox environments to more effectively showcase the super-powered abilities of their protagonists.

The developers of these games have tried to create worlds without walls. Of course virtually all game spaces are finite; there are always some obstacles or boundaries that prevent you from falling outside the game world into the abyss. Open world games, though, try to give the player realms so vast, so detailed and realistic that they forget they are inside a digital cage.

But the bigger the developers make the worlds, the emptier they can potentially feel, particularly from a narrative point of view. Open world games bring a whole host of problems when it comes to storytelling.

Too often, in my opinion anyway, open world games tell their stories by letting you experience events in a very linear, pre-determined manner. You might have the freedom to go anywhere and do anything in the city but often you have no real influence on the path of the story. The game world might be open but the story is anything but.

One way developers try to add both an illusion of choice and also attempt to fill up the empty narrative landscape is by including additional story arcs. The open world Spider-Man titles, for example, have always had a main storyline, following whichever film each game was based on, mixed in with several other comic-inspired side stories.

Fallout 3 does its optional missions particularly well. An arguably disappointing main story is bolstered by the inclusion of a multitude of interesting side quests. The missions in Fallout 3 work well because they add to the overall story of the game world. They also allow players to forge their own path through the content of the game. The overall destination is always the same, they have little choice about the actions in the main quest, but the freer choices in the additional tasks allow players to personalise their game experience.

inFamous, on the other hand, does its side missions quite badly and they quickly become extremely repetitive. Obviously gaming is a pretty repetitive activity anyway, but the side missions in inFamous are also repetitive from a story point of view. To give an example, several of the side missions early on in the game require you to go round and destroy infected water towers. That’s the exact same task you’ve just done and completed in the main story, where it looked like you’d eliminated that particularly threat. These missions don’t actually add anything to the tale or your appreciation of the game world and, if anything, they just weaken the overall narrative.

Another way developers try to make their open worlds seem less empty is by shoe-horning in mini-games. You know the sort of thing; point to point races, timed treasure hunts, random destruction or escort missions. Tasks pretty much unrelated to the main narrative. Some games successfully manage to explain the mini-games existence in the game world but too often they just feel false. Unless the environment is pitched as a playground rather than a narrative space, such as in Crackdown for example, the mini-games just spoil the illusion of the world the developers have tried so hard to create.

Of course, if your game is built around a single, strong story arc then does it really need to be an open world game? Some developers seem set on creating a sandbox experience whether it’s the best way to deliver their narrative or not. There are other ways of telling the same story.

Fable II, for example, has the feel of an open world game but you’re only really getting selected chunks of the world to walk through. Peel away the environment and you can reduce the game world into a series of carefully designed paths and tunnels. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. You can have more focussed storytelling and less empty spaces. It ensure the optimum use of the developers time as virtually everything they create will actually be seen and used by players. Compare that to a title like Oblivion where whole chunks of the landscape, including any associated missions and other content, will be unexplored by most that play the game.

Even the developers of inFamous realised the advantages of a more traditional level based approach over an open world environment at some points. Any time they wanted to do something really dramatic in the story you were transported to a hemmed in area where they could control the tension and action a lot easier than out in the open city.

I’ll end this random collection of thoughts with a plea to developers. If you’re determined to produce an open world game then please make sure you create enough story to fill it. In a big city there’s a story to be found on every street corner. In an open world game it should be the same.

My name is Strident and I’m a badgeaholic. An achieveomaniac. A trophy junkie. Whatever you want to call me, I am obsessed with reward systems in games.

I wasn’t always the same. In the old days, in the time before achievements and trophies, I could quite happily play games just for sheer pleasure alone. Now I’m older, my time seems more precious and those on-screen notifications of each new accomplishment allow me to kid myself that I’m doing something productive when I’m gaming; even though those points and trophies have no real-life value. So why do gamers get so obsessed with accumulating virtual rewards? Systems, like Microsoft’s Achievements, speak to the inner collector in many of us, prodding our hunter-gatherer instincts into life.

As a child you spend your time being constantly rewarded, or at least being asked to seek rewards from society. Good behaviour earns stickers and treats. Outstanding or landmark performances bring certificates and awards. Whole organisations, like the Scouts, are based around completing specific targets in order to work towards badges. After just a few years of life you quickly amass a collection of paper, cloth and cardboard that forms a physical representation of your accomplishments.

It’s not long before most children find themselves looking around for other things to collect. Whether it’s pens, thimbles, beany bears, paper weights, soaps, rubbers (erasers to our US friends!), stamps or coins. It’s not just hobby of the young, though, even in adulthood people still obsessively collect. As a species we seem to have some strong innate impulse to gather together objects, although different types of collector are motivated by different things.

To some, the quantity rather than the quality of items is important; they just want to have as big a collection as possible. Others are completists and obsessively try to collect everything, a feat that’s pretty much impossible in areas like stamps and coins. Some people are solely attracted by rare items and prefer to build collections of unique or hard to find objects.

To community collectors the draw of a group of likeminded individuals is often more valuable than the actual act of collecting itself. Then there are the investors, those that collect for future financial or personal gain, and the curators, those seeking to produce a record for future generations.

Just as there are a whole range of different motivations for collecting real-world items there are also a similar selection of reasons why people enjoy obtaining trophies and achievements. You can see the behaviour of collectors mirrored in the gaming community even though the reward badges being collected only exist virtually.

The quantity collectors are represented by those who are always striving towards a bigger Gamerscore. They determine their position in the pecking order of their community by the sheer number of points or trophies that they have obtained.

The completist collectors of the gaming world are those that try to finish one hundred per cent of every single game they own. The unique collectors, who get their buzz from collecting rare items, are the ones that particularly enjoy chasing the really difficult or time-consuming achievements.

Driven by their desire to help others, the community collectors are the ones running and contributing to the gaming help sites. Writing a decent guide, to help others collect achievements, is just as important to them as collecting those rewards themselves.

The curators, in gaming reward system terms, are those who collect achievements in order to document their play. To them, their trophy list is like a diary. It helps them record the fact that they beat a certain boss or aced a specific challenge.

There has been talk about how reward systems, such as those implemented by Microsoft and Sony, are bad for gaming but it’s important to realise they can add a lot of value and an extra level of interest to the hobby for some people. There are lots of different reasons why achievements and trophies can be important to those that enjoy collecting them, it’s not always just about trying to obtain a bigger Gamerscore than everyone else.