So I’ve now got myself a Wii, and very nice it is too. However I feel I’m missing something, namely the sense of pointless achievement I get with playing the Xbox 360. If you haven’t seen the online side of the 360, as a player you get points for achieving certain tasks in every game, and built up an overall score, your gamerscore. It is your personal badge of how seriously you take your gaming, how far you’ve got in all your games.
And it goes deeper than that as well, you can compare yourself to your friends, see down to the individual achievement how far they’ve got in a game you both have. I like this, it spurs me on to try and outplay my friends. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t, but I feel it just adds an extra little purpose to gaming.
This I find lacking on the Wii. I don’t know what games my friends have, I can barely play them on any games at the moment (only one, Mario Strikers, and I don’t fancy that), and I don’t know how they’re getting on. In this day and age, you also tend not to be told how far you are through a game, so I don’t get the same sense of progression. As far as I understand it, PS3 has a similar system. I hope Nintendo are going to start to rectify this somehow, but at present there doesn’t seem to be any enthusiasm from them to do so. It’s a shame.