Kevin Gilmartin

A wee bit of Shakespeare to kick off this particular post – the first in a while, for which I am duly repentant.

So I’m a player of games and, until just recently, I thought myself a rather cosmopolitan kind of gamer. I’d play any game, kill any thing on any gaming platform. I’m not a biased person.

A few days ago though a rather worrying thought fleetingly danced across a synapse. I fired up the PC to renew my EVE Online subscription and possibly have a crack at some old X-Beyond the Frontier when I found myself thinking “Why bother…there’s no achievements.”

Well, dear reader, I was in shock and disgust at myself. Have I become….AN ACHIEVEMENT WHORE??

No, of course I haven’t – I love my PC too much to demote it to a jumped up blogging machine. I still love Hitman, and X-Beyond the Frontier and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and all those good old titles that are pushing their teenage years. But it does raise a valid point.

Is the achievement and reward system on Next-Gen consoles killing the art of gameplay for its own sake?

There are of course people who will relentlessly chase achievements until they get all 1000 gamer points, even to the extent of hunting down like minded fok (Chievy Chasers, as I like to call them) to get the online and co-op points nailed. These are the guys who are killing gameplay for themselves. Maybe they enjoy it, but when you come across them in a lobby or in a random game they can quickly suck the joy out of the experience.

For most gamers, myself included, I think achievement systems make us better players. They encourage you to practice certain skills, they instill a sense of patience, and I think ultimately they keep many old games fresh.

I’m not an achievement chaser. If I accumulate points in the course of gameplay then it’s a bonus, but I don’t play a game until it’s exhausted.  The first achievment I ever got was in Crackdown – I’ve still got many to get in that game and the sequel is out soon; hell, I don’t even have all 1000 points for Oblivion!

Hmm, all this talk of playing games has me in the mood now. Some Assassin’s Creed 2 might be just the ticket.

That’s not actually true. In fact it’s a scurrilous lie; as far as I’m aware the guys at Last.fm and the guys at Spotify have no manner of relationship at all.

What is true, however, is that I love both Last.fm AND Spotify but I have to say that I think I’d love each one a little less if not for the other.

The thing I found annoying about Last.fm was that it would play a really great track and then it’s pretty much gone forever. Sure, I can mark it as a ‘loved’ track but I use the free version  and can’t play my Loved Library. So even if I’ve taken a note of the track and the artist it’s going to be a while before I can chase it up and check out more stuff by the same guys. Some of my associates asked why I don’t just download it; I might as well out myself right now as a conscientious objector to the whole music/movie/torrent/limewire downloading thing. I just don’t do it.

So that’s where Spotify comes in. I had a bit of a problem getting started with Spotify at first, because all the music I wanted to listen to was already on my hard drive having been ripped from my CD collection.

My wife is much more in to newer music than I am, so she’d get a lot more use out of Spotify than I did. I’m firmly stuck in 90′s grunge and metal from my early 20s – it’s not that I don’t like new stuff, I’ve just never had the time or an opportunity to discover it. Until now.

Now I’m a new music MACHINE, I TELLS THEE!!

As I struggle with my continuing mission to re-arrange my bookshelves I’m discovering new musical delights at the same time.

With Last.fm running on my XBox 360 I can listen to tag or genre stations as I work. If a particular band or artist grabs me then I have Spotify running on the PC. I simply type in the name and go back to the search results later on. It’s a beautiful thing; both services complement each other so well.

But as is the way of things in our materialistic digital world, I doubt it’s a marriage that’ll last.

Spotify is still in technically Beta – you can only get signed up to the free version if you have a Beta invite. Technically.

I have to wonder how long it’s going to be before the people at Spotify realise that if they incorporate a Last.fm kind of functionality into their client then they can provide a single, enhanced, service to people who are currently using two rival services together. Not long, I’ll wager.

Would that kill off Last.fm? Who’s to say? I for one hope not – it’s a good service and I’ve discovered a few new things through it. If they’re smart they’ll adapt to the threats from opposition and come out of the other side better for it. I do think that Last.fm can, and deserves to, survive.

If it does come to the crunch, though, and legal free music services start battling it out then, as they are at the moment, the smart money is on Spotify.