What's up with all this achievement tomfoolery? Not that I'm complaining. I'm always thrilled to show off my mad "normal mode" achievement skills and utter failure to get some of the easiest achievements in Mass Effect 2. (Seriously, I've incinerated dozens of armored enemies' armor away and it somehow only counts as 4? Get out, BioWare. Just get out right now. But make sure my Shepard doesn't freeze in place while being mauled to death by a YMIR mech again first.)

I like how most of my "rare" achievements are from a game I haven't played in six months or so--World of Warcraft; good night, sweet prince. That's never going to go away, either. I'm sure I'll be getting messages about that, to the effect of "scrub didn't even hit 80" or "hay want 2 join my guild were coo!!" No. NO!

There was a point here somewhere. Probably something about how I'm not sure what I think of this whole thing. I like getting achievements, don't get me wrong, but it seems like we should only take this whole, "show off achievements to all your friends like 360 Kid," thing so far.

Maybe I'm just a traditionalist in that respect, but it seems like, while this is a cool feature for the suckers who want to do it (see: me), we're getting a lot of unnecessary and even redundant media convergence here. Last I knew, both Facebook and MySpace had similar systems built in by third parties. Not that I'm lumping GameSpot in with the likes of them, but it seems strange that social networking sites beat an actual gaming site to the punch by over a year.

Speaking of Facebook, I'm seeing now (weeks or months late, as I've made a concentrated effort to ignore it) that I can link my GameSpot account to my Facebook account. Good Lord, when will the madness end? I can now have my Facebook stalkers lurk on my GameSpot profile (or indeed vice-versa)? Stalkers are flattering and all, but I do like to keep certain aspects of my life separate. For instance, my almost-nonexistent social life and my gaming life. You dangle a connection between the two in front of me long enough, and I will get curious, despite knowing I'll sorely regret it.

I think I said earlier on that there was a point to this thing somewhere, but I might have been mistaken at the time of writing. At this point, who can tell? Not this guy.

What do you guys think of all this newfangled achievement stuff?