Very good Shamus, I'm glad I'm not the only person that finds achievements immersion breaking. The PS3 ones are slightly better but there should really be a way to just make them silent and invisible.

Susan Arendt:

Just turn off Achievement notification in your profile and voila - no more pop ups ruining the mood.

Well done Susan, you and your pony have revealed me to be a very silly man. Thanks though, now if I could only get the thing to run a little quieter, maybe I should wrap a towel around it.....

Shamus Young:
Wow. I didn't know Achievement notification could be turned off, either. It's actually something I'd want to do on a per-game basis. God of War? Sure. Silent Hill? Not so much.

I've only recently been dragged, kicking and screaming, into the current-gen consoles.

Maybe developers should be given the option to set a default for the notifications? Like you say, some games it makes things better, others it can really spoil the atmosphere.

So what's Mr Young's opinion? Disappointed?

Susan Arendt:
Copy the game to your hard drive (assuming you have the room to do so) and play from there. It's soooooo much nicer. I do that with all of my 360 games now.

Have done it with Fallout 3 and I can't say there's been any difference at all. It seems to be a pointless exercise to myself, except it's a fairly good way to use up that spare 80GB of space that I had lying around.

Anyways, here's me taking up all of Shamus's comment space. Thanks again for the comic Shamus, see you Friday!

Susan Arendt:
Really, you don't notice any noise difference between using the disc drive and not? Wow, you had one quiet drive, then.

None at all, I guess the noise of the fans drowns it out. I remember my original 360 (now on Elite after the first one died) occasionally made some grinding noises credited to the disk drive but other than that I can't remember the drive being that noisey on that one either.
I'm starting to think that you're the one with the noisey disc drive.....

It's unusual, isn't it, that Shamus' sidebar commentary is somewhat *less* critical of the game than is the comic itself? Usually it goes the other way, at least according to my increasingly dim and unreliable memory.