Ask X3F: Treasured memories edition

Geez, kids, we've got more questions than we can shake a raw hunk of undead flesh at. Trust us when we say that we're capable of shaking a hunk of undead flesh at a lot of questions, but this is overwhelming even to us. Are we to believe that you actually want -- possibly need -- our sage advice? We're truly touched. This week in Ask X3F, we cover child account promotion, saved films, achievement tracking and more. Now please stop touching us. It's creepy.

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Hey guys been a fan of the site for a few months now and am absolutely jealous of what you guys do. I've had this question for a while now and its been killing me that i haven't found an answer yet, and have only now thought of asking X3F. My question is, how come no new games since halo 3 (at least that i know of have not had a saved film feature? Is it just me, or does no one seem to care? It is such a handy useful feature and the only thing that I've heard about that comes close to this is in Gears of War 2 and being able to take screenshots. After Halo 3 came out i thought the saved films feature would become a standard among all upcoming games...I guess I was wrong. Am I crazy? Is there some huge point I'm overlooking? Can you please help me make sense of this?

There's a very simple reason as to why more games haven't included a saved film feature: it's up to the developers. There's no doubt that saved films are pretty awesome, and we've had lots of fun using Halo 3 to make our own super high quality machinima. While there haven't been many games to implement the feature since then, we can think of a couple, most notably Ninja Gaiden II and Duke Nukem 3D. But, as we said, implementing such a feature is entirely up to the developers. It's also not the kind of thing that's likely to become standard anytime soon, as 1) it doesn't really make sense for every game (checkers comes to mind) and 2) it adds money and time to any development cycle.

Still, that doesn't stop you from picking up a video capture device and saving films on your own. There are plenty of cheap video capturing solutions these days, including the EyeTV, which is something we use to do the XBLA in Brief videos every week. Also, if they ever get around to releasing it, Blackmagic has a (Mac only) capture device that will actually capture full HD video from a component source for only $120 (no, seriously, only $120).

For the record: Left 4 Dead is just screaming for a saved film feature.

I was wondering if there is any way to see your total number of achievements in the NXE? With the old dashboard you could go into the achievement section and it would tell me that i had 1700 achievements. Im just wondering because me and a friend are racing to 2000 achievements and now we might not be able to tell who is ahead.

As far as I know, there is no way to check how many achievements you've earned via the NXE (unless you want to add up all the 'X out of X achievements' messages). However, you can track your achievements on the web. Xbox.com, unfortunately, doesn't offer this service, but you can find it elsewhere. For example, we're big fans of MyGamerCard.net. It's easy to set up a profile, and then your achievement total is only a click away. You can also feel free to use their custom gamercards to plaster your gamercard on blogs and other places on the web. For example, here's mine, using the spiffy Cylinder theme.