Achievments in Half-Life 2: Episode 2?

[Image: episode 2]

I just got through playing a good hour or so of Episode Two (I know, I know - I should add it to my sidebar. I just redid the site and I’m lazy, OK?) and I kept noticing these little achievement notices popping up in the lower right-hand corner of my screen.

I’m playing on my PC, through Steam, so this surprised me a little bit.

Incidentally and as a complete side note, the closed XBL system means that no independent publisher will ever be able to make a distribution client like Steam is in Windows. Interesting.

Back to achievements. If you hit escape you’ll find a big list of all kinds of possible achievements, which anyone whose been playing Xbox games will be familiar with. A couple of them I’ve already done just for the sake of doing. I always thought that adding achievements to Xbox games was one of the coolest things MS insisted on doing.

Does anyone know if these achievements will be counted on my XBL gamertag? Because if they will be, that might give me a reason to actually post that thing in my sidebar. I’ve had a gamertag for a while, but not a 360 and certainly not an XBL account (I’ll get one when they’re free).

As a result, my gamertag has no gamerscorepoints of any kind. But if Ep2 will give me some…

OK, now that I’ve cracked into that a bit, it’s time for me to dive into Portal, which everyone seems to be enjoying so much.