How to get the “Running the Show” Achievement

Fireworks are triggered when a knight returns a princess to a castle. This means you kill a carriage and don't take the princess.

I used the first HOARD level, because it has the longest expected goal times (so they must expect you to survive longer). I started out each round by killing as many towns as possible, and keeping the archer count down afterwards. Towns give you a nice initial gold boost.

Whenever a magic tower springs up early on, killing it will give you lots of gold (and likely upgrade your dragon). They're also the most annoying thing on the map late-game (second being archers).

Make sure to use powerups - they're great for picking off groups of knights and individual magic towers. As for archers, you can run by them and not die as long as you don't stop.

Once you're good at simply surviving, you have two secondary goals:

1. Kill princess carriages, and let knights take the princesses. When a knight returns a princess to a castle, that triggers fireworks. You need to do this twenty times.

2. Don't get hurt. If you get hurt, you need to take a princess yourself, and that's one less firework :)

It took about a six minute round to get the achievement, after about 45 minutes of practice (and the game was fun enough I didn't mind the practice). When it gets that far into the game, you'll start seeing two or three carriages together you can kill for fireworks.

Are you using the Sixense MotionPack? If so, that might be your problem.

Fix:

It is possible to disable the motionpack by adding the launch option "-nosixense" in Steam. (right click on Portal 2 in the games list, select Properties, then Set Launch Options...)

EDIT: Valve released a patch on October 11, 2011 which solves this issue. Change log of that patch:

• Fixed the Talent Show achievement not being awarded properly