In Pursuit of Platinum: 15 Games, 1 Down, umm.. 15 to Go

“No more game purchases till I achieve 100% or Platinum on all of the games I’ve purchased,” is the goal, and while renting should keep me up to date as far as the newest Playstation going ons, I’ve just realized that PSN games mean no renting available.

Super Stardust Portable, I’ll see you in 2010. Maybe.

In good news this week, I finally received my first Platinum Trophy for completing 100% of the Trophy challenges in Call of Duty: World at War. Yay!

Call of Duty: World at War: 100%
Continuing from last week, I decided I needed a break from slugging it through the game on Veteran, so I switched modes and went gunning for, what I call “stunt Trophies,” things like “Shoot 3 enemies with one bullet,” and the like. The one that gave me the most trouble involved pistol shooting someone from sniper range. I’ve done stuff like it before in other games, but in this situation, the target was so small, and holding the gun up to aim pretty much covered him from my view. A glitch that gave me way more ammo than I should have had may have helped me out on this one.

But what glitch giveth, glitch can take away as my save game from just after my two hour battle to the first checkpoint in “Relentless” mysteriously decided not to work anymore (something about not being compatible with my version of the game.), sending me back to the beginning to try it all over again. Sucked, but by the end of that level, I think I learned something. COD on Veteran is less like a modern video game and more like real life.

Back in the day, cheap deaths kept the quarters flowing at the arcades, but in modern games, cheap deaths are frowned upon. A developer should always give the player at least some chance of getting through a scenario without unavoidable death. If an enemy is going to shoot me, I should at least be shown that it’s going happen before it happens. COD does a pretty good job. Not so at Veteran level. At Veteran, I stand up for more than two seconds and I usually get a bullet through the side of my face. I’ve never been in real combat, but I imagine that must be what it can be like. So the trick is to be safe, keep low and stay behind cover.

I continued to die frequently after learning my lesson, but not nearly as much as before, and when I finally raised the Russian flag over Berlin, well, I really felt that I had achieved something to be proud of.

Resistance 2: 46%
Working towards that one million XP and 10,000 kills in ranked competitive seems a bit easier after COD. Actually, I think it’s just very refreshing to be playing with other, real live people again. I’ve heard that Skirmish yields the most XP, with me netting about 10,000 XP per game. If I can keep that up, then I’m only 80 some games away from one million. Kills, on the other hand, are probably going to take me much longer. On my best days, I can get about 20 per game, but usually, I get closer to 10, which means that I’m about 900 games away from that Trophy. The battle rages on…

On the co-op side, well, I’m not quite there yet.

I did finally complete the single player campaign on Difficult though, so I’m on my way to getting through it on Superhuman. Would it have killed them to give me something for getting through on Difficult? A “pat on the back” right there would have been great.

Blast Factor: 14%
I thought I had knocked a game off my list, and while I have, the gaming powers that be have seen to it that I get another to take its place, as Trophies support was patched into Blast Factor this past week. Fortunately, I feel that I’m pretty good at twiddle my thumbs games like Blast Factor. Bring them on, I say.

I haven’t gotten very deep into the Trophies for this game yet, but so far, there’s a few that I can’t even understand what I’m supposed to do to achieve. Not having the expansion pack may have something to do with it.

All other things aside, it’s great to see even a PS3 launch game getting Trophy support patched in. It seems to me that adding Trophies is the easiest way to boost sales, so everyone should be doing it. I’m looking at you, Metal Gear Solid. Just, don’t do it now. Wait for me to finish all of my other games first.

Originally published on Playstation Gamer Advisory Panel (GAP) 2008-12-08 16:57.