MD's backlog/cleanup Diary

[MD_91]

4 hours ago, Shinoda_2qx said:

Hey, nice thread, I enjoyed reading of your experiences, especially on the games I’ve still got to return to myself. 

 

Don’t give up on Fifa 15! I hated that trophy, but it was so much easier to do with a friend online. 

 

Also, don’t be ashamed of any trash plats, they all form part of your PlayStation journey/story, and you can look back at the dates you earned them to see where you were at at that point. 

 

Good luck with the clean up! 

 

Thanks for reading, we've got quite a few games in common, looks like you've already finished most of the ones I still need to go back to

 

I'll definitely get fifa 15 done eventually but it's one of those where it could take 20 minutes or 5 hours so it's probably getting avoided until I only have difficult stuff left

[MD_91]

 

Cleanup enjoyment = 5/10

Cleanup difficulty = 5/10

 

Very good puzzle game apart from a couple of design choices that left me frustrated. Having a time limit isn't really a problem (although I would've enjoyed the game more if it didn't have one) but not putting a timer on the screen and instead having to listen for certain sounds to figure out how much time you have left is just stupid, also when you pause the game there's no 'resume' option just quit or retry, maybe it's my fault for just not paying attention but several times I pressed x when paused out of habit to resume the game and got sent back to the main menu which was especially annoying when I was 5 or 6 levels into an 8 level course and had to start from the beginning again.

 

Played most of the game without a guide but ended up having to use one for 4 levels and to complete the 2 hardest courses, even following a guide almost move for move the last course was tough to finish in time.

 

 

Cleanup enjoyment = 3/10

Cleanup difficulty = 6/10

 

Maybe if I'd played this in an arcade when I was a kid I would have a different opinion of it but I didn't enjoy this game at all, beat em ups have never really been my style of game and I got bored very quickly, I was getting frustrated with the trophy for completing the game on expert difficulty mainly because I was just trying to rush through it but once I had a bit more patience it was still a bit of a struggle but much more doable.

 

 

Cleanup enjoyment = 3/10

Cleanup difficulty = 4/10

 

Pretty similar to the first Sonic where you can save whenever you want removing most of the difficulty but the bonus stages for collecting the chaos emeralds are much harder in this one, even when abusing saves I struggled on a couple of sections getting them.

 

I didn't have nostalgia to help me enjoy this a bit more like I did for the first one, I hate the way Sonic controls especially with the way he just slides off platforms after you've jumped and landed on them, I'm hoping when I go back to Sonic Generations it will leave me with a better impression of this series.

[AihaLoveleaf]

Just wanted to say that I like the concept of this thread. I'm also cleaning up super old games that I picked up and quickly put down 8-10 years ago in order to increase my completion percentage. The "cleanup enjoyment" is an interesting metric. The old games I'm playing through have been fun so far, fortunately. It's possible things could start getting boring later on though, we'll see.

 

Anyway, keep up the backlog clearing. It's an interesting read.

[MD_91]

2 hours ago, AihaLoveleaf said:

Just wanted to say that I like the concept of this thread. I'm also cleaning up super old games that I picked up and quickly put down 8-10 years ago in order to increase my completion percentage. The "cleanup enjoyment" is an interesting metric. The old games I'm playing through have been fun so far, fortunately. It's possible things could start getting boring later on though, we'll see.

 

Anyway, keep up the backlog clearing. It's an interesting read.

 

Thanks, the low amount of games on your account hopefully means you don't really have anything that will feel like a chore to go back to, I wish I'd been more selective in the past especially with some of the free ps plus games I tried out 

[MD_91]

 

Cleanup enjoyment = 4/10

Cleanup difficulty = 1/10

 

Just needed the dlc for the 100%, it's split up into 5 different stories none of which last longer than 20 minutes and being so short they don't give you much of a chance of getting invested, I thought 1 of the stories was pretty good, 2 were average and 2 were weak, just adding 10 minutes to each one could've made a big difference instead of it just being some quick filler between season 1 and 2.

 

Worst thing about this was the trophy for winning a game of rock paper scissors, it took me 9 attempts and each time you fail you have to sit through about 8 minutes of dialog before you can try again which meant this stupid rng trophy took me about as long as the rest of the dlc and dropped my rating of it from a 6 to a 4.

 

 

Cleanup enjoyment = 4/10

Cleanup difficulty = 3/10

 

Another decent puzzle game, I still had the hardest difficulty levels in the base game left and had to buy dlc that had even harder levels, I did most of the base game myself and then just ended up using a guide for the dlc, felt a bit cheap putting no effort into it but it would've probably taken me over 10 hours figuring it out myself and I'd rather use that time for other games.

 

 

 

Cleanup enjoyment = 3/10

Cleanup difficulty = 2/10

 

4 more fifas to clean up and then I'll be done with this series thankfully, took about 6 hours to play the 30 games I needed for the still achievable trophies so at least it wasn't much of a grind compared to some of the others.

 

[MD_91]

 

Cleanup enjoyment = 1/10

Cleanup difficulty = 1/10

 

This was my first experience of an episodic game before any of the Telltale ones and I remember enjoying it on my first playthough, the main difference between this and the TT games is this relies on puzzle solving rather than dialog choices, also all but 1 of the trophies are missable. I was only missing a few trophies from 3 of the episodes and I didn't really feel like playing the whole game again so I just followed a guide to finish what I was missing.

 

 

Cleanup enjoyment = 2/10

Cleanup difficulty 3/10

 

Just had to do the dlc for this and I didn't enjoy it at all, cheap rubberbanding AI for the single player challenges and badly laid out objectives for the online, there's no private lobbies and the servers were busier than I was expecting making it impossible to boost unless you can get at least 4 or 5 people together at once so I ended up just doing it mostly by myself.

 

I don't mind having to actually put some effort in but because of the way they've done it a big chunk of the 20 hours it took me to complete was spent achieving nothing, there are 20 online objectives but only 3 are unlocked at a time with the first ones only being achievable with tier 4 cars, a session consists of 2 to 4 races and will be either tier 4, 5 or 6.

 

At the end of a session the lobby will vote on what tier they want the next session to be out of 2 choices and this is where the problem starts, say you enter a lobby and the only 3 objectives you have available right now are for tier 5 cars, you have no control over what tier you enter so they could be halfway through a tier 6 session, you wait for them to finish and then if you're lucky it could be a vote between tier 5 and tier 4 but if the majority only have tier 4 objectives unlocked you get outvoted and then have to sit through another 3 or 4 races for another vote but since there's only 2 options to vote for at a time it might not even include the tier you need let alone it not being voted for, I don't want to ramble too much because there's other problems with it as well but hopefully you get the idea of why this was so frustrating.

 

The only reason this doesn't get a 1 for enjoyment is because there was at least some fun in the racing but I would probably say this is the least enjoyable cleanup I've done, most of the low scores I've given so far were for games that I was just finishing up in the background while listening to a podcast or watching a video and I'm not really sure how to score something like that but this actually earned its low score for being genuinely unenjoyable to complete.

 

 

Cleanup enjoyment = 6/10

Cleanup difficulty = 3/10

 

Basically a modern version of space invaders, not too difficult as long as you use your money wisely for ship upgrades and can be completed in about 2 hours if you are efficient, consists of 5 worlds with 20 waves each with a boss at the end, if you die you get sent back to the start of the world you are on but you can just save the game at the start of each wave and reload if you die making it even easier, as far as fast games to complete go this is definitely one of the more enjoyable ones.

[MD_91]

 

Cleanup enjoyment = 5/10

Cleanup difficulty = 4/10

 

Was just missing the trophies for beating the final boss and collecting the orbs, from what I remember of the first time I played this my ps3 froze as I was fighting the final boss and my save got corrupted, I didn't have a backup so I just sold my copy of the game without finishing it.

Coming back to it I didn't want to rely on debug mode but after doing a full playthrough of the story and getting 300 orbs without a guide I used it to get the last trophy for 600 orbs because I'd had enough of the game at that point, most of the difficulty comes from the camera being awful and I just don't really like the direction they went with Jak 2 and 3 compared to the original.

 

 

Cleanup enjoyment = 7/10

Cleanup difficulty = 6/10

 

Challenge mode is where pretty much all of the difficulty comes from for this game, instead of a generic "win gold in this event" you have certain requirements to complete, the last challenge in the game is by far the hardest where you have to lap an opponent in speed skating within 10 laps. To do it you need to take every corner pretty much perfectly and get green timing on nearly all your footsteps on the straights to maintain your speed, I think I had bad timing on 4 footsteps of about 80 and managed to lap the opponent on the very last corner, it didn't actually take me as many attempts as I thought it would but I was definitely a bit lucky to do it on that run, I always really enjoy the olympic themed games and I'm looking forward to getting the new one done especially since I can use a trial of ps now to play it for free.

[FreshFromThaDeli]

I just want to say you have made a staggering amount of progress since 20th April 2021. You have achieved 70% completion already! I don't know how you managed to do that so quickly especially with the good quality of the games you gone back to play that are both challenging and time consuming. Keep up the amazing progress.

[MD_91]

 

Not much progress on my backlog over the last week as I wanted to get as much value as I could out of my 1 week trial of ps now, Tokyo 2020 was decent but not as good as previous Olympic games so I'm glad I didn't pay to play it, I was disappointed with the trophy list as it mainly just consists of playing everything a couple of times rather than requiring any skill or real learning of the game to get the platinum. Obviously I could just challenge myself by doing something like trying to get a gold medal in every event but I just can't play games with that mindset anymore, my enjoyment comes from working towards trophies in a game and once I've completed what the trophy list is asking of me I just want to move on, it's one of the negative effects the introduction of trophies has had on my gaming but on the flip side a good trophy list can get me to play and appreciate games in ways that I otherwise wouldn't think about trying.

 

I decided to play Sonic the Fighters mainly because I knew it was some quick and easy trophies while I waited for Tokyo 2020 to download then I noticed Sonic 4 Ep 2 was available, since I already had Sonic 4 Ep 1 to go back to I decided I may as well play it, I found it much more enjoyable than Sonic 1 and 2 were and seeing the large amount of Sonic games on ps now has given me a new goal of eventually completing every Sonic game on this account, I chose Sonic CD next because it looked to have the quickest completion time of the remaining Sonics and with only a couple days left on my trial I didn't want to start a 20+ hour game, the next time ps now subscriptions go on sale I'll go back to the rest that are on there. Playing Daytona USA made me realise another goal I would like to work towards is getting my average trophy rarity under 40%, it's currently at 41.19% so it's definitely doable I just need to cut out the urge of playing games just for easy trophies, I'm never going to get high up the leaderboards anyway so boosting my trophy count with games like that is pointless.

 

 

 

Cleanup enjoyment = 5/10

Cleanup difficulty = 4/10

 

I enjoyed episode 2 a lot more than 1 mainly down to level design, some of the levels in this one just felt like a chore to go through and I also liked the use of Tails in ep 2, makes me wish I'd completed this before playing 2 as I would probably have a better opinion of it but I still think it did a decent job of modernising the series. The Untouchable trophy for beating the final boss without taking a hit took me way longer than it should've, none of the 5 phases are particularly difficult but 2 of them rely on some rng and Sonic's homing attack didn't always consistently work causing me some stupid deaths, I'm definitely developing a love hate relationship with Sonic games that I'm now committed to until I've experienced them all.

 

 

 

Cleanup Progress: 20th June 2021 - 20th July 2021

315 games played/121 completed - 320 games played/137 completed

Completion % - 68.68% - Completion % - 70.36%

3558 unearned trophies - 3387 unearned trophies

 

Feels good to get the completion rate over 70% and unearned trophies under 3400, definitely happened faster than I was expecting but I've picked through a lot of the quick or easy stuff so I'm expecting progress to start slowing down. Not included in the completed games are 6 games that I've cleaned up and only have unobtainables left meaning I still have 177 games to go through, that's 12 games down in the last month which definitely isn't a sustainable rate but even at that pace it will take me at least another 15 months to get through everything.

 

[MD_91]

 

Cleanup enjoyment = 2/10

Cleanup difficulty = 1/10

 

Extremely easy but extremely boring platinum, thankfully I was able to simulate a big chunk of matches or it would have taken a lot longer than the 20 hours it took me to get through everything I still needed to do, the best thing I can say about this game is it has no online trophies so it doesn't have to join the big pile of unobtainable pes and fifa plats I already have.

 

 

Cleanup enjoyment = 6/10

Cleanup difficulty = 4/10

 

Definitely my favourite Sonic game out of the ones I've played so far but it still has issues, going into it I was looking forward to the 3D levels the most but they ended up being the weaker part of the game mainly because of technical issues, the levels were fun to play but multiple times the camera would just break and get stuck because it couldn't keep up with the changes of direction and the inconsistent homing attack caused me a lot of annoying deaths because it refused to lock on to what I was aiming at.

 

Being able to unlock and equip skills makes a big difference mainly because of the Power Brake skill, it allows Sonic to stop instantly no matter how fast he's going which was especially noticeable when playing as 2D Sonic, instead of sliding into a hazard/enemy or off a platform to his death because you couldn't stop in time like in the older games the controls feel a lot tighter and more responsive which made the 2D levels satisfying to play because if I died I was comfortable knowing it was largely down to my mistake rather than feeling like the game's controls or physics had let me down.

 

Difficulty wise there's nothing too bad and I could rate this as a 3 or 4, getting an S rank in every level didn't take more than a few attempts at most although I'm glad they didn't ask for an S rank in the challenges because that would've raised the difficulty a lot, a couple of the challenges gave me a bit of a problem even just passing them with a D rank but part of that might've been me knowing all I had to do was just complete the challenge so I was being sloppy. There's 5 red star rings in each level and most of them are easy to get with the use of a guide apart from a couple of tricky ones which are in high speed sections where if you miss it you have to restart the level, the worst one for me being in a 3D level where you're going downhill on a skateboard, the timing and speed of the back to back ramps you have to jump off to hit the ring felt very inconsistent and this level was also the worst for the camera breaking. None of the bosses were challenging including the supposed hardest trophy in the game for beating the final boss without being hit although that was frustrating for very different reasons.

 

The final boss has to be a contender for the worst boss in any Sonic game and dropped my score for the game from an 8 to a 6 because of how underwhelmingly bad it was, there were a lot of cool ways they could've gone with this based on the story of the game and it's a shame this is what they came up with. You play as Super Sonic flying through space where you have to fly head first into the boss 3 times to beat him, you can switch between 2D and 3D to catch up to him and dodge attacks although the 2D part is essentially pointless and you're better off staying in 3D the whole time, in saying that though you die if you run out of rings so you have to keep collecting them but in 3D there's so much shit on the screen by the time you see a line of rings you've probably already flown past them. On my first attempt I had no clue what I was doing for most of the fight as the game does a terrible job at attempting to explain the mechanics and then once I had figured it out it was just a very boring and anticlimactic way to end what was otherwise a very enjoyable game.

 

[MD_91]

 

Cleanup enjoyment = 5/10

Cleanup difficulty = 2/10

 

Just had the 2 dlc's to come back to for this and there was a big contrast in quality between them, I started with Year of the Snake and it had me questioning why I had such good memories of this game because of how bad it was. Uninteresting story, boring and repetitive missions and I also had several glitches, the only good thing about it was how short it was so I could be done with it as soon as possible, on its own I would give this a 2 or 3 out of 10.

 

Thankfully the story in Nightmare in North Point was a lot better, the cheesy horror/supernatural theme was fun to play through although like the other dlc it was also extremely short, this had the potential to be pretty good if they'd fleshed it out a bit more and I'd give it an individual score of 7, I don't remember much about the difficulty of the main game but both dlc's were incredibly easy.

 

 

 

Not sure what to do with these 2 games, got all the offline trophies and technically the platinums are still obtainable but the online is completely dead, I had boosting sessions up for a couple of weeks with no responses, I'm not going to count them as completed but it seems pretty unlikely I'll ever go back to them again.

 

 

 

Not backlog related but probably worth mentioning as my new rarest platinum, the only difficulty comes from the tennis school where you have to complete 10 challenges, (actually 9 as you don't even need to do the last and hardest one) I assume the rarity is mainly down to the lack of a guide until recently and also the extremely boring grind you have to put in to get enough coins for all of the equipment, my total playtime probably ended up somewhere between 60 and 70 hours and at least 40 of that was me just grinding for coins, probably the best tennis game of the last 10 years although that's not saying much with the lack of quality ever since top spin 4.

 

 

 

Cleanup Progress: 20th July 2021 - 20th August 2021

320 games played/137 completed - 321 games played/141 completed

Completion % - 70.36% - Completion % - 71.62%

3387 unearned trophies - 3251 unearned trophies

[MD_91]

 

Cleanup enjoyment = 7/10

Cleanup difficulty = 4/10

 

Probably one of my favourite need for speed games, coming back to it I still needed most of the collectibles, 3 starring all the activities and to complete the dlc, the collectibles were mostly easy to get although there were a couple awkward ones and getting 3 stars on every activity wasn't as tough as I initially thought it would be, I'd read about people struggling with the speed run and drift events in particular but I got used to the drifting pretty quickly and beat most of those in a couple of tries, the main problem with speed runs is traffic getting in the way but if you switch to online free roam rather than doing them offline a lot of the traffic is removed.

 

The dlc consists of 16 "speedcross" events where you have 2 or 3 laps to score a certain amount of points on a special course, you gain points by drifting, jumps, fast speed and smashing boxes, it basically just combines the activities from the main game into a course. Overall I found the dlc pretty fun but a big problem I had with it was it was far too easy, on every event I had achieved the target score before the end of the first lap and by the last couple of events I was starting to get bored, I didn't need it to be frustratingly hard but the score targets being 50% or so higher would've at least meant I actually had to try a bit to beat it, I think even the devs were aware of how easy it was as in the final event there was a line of dialogue mentioning how I'd smashed the score without even completing half the course.

 

 

Cleanup enjoyment = 4/10

Cleanup difficulty = 5/10

 

With a 1 month sub of ps now being available for £1 I thought I may as well take advantage of it and this happened to be on there which is useful since I no longer have my copy of it. I have no memory of why or when I initally played this but coming back to it I really didn't enjoy it, probably more of a case of me being bad at the game rather than it being a bad game but most of the bike races were a constant struggle of just trying not to crash going round a corner, over a jump or getting knocked off my bike by the AI, the events where I could use 4 wheel vehicles were a lot less frustrating. 

 

Wasn't sure I would be able to get all the offline trophies when I started playing because of how much I sucked but it ended up being not too bad, winning all 81 events was easier than I thought apart from a random difficulty spike on 1 race and getting all the gold medals in the free ride events was easy with a guide, the servers went down years ago so the remaining trophies are unobtainable.

 

 

Trying to get as much value out of my month of ps now as I can so I ended up playing these, I'll try and get something else done on my backlog that I don't still own a copy of before it expires I'm just not sure what I feel like playing.

 

Never played Crazy Taxi when I was younger but I've always been interested in it, having now played it I wish I hadn't bothered as I think it's aged pretty badly and I hated the physics, I wouldn't recommend playing it if you don't have nostalgia for it.

 

If you like the show I would recommend playing Adventure Time, fairly fun and easy plat although the simple turn based combat started to get a bit repetitive near the end, playing this felt like a watered down version of South Park: The Stick of Truth.

 

Not as good as the Trials games and nowhere near as difficult but I think Urban Trial Freestyle is worth playing if you are a fan of those games.

[DrunkenEngineer]

Man, you are still cranking away and making tons of progress!

[MD_91]

 

Cleanup enjoyment = 2/10

Cleanup difficulty = 1/10

 

Basically the same as my cleanup for PES 2014 as they mostly copy and pasted the trophy lists apart from adding some online trophies to this one which are now unobtainable.

 

 

 

Cleanup enjoyment = 5/10

Cleanup difficulty = 4/10

 

Can definitely understand why people love this game for the aesthetics (especially for a 20 year old game) and the atmosphere but I found the actual gameplay to be pretty terrible (even for a 20 year old game) and most of my time spent playing this was me being frustrated and not appreciating the positive things about it.

 

Biggest problems I had with it were one of the worst cameras I've ever experienced in a game and the braindead AI of Yorda, a girl you find trapped in a cage and need to escort out of a castle you are trying to escape, she probably had a dislocated shoulder by the end of the game with the way I was dragging her by the arm through every area as she couldn't be trusted to follow instructions. 

 

I've seen people say the AI is stupid by design which makes sense to some degree and it wouldn't have been as much of an issue if they hadn't decided to include a speedrun trophy, I don't understand why they included this as it clearly wasn't a game designed with the intention of being rushed through and a speedrun just highlights the bad mechanics.

 

Journey is the game that kept popping into my head as I played through this in what felt like the most similar experience, I struggled to get invested into either one (this game more because of how much I disliked the gameplay) but if you enjoyed Journey I think this is worth playing.

 

 

 

God of War has never really interested me but always felt like a Playstation series that I needed to try out at some point, wanted to make use of the remaining week of my ps now sub and saw this on there so it seemed like a good time to finally play it.

 

I've never seen more than a couple of minutes from any of the games so didn't know much about the story or gameplay, more button mashing than I would've liked but overall I enjoyed this, despite being 15 years old and the first in the series I think it has aged pretty well and has made me look forward to playing the rest of them in the future.

 

 

 

Cleanup Progress: 20th August 2021 - 20th September 2021

321 games played/141 completed - 325 games played/147 completed

Completion % - 71.62% - Completion % - 72.65%

3251 unearned trophies - 3179 unearned trophies

[MD_91]

 

Cleanup enjoyment = 5/10

Cleanup difficulty = 2/10

 

Football management sim, not much to say about this as there's not much depth to it tactically and can be completed in under 5 hours. I enjoyed the first couple hours but then I was already at the point where my team was strong enough that I didn't have to pay attention so the last few hours were just mashing buttons to get through the menus as quick as possible for the remaning trophies.

 

 

 

Cleanup enjoyment = 4/10

Cleanup difficulty = 3/10

 

Just needed to complete the Valley of the Yetis dlc, I've looked at buying it a few times over the years but always felt the price was too steep and it rarely ever seemed to go on sale, when I finally did notice it on sale a couple of weeks ago any real interest I had to play it had been replaced by "I can finally get this out of the way". 

 

Didn't help that I hadn't played a Far Cry game in almost 4 years so felt pretty rusty going straight into the dlc with no tutorial and the first few hours were a struggle, started to enjoy it more nearer the end but I didn't find the Yetis or the story around them very interesting.

 

 

 

Cleanup enjoyment = 4/10

Cleanup difficulty = 2/10

 

Decided to clean up both at the same time as 1 month of EA play was on sale allowing me to go back to the PS4 version and all I had left still obtainable on the PS3 version was the offline party pack dlc, the dlc has been delisted but is included in the physical version of the ultimate edition so I just bought a cheap copy of that.

 

Sucks that I can't get the 100% on the ps3 version as it's one of my favourite ps3 games, my first platinum and the second game I ever earned a trophy in, I was expecting to have to boost the remaining online trophies for the ps4 version but thanks to some helpful people in random lobbies it was easier than I thought.

 

 

 

Cleanup enjoyment = 3/10

Cleanup difficulty = 4/10

 

Also used EA play for this as I sold my copy a few months ago, I'll take this as a sign that I'm tired of the NFS series because I don't think this is necessarily a bad game but this was the least fun I've had playing a Need for Speed, for some reason it always felt like a chore to play and I was just bored throughout even though it's not much different from NFS Payback which I really liked.

 

This game was sort of the unofficial start of me deciding to clean up my account as when I came back to it at the start of April I hadn't touched it since January 2020, I wanted to at least play through the story and get the easy trophies done and then a couple days after selling it I decided I wanted to actually go for every obtainable trophy on my account which meant coming back to this for the more tedious stuff mainly being to 3 star every activity.

 

Very similar to Payback in the amount of activities and the difficulty of them but the amount of traffic in this is far worse and unlike in Payback playing in an online lobby doesn't reduce it which made a couple of the speedtraps especially frustrating. Even more frustrating was when the trophy for 3 starring every activity then didn't pop at the same time as the trophy for getting every collectible and 3 starring all activities, I just started redoing random activities and thankfully it popped about 5 minutes later, very glad I didn't have to redo all of them but now those trophies are out of order which just sums up what an annoying experience this game was to play and my hype for the next NFS that is meant to be coming next year is now non existent.

[MD_91]

 

Cleanup enjoyment = 8/10

Cleanup difficulty = 6/10

 

Definitely wouldn't have expected to be mentioning a casual puzzle game like Peggle as one of my proudest completions but it's up there for a couple of reasons, it's one of the most difficult games I've completed (which highlights the lack of hard games I've beaten and gives me extra motivation for when I get around to some of the tougher unfinished games on my list) and I initially thought the 100% was impossible as the dlc was delisted years ago.

 

Turned out Peggle and the Peggle Nights dlc are included on the physical version of Plants vs Zombies which only had a NA release so finding a copy of that for a reasonable price felt like an achievement (or trophy) in itself, when I first checked ebay and amazon there were barely any listings and nothing for less than £60 which I wasn't going to pay, I decided to just check every couple of days and about a month ago I noticed a listing for £27 so I bought it pretty much instantly. Still felt like a silly amount to pay for some dlc that was probably £5 when it was on the store but it's also a sign of how much I enjoy this game that I didn't hesitate to buy it, I've still been checking listings over the last month out of curiosity and haven't seen anything come up for cheaper than £50 so I've actually made a profit out of completing this.

 

Peggle is a pretty simplistic game, on a standard level you start with 10 balls and the screen is filled with about 75 blue, 2 green and 25 orange pegs and to beat the level you have to remove all of the orange ones, the green pegs will trigger a different powerup depending on which "master" you are using which will be things like multiball or a guide for precision aiming. Challenges will require you to do things like beating a level starting with only 1 ball, beating 3 levels with a cumulative score of 750k or beating 10 random levels in a row without failing.

 

I'm not sure how to actually rate the difficulty as I feel it's almost as much about luck and persistence as it is skill as besides where you decide to aim the first shot you will likely never play a level the exact same way twice. Most of the 75 challenges weren't too bad but the real time consuming bit was clearing every peg in all 55 levels, there were quite a few that easily took me over an hour of attempts each and I was chipping away at it for about 4 months, it was a grind but it never got boring or frustrating thanks to the simple but addictive gameplay.

 

 

 

Cleanup enjoyment = 4/10

Cleanup difficulty = 2/10

 

With most of the still obtainable trophies being achieved through career mode it would have been much more fun if I'd played on a harder difficulty but with so many games to get through I decided to just get it done as efficiently as possible, still hoping for a Top Spin 5 someday or just a good new tennis game that I can put some proper time into.

 

 

 

Cleanup enjoyment = 3/10

Cleanup difficulty = 2/10

 

This was actually the last PS3 game I played for over 7 years right before I got my PS4, pretty annoyed at myself now looking back that I never touched the online despite most of the trophies being pretty easy, coming back to it now the still obtainable stuff only took me an hour.

 

 

 

Cleanup enjoyment = 1/10

Cleanup difficulty = 3/10

 

Only had 2 obtainable trophies left for this, the first one only took 5 minutes but then the one for all 150 collectibles took me about 6 hours of following a guide, 6 hours is nothing really when compared to really grindy trophies but I started it thinking I could get it done in about 2 hours which made it feel so much longer by the time I'd finished.

 

 

 

6 months since start of cleanup

304 games played/83 completed - 328 games played/155 completed

Completion % - 64.5% (estimate) - Completion % - 73.65%

3892 unearned trophies - 3096 unearned trophies

 

 

Wasn't expecting to make this much progress so quickly but I ended up having a ton of free time over the summer which helped a lot, my initial goal was just to get under 3000 unearned trophies which has turned into my end of year goal, I'm a lot busier with work now and I still want to mix in some new games but it should be easily doable.

 

I said in July when my average rarity was 41.19% that I wanted to get it under 40 and it's already down to 40.26%, looking at my trophy advisor I only have 114 unearned trophies left higher than 40% rarity so it's something I don't really need to focus on as it will happen naturally, even if I add some new games with high rarities (which is guaranteed especially when I eventually get a PS5 looking at some of the games I'll want to play) it shouldn't affect it much.

 

I've basically doubled the amount of completed games since I started which is pretty crazy, not included in completed are 15 games where I've gone back and gotten all the remaining obtainables which would technically take me to 170 completed, I'm already at 107 unobtainable trophies from those 15 and I know it's going to get a lot higher from some of the games I haven't gone back to yet, me completing the online portions of games in the past was the equivalent of trying to get a child to eat the vegetables in their meal and it's coming back to haunt me now ?

[FreshFromThaDeli]

Amazing progress in only 6 months! You have achieved what I did in 1 year and a half in terms of completion percentage. Keep it up! ?

[MD_91]

 

Cleanup enjoyment = 5/10

Cleanup difficulty = 1/10

 

Just had 2 career mode related trophies left, the quickest you can finish it is 51 fights unbeaten so I decided to play on the easiest difficulty, there's an exploit where you can max out your stamina and power which I used and then just went into every fight swinging like a madman winning most fights with a 1st or 2nd round KO and because the knockdowns are so satisfying in this game it was fun despite the lack of a challenge.

 

 

 

Cleanup enjoyment = 3/10

Cleanup difficulty = 1/10

 

Telltale style game but with even less gameplay as the only controls are left and right to select dialogue and the occasional x button to perform an action, it can be completed in 3 playthroughs (inlcuding backing up and reloading your save at certain points) but took me 4 as I did a blind run 2 years ago and then left it until now.

 

As a single playthrough I would give it a 5 or 6 out of 10, I liked the graphics and soundtrack but thought the story was average at best with the apes side of the story a lot more enjoyable than the humans. Pretty short game with a playthrough only taking about 4 hours but having to sit there following a guide 3 times got boring very fast, if you like story based games I would recommend this but only if it goes on sale.

 

 

 

Cleanup enjoyment = 2/10

Cleanup difficulty = 3/10

 

Pretty sure I liked this when I first played it but coming back to it now it just feels like a less enjoyable version of Burnout Paradise, the collectibles are glitchy and not tracked well in game, I had to complete the requirements for a couple of trophies several times before they would unlock and one of the trophy descriptions is just wrong making this a pretty annoying experience to get the platinum.

 

The only real positive I got out of coming back to this is now I have the platinum for every Need for Speed game that I've played on my profile, the dlc is still available but unless I change my mind for some reason there's no way I'm paying £24.99 for it as they don't deserve that amount of money for this mess and from looking at some of the requirements the dlc doesn't look fun to complete anyway, the dlc for NFS Hot Pursuit has been delisted meaning I can't get the 100% for every NFS on my profile which makes the decision easier as well.

 

 

 

Cleanup enjoyment = 7/10

Cleanup difficulty = 6/10

 

Has to be one of the weirdest trophy lists on this site, 15 easy ultra rares that can be completed in under 30 minutes but then the remaining trophy can take anywhere from 6 to 20 hours depending on your skill level. I completed about half of the 500 challenges when I first played this but left all of the hard ones, I actually came back to it a couple of months ago but after struggling with some of the harder challenges put it off again till now. 

 

Actually wasn't as difficult as I thought it would be after playing for a couple of hours and getting familiar with it again, I had to watch a video for 1 challenge because I couldn't figure out how to get enough momentum to perform the trick required (turned out I was trying to do it on the wrong part of the level even though it seemed like the only place to do it) but everything else I completed myself after enough attempts and this was a very satisfying completion.

[MD_91]

 

Cleanup enjoyment = 5/10

Cleanup difficulty = 2/10

 

Very unique puzzle/platformer game that I would definitely recommend if you want a good challenge (all of the challenge comes from the puzzle solving side of it), it got too difficult for my tiny brain but even doing a completely guided playthrough I really enjoyed the look of the game and the soundtrack.

 

According to my save file from when I first played this I got about 60% through before I assume I got stuck/lost and gave up and given that you need 209% to complete it I really didn't get very far. 

 

Coming back to it I decided it was best to just start a new save and follow a guide the whole way through and I'm glad I did as I have no idea how you would figure out every puzzle/find every collectible playing it blind without putting a serious amount of time into it, I appreciate the complexity of this game but I just wanted the remaining trophies as efficiently as possible and a fully guided run took me about 6 hours.

 

 

 

Cleanup enjoyment = 3/10

Cleanup difficulty = 2/10

 

Not much to say about this apart from it being an annual wrestling game, definitely an annoying one to look back at as the 4 online trophies could have been completed in about 10 minutes, all of the offline stuff is pretty easy with the different settings you can use to weaken the AI.

 

 

 

Cleanup enjoyment = 4/10

Cleanup difficulty = 4/10

 

Just needed the trophies for getting the last collectible in the secret area and beating the game with 5 or less deaths. 

 

The secret area was easy enough because despite having to do most of it in the dark they are very generous with checkpoints but the 5 deaths run took me way longer than it should've, I enjoyed this game the first time I played it but this trophy was a chore.

 

Most of the game isn't particularly hard and it only takes about an hour to beat but I had a few failed runs around the 30 and 45 minute marks and one right at the very end because I kept making stupid mistakes and wasting lives at points I shouldn't because I wasn't paying enough attention, I think if the trophy required a deathless run I actually would have done it quicker as it would have forced me to focus the whole way through.

 

 

Cleanup Progress: 20th October 2021 - 20th November 2021

328 games played/155 completed - 329 games played/160 completed

Completion % - 73.65% - Completion % - 74.54%

3096 unearned trophies - 2987 unearned trophies

 

 

That's my intial goal of getting under 3000 unearned trophies achieved already, I think my ultimate goal would be to get under 1000 but it might already be impossible because of server shutdowns and delisted dlc not even including obtainable trophies that are probably just going to be too difficult. 

 

I'm already at 196 unobtainables from 21 games I've gone back through so I would have to average less than 6 each for the remaining 148 games on my profile and it's not like I'm gonna 100% every new game I add in the future either, for now my next target is to get under 2500 which I expect to take a while as the quick and easy stuff I have left is drying up fast now.

[rjkclarke]

I just want to say that you are making such good progress with this.

 

Sometimes I wish I had even half the conviction and the willpower that you seem to have, it'd make me a fair bit more motivated to return to some of my own started games.

 

Every time I look at something like Red Faction Geurilla or Singularity or Assassin's Creed Brotherhood on my list. 

 

I basically just turn into this chap

 

 

 

I Absolutely respect the fact that you always seem to be making such good progress every time that you do a new update.

 

Congrats on Fez as well by the way - I didn't think I'd see someone make my completion time look like a speedrun .... I think mine was like 5 years. I basically did the same thing you did though, I got to like one very specific puzzle that stumped me and I just noped out for years, until playing it last year I think, on one of my own clean-up-athons. Then just did a fresh playthrough - I ended up pretty positive about the game coming out the other side of it.

 

Keep on keeping on and all that - you'll be at 80% completion  in no time!

 

[MD_91]

20 hours ago, rjkclarke said:

I just want to say that you are making such good progress with this.

 

Sometimes I wish I had even half the conviction and the willpower that you seem to have, it'd make me a fair bit more motivated to return to some of my own started games.

 

Thanks, I just wish I'd had some of this conviction 6 or 7 years ago and then I wouldn't be trying to dig my account out of the massive hole it's in now ?

 

You don't have much left to go back to but looking at some of it I can't blame you for not wanting to especially the online stuff

 

20 hours ago, rjkclarke said:

Congrats on Fez as well by the way - I didn't think I'd see someone make my completion time look like a speedrun .... I think mine was like 5 years. I basically did the same thing you did though, I got to like one very specific puzzle that stumped me and I just noped out for years, until playing it last year I think, on one of my own clean-up-athons. Then just did a fresh playthrough - I ended up pretty positive about the game coming out the other side of it.

 

I like that I've got the longest completion time on this site for Fez, may as well be the slowest if I can't be the quickest ?

 

It's a very cool game but even following a guide I almost got lost, there was one point about 3 hours in that I thought I'd gone through the same portal as the guy I was watching but I came out in a completely different area, led to 20 stressful minutes of wandering around until luckily matching up to where I was meant to be because I was starting to think I was going to have to start again, pretty sure it was just another reminder that my attention span is awful rather than anything related to the game though

Edited November 22, 2021 by MD_91

[DrunkenEngineer]

Low-key killing it over here dude, no muss no fuss!

[MD_91]

 

Cleanup enjoyment = 2/10

Cleanup difficulty = 3/10

 

Not going to say much about my general thoughts on this game as I don't want to end up rambling about my problems with it, I somehow managed to avoid spoilers before playing and enjoyed the first 10 hours or so of my first playthrough but by the time I'd reached the end after 28 hours I thought it was too long, too depressing and I either disliked or just didn't care about most of the characters, I certainly didn't hate it the way a lot of people seemed to and I think it had the potential to tell a great story but they made a mess of telling it.

 

Coming back to it I wanted to get it completed before it leaves PS Now as I sold my copy of the game after getting the platinum and didn't want to have to rebuy it just for 2 DLC trophies. I combined grounded and permadeath into one playthrough and with the option to do it by chapter along with all of the accessibility options it's nowhere near as hard as they could have made it (especially with the exploit that allows you to use modifiers like unlimited ammo and one hit kills), only reason I give it a 3 for difficulty and not a 2 is because I made it worse for myself than it should've been by rushing too much, the game gives you some stats at the end of a permadeath run and it took me 14 hours with 5 hours being lost to deaths and of the 44 deaths I had 40 of them were probably easily avoidable. 

 

 

Cleanup Progress: 20th November 2021 - 20th December 2021

329 games played/160 completed - 330 games played/161 completed

Completion % - 74.54% - Completion % - 74.67%

2987 unearned trophies - 2979 unearned trophies

 

Not had much free time over the last few weeks so made barely any progress this month, adding a new game to my profile that I haven't finished didn't help and I've been struggling to decide what I want to play so I'm hoping taking part in a couple of events on here for 2022 will give me some extra focus.

 

My average rarity has gone under 40% for the first time since I set that as a target back in July, I've realised it's a stat I don't care about as much as I thought I would when I set that target but it stops this month from feeling completely unproductive so I'll take it ?

Edited December 15, 2022 by MD_91

[MD_91]

 

Cleanup enjoyment = 6/10

Cleanup difficulty = 3/10

 

Started this as a co-op game with a friend, we only got halfway through before not touching it again for reasons I can't remember and I've been meaning to come back to it solo for a while.

 

I've never had much interest in top-down twin-stick shooters but I enjoyed this more than I thought I would, it's a pretty short and simple game with 5 main tombs and 5 challenge tombs along with some bosses to beat, none of the tombs take more than 10 minutes to get through but require multiple playthroughs depending on how efficiently you get the challenges done.

 

Most of the challenges aren't much of a challenge and consist of beating a tomb under a certain amount of time, hitting a points total, picking up collectibles and killing enemies in specific ways, the only ones that gave me any trouble were the point challenges as the amount needed was fairly strict for a couple of tombs and required keeping the multiplier up the whole way through but overall it's far easier than the rarity suggests.

 

 

 

Cleanup enjoyment = 8/10

Cleanup difficulty = 3/10

 

Probably my favourite game of the PS4 generation, when the music starts up as you're swinging around the city is one of my all time favourite gaming experiences. Gave my copy to a friend soon after getting the platinum 3 years ago and was finally able to get around to the dlc after getting the GOTY edition as an xmas present this year.

 

Started with combining the new game+ playthrough with ultimate difficulty, I chose to skip QTE's and puzzles and since the story is still pretty fresh in my head from when I first played it I skipped most of the cutscenes so this didn't take me long to get through, the only bits that gave me trouble were the boss fights where you have to fight 2 at once because the camera was giving me some problems but otherwise having your character fully upgraded makes ultimate pretty easy.

 

I really liked all 3 story dlc's with the first part being the best, felt they did a good job with mission variety and at about 4 hours to fully complete each part they were a good length, like the main game though one of my only complaints is I could've done without the crimes as I found them pretty boring to complete.

 

I want to hold off on playing Miles Morales until I've got a PS5 and coming back to this has got me really looking forward to it although with the way things are going by the time I get around to it Spider-Man 2 will already be out ?

 

 

Cleanup Progress: 20th December 2021 - 20th January 2022

330 games played/161 completed - 332 games played/165 completed

Completion % - 74.67% - Completion % - 75.09%

2979 unearned trophies - 2951 unearned trophies

 

Another pretty slow month for progress as I didn't have much free time again but with the busiest time of year for my work now out of the way I'm hoping to start playing more regularly again over the next few months, I think the 85% end of year target I've set myself for the attack on completion event is probably unrealistic but for now it's good to see it go above 75%. 

 

I doubt the number of unearned trophies is going to drop much for a while as a lot of the games I want to play for the bingo bonanza and platinum difficulty events will be new for my account which I'm looking forward to, cleaning up old games is still a big focus but there were times last year where I could have done with reminding myself that this hobby shouldn't feel like a chore ?

 

[MD_91]

 

Cleanup enjoyment = 7/10

Cleanup difficulty = 4/10

 

Finally got the motivation to go back to this by using it as my 4/10 for the platinum difficulty challenge thread, I had been putting it off for the last several months as the only trophy I needed for the platinum was to 100% the game and as I no longer had my save file I didn't like the thought of putting 20 plus hours into a game I remembered not being a big fan of the first time I played it just for 2 trophies. Actually enjoyed playing through it again a lot more than I was expecting and the 100% wasn't as lengthy as I thought as I was done in under 15 hours so this was a good surprise to come back to.

 

 

Cleanup enjoyment = 1/10

Cleanup difficulty = 2/10

 

Wasn't planning on coming back to this for a long time until I saw there was a way you could massively reduce the 25 to 30 hour grind needed for hitting 1000 aces, 1000 forehand winners, 1000 backhands and 5000 winners in total. 

 

Just had to create and backup a save file for a match where I was about to win before match point and then I could just keep reuploading that save to win the match point while adding the 15 aces and 52 winners from the match to my profile stats each time rather than having to play a full match each time, was still a very boring way to spend 8 hours but it saved this month from being my worst for unearned trophy progress so at least something positive came out of getting this game done

 

 

Cleanup enjoyment = 5/10

Cleanup difficulty = 2/10

 

I had thought about leaving this unfinished as I barely touched the online part of the game when I first played it and knew from platting the PS4 version it would be a 3 to 6 month grind, with it being a pretty old game now the thought of a server closure being announced before I could finish was always in the back of my mind but now it's done I'm glad I went back to it. 

 

Between getting the trophy for my first gold cup on an online challenge on November 10th last year and getting the plat 14 weeks later I think there were only 2 days where I didn't do the daily challenges. I initially aimed to make sure I got at least 1 gold and 1 silver which for the first couple of weeks I was spending anywhere from 30 to 45 minutes on but eventually getting 2 golds a day in about 15 minutes was easy enough, I could've finished this a couple of weeks quicker but there were a few days where I was either feeling lazy or didn't have much spare time where I literally just had one attempt at each of the challenges and then turned the game off even if that meant only getting a bronze and a silver. 

 

Overall as far as grinds go this is one of the more enjoyable ones I've done and I would happily do something like it again if it meant ever getting another Rayman game.

 

 

Cleanup Progress: 20th January 2022 - 20th February 2022

332 games played/165 completed - 337 games played/173 completed

Completion % - 75.09% - Completion % - 75.60%

2951 unearned trophies - 2933 unearned trophies

 

I said back in November that I expected my next target of 2500 unearned trophies to take a while but I didn't think it would be as long as I've now realised, at the time I was thinking it could be a realistic year end goal for 2022 but now I have a rough idea of what I plan on playing through the rest of this year it looks like I'll be lucky to get under 2800 (maybe 2700) by the end of it