MD's backlog/cleanup Diary

[TC_217]

Glad to see you are still at it! It took me a while, but I finally acted on the inspiration I got from your thread and others like it. I did some work on my backlog and lowered my unearned trophy count by more than 300. Now I'm going to play a few new games and then get back to the backlog. Keep up the good work

[MD_91]

6 hours ago, TC_217 said:

Glad to see you are still at it! It took me a while, but I finally acted on the inspiration I got from your thread and others like it. I did some work on my backlog and lowered my unearned trophy count by more than 300. Now I'm going to play a few new games and then get back to the backlog. Keep up the good work

 

As far as inspiring my checklist is definitely very low down the list compared to the quality and effort a lot of people put into theirs but if it helped motivate you at all that's good to hear ?

 

Shame you can't get 100% anymore but hopefully you can still get your unearned down to double digits 

[MD_91]

 

Cleanup enjoyment = 5/10

Cleanup difficulty = 2/10

 

Wanted to make sure I got at least one game completed off my backlog this month and chose this as it's one of the shortest options I had left.

 

Was just missing trophies for lockpicking 20 doors and some different kill methods but as I didn't have a save file I had to play through about 75% of the story to have access to everything I still needed, only took about 6 hours and the game was better than I remembered, it's a bit janky especially the combat but overall it was enjoyable to play again.

 

 

 

Cleanup enjoyment = 5/10

Cleanup difficulty = 5/10

 

Wasn't planning on going back to this for a while but saw they had an event running this weekend that made getting race wins a lot easier and as that was all I was missing for the platinum it made sense to do it now.

 

I enjoyed this for the first couple of weeks that I played it as the idea of a video game version of Takeshi's castle was very cool but the novelty wore off and then I didn't touch it for 8 months until there was an exploit that made Infallible a lot easier, I then grinded out everything else I was missing except the race wins before taking another 10 month gap until now, both my enjoyment and difficulty of this game varied based on the modes available and player base at the different times I played it so I'm not really sure how to rate this.

 

 

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

337 games played/173 completed - 340 games played/177 completed

Completion % - 75.60% - Completion % - 75.97%

2933 unearned trophies - 2911 unearned trophies

 

 

Between games I've gone back to since starting this checklist and gotten all the remaining obtainable trophies and some games where that's already not possible (looking at those 50 unobtainables in Uncharted 3 hurts) I think the total of "completed" games that don't actually count towards the completed stat is currently at 20 which means I still have 143 uncompleted games to get through, back in June I had it at 189 so I'm definitely happy with that amount of progress in 9 months.  

[MD_91]

 

Cleanup enjoyment = 6/10

Cleanup difficulty = 5/10

 

Been holding off on going back to this for a few months as when I started getting close to the 10,000 trophy milestone making it the platinum for what was one of my favourite PS3 games felt like a good choice, after playing it again for the first time in 12 years it's still very good and the story especially is a big improvement from the first game but it's not a contender for my favourite game in the series anymore, I would definitely rate 4 and LL higher and probably even 3.

 

Also realised one of the reasons I enjoyed this so much when I first played it was because I did it on normal difficulty, I found hard to be a lot more frustrating than I was expecting because of a few sections and I ended up using the exploit to have one hit kills and unlimited ammo for my crushing playthrough, the final boss actually ended up being a lot easier than I remembered though. 

 

 

 

Cleanup enjoyment = 2/10

Cleanup difficulty = 2/10

 

Having to win every race and complete every objective in the career mode is one of the most boring things I've done in the last year that I've been going back through these different old games, my total playtime according to the in game stats was 26 hours and I remember checking it at the 8 hour mark thinking how it was already starting to feel like a chore but I was commited to finishing it before moving onto another game at that point. 

 

There's not much variety between the different stages you have to race and the events in career mainly just consist of a few different stages thrown together, I could've made it less boring for myself by not playing on the easiest difficulty but when a lot of the events take between 30 minutes to an hour (one of the final ones takes about 5 hours) it wasn't worth risking not completing what I needed to and having to replay them.

 

 

 

First Year Cleanup Progress: 20th April 2021 - 20th April 2022

304 games played/83 completed - 344 games played/181 completed

Completion % - 64.5% (estimate) - Completion % - 76.47%

3892 unearned trophies - 2882 unearned trophies

 

 

Feel pretty good overall with what I've done with my account over the last year increasing my completion by about 12% and reducing my unearned trophies by just over 1000, not every game has been fun to go back to but the satisfaction from improving/cleaning up my profile makes it feel worth grinding through the boring ones. 

 

The progress slowed down a lot in the second half of the year compared to the first 6 months and will probably keep getting slower so I feel like a good goal for the next year is to reduce my unearned by another 500 from where I started (2392) but I'll be happy enough to just get under 2500.

 

My aim with this checklist was just to keep myself motivated and by making sure I update it at least once a month it's serving its purpose, I can't imagine it's very interesting to read so to anyone that has followed my progress at all over the last year I just want to say thanks 

[DrunkenEngineer]

Your checklist is actually a great inspiration.  I have a profile on another platform that's in a similar spot as yours started out, and watching you just put your head down and get the work done is very awesome.  Especially how you know you have games with unobtainables, you still pushed through at got as many as possible (or where willing to do) and moved on.  Mad respect.

[FreshFromThaDeli]

Great achievement and progression completing these games over the last year. I have a similar experience to yours when I started doing the same thing 2 years ago kicking off with going back to Tomb Raider PS3. Keep it up!

Edited April 22, 2022 by FreshFromThaDeli

[MD_91]

 

Cleanup enjoyment = 5/10

Cleanup difficulty = 5/10

 

Used the Platinum Difficulty Challenge as motivation to get this finished as I'd been putting it off for a while and it turned out not to be as frustrating (or as hard as the 6/10 I was using it as for that challenge) as I was expecting it to be, I still had 17 of the 27 time trials to do and there were only 2 that were any real sort of struggle whilst getting the remaining gems I needed was easy, when I get around to going back to Crash Bandicoot to complete the trilogy that will probably give me the sort of frustration I was expecting from this.

 

 

Cleanup Progress: 20th April 2022 - 20th May 2022

344 games played/181 completed - 347 games played/186 completed

Completion % - 76.47% - Completion % - 76.85%

2882 unearned trophies - 2855 unearned trophies

[MD_91]

 

Cleanup enjoyment = 3/10

Cleanup difficulty = 2/10

 

Decided to get this done just to make sure I made some sort of progress on my backlog this month, the trophy for checking every map in the game is one of the dumbest/most pointless trophies I think I've ever completed, there's 47 in total with some only accessible at certain points in certain levels and with no way to check which ones you have looked at it was about 7 hours of following a guide and hoping I hadn't accidentally missed one at the end of it, there's no real need to look at the map for most of the game so I hate that they forced this in as a trophy requirement.

 

The only other thing I had to come back to this game for was collectible related, thankfully I still had my save from when I first played this and didn't have many to get so just picked up what I needed as I was working through the maps, wasn't really focused on reliving the story as I was just following a guide for what I needed so this wasn't very enjoyable to go back through.

 

 

 

Worth mentioning this as it's the reason for the slowest amount of progress I've made on my profile in the last 14 months and is also now one of my favourite games of all time.

 

Between the story which was so much better than I was expecting it to be (also enjoyed the contrast of the wackiness of the substories) and the relatively small map that is packed with fun things to do (I would happily buy a spin-off game of the cabaret club minigame), the 145 hours that I put into getting the platinum mostly (I do have to say mostly as there are certain things that are far too reliant on RNG *JCC can go fuck itself*) flew by and I'm really looking forward to getting through the rest of the series.

 

 

Cleanup Progress: 20th May 2022 - 20th June 2022

347 games played/186 completed - 348 games played/188 completed

Completion % - 76.85% - Completion % - 76.97%

2855 unearned trophies - 2850 unearned trophies

[MD_91]

 

Cleanup enjoyment = 3/10

Cleanup difficulty = 3/10

 

Wouldn't say it's a bad racing game but unless you are a massive Ferrari fan the lack of variety in going for the platinum gets very boring very fast.

 

Couldn't feel much difference in how most of the Ferraris felt to drive and with only 14 different tracks there was a lot of repetition in working towards all of the tournaments I needed to win, by the time I'd gotten the trophies for 100 total wins and 2000 total miles driven I'd probably spent 1 and a half to 2 hours on each track but it felt a lot longer as apart from the difficulty specific arcade mode there was no reason to play on anything other than the easiest difficulty just to make sure it didn't drag any longer than the roughly 25 hours I needed for the plat.

 

 

 

Cleanup enjoyment = 6/10

Cleanup difficulty = 4/10

 

Don't know why I decided on another driving game as the next choice on my backlog to go back to after how boring the last one was but with this being open world I found it a lot more enjoyable, the game had a big focus on multiplayer initially (servers closed years ago leaving me with a load of unobtainables) but the single player content was still fun pretty much the whole way through. 

 

 

 

Cleanup Progress: 20th June 2022 - 20th August 2022

348 games played/188 completed - 356 games played/195 completed

Completion % - 76.97% - Completion % - 77.91%

2850 unearned trophies - 2776 unearned trophies

 

 

Don't like how slow my monthly progress has been lately so switching to tracking it every 2 months will hopefully make it feel a bit more satisfying, even with 141 games with obtainable trophies left I've been struggling to find the urge to go back to most of them so for every backlog game I play I've been adding 2 or 3 new ones, it might mean it takes me another 400 games to get through everything but it will be worth it if it means I don't get burnt out doing it

[MD_91]

 

Cleanup enjoyment = 8/10

Cleanup difficulty = 5/10

 

Still as good as I remember it being from the first time I played it, had been putting off going back to this for a while because I'd seen people say how frustrating a couple of the combat challenges are but when I got around to attempting them after doing my hard difficulty playthrough and getting used to the combat again they weren't anywhere near as bad as I was expecting, apart from a couple of hit detection issues the combat in this game is still so good especially for what was their first attempt at it.

 

 

 

Cleanup enjoyment = 5/10

Cleanup difficulty = 4/10

 

Side scrolling stealth game made up of randomly generated levels so how much I was enjoying it mostly depended on how kind the RNG was. Beating the game on all 3 difficulties wasn't too bad as a playthrough can be done in less than 2 hours and although no progress carries over it doesn't take long on even the hard playthrough to get enough money for the best weapons/items to make the rest of the run pretty simple.

 

 

 

Cleanup enjoyment = 2/10

Cleanup difficulty = 2/10

 

The last attempt at a football game by a big company not named Konami or EA, I'd completely forgotten this was made by Ubisoft until it arrived in the post and I saw their logo on the cover.

It's decent enough if you wanted to play a few games of arcadey 5 a side football with friends but as a single player experience it got very boring very fast, the trophy for unlocking every player in the game is horrible as you have to replay the campaign several times to do it and the game doesn't track your progress so it was definitely a relief when the trophy popped after unlocking the 198th and final player I needed.

 

 

 

I don't think I'll ever be treating this as completed as I doubt I'll bother with the remaining MP trophies for as long as they remain obtainable but it was cool to go back and make one of my favourite games of the PS3 generation my 150th platinum, the main thing which had put me off going for the plat all these years was the MP grind to rank 50 which actually wasn't much of a grind at all thanks to an XP glitch which cut the time it took probably from 30 hours down to about 4.

 

 

18 months since start of cleanup

304 games played/83 completed - 361 games played/202 completed

Completion % - 64.5% (estimate) - Completion % - 78.48%

3892 unearned trophies - 2759 unearned trophies

[MD_91]

"Completed" Games Update

 

Outside of the 203 games I actually have at 100% on my profile I have also been treating games with only unobtainables left as completed but until now it's not something I've properly kept track of outside of mentioning it in an occasional monthly update.

 

This has also been on my mind for a while but having gone back to GT Sport in the last couple of days I'm finally willing to start giving up on games that still have obtainables left and treating them as completed too, making a list of all these games will help to keep track of how many unfinished games/unobtainable trophies I actually have.

 

 

Games with only unobtainables left

 

 

High Velocity Bowling - 2 trophies

 

Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit - 11 trophies

LittleBigPlanet 2 - 32 trophies

Uncharted 3 - 50 trophies

Pro Evolution Soccer 2019 - 2 trophies

Grand Slam Tennis 2 - 4 trophies

WWE All Stars - 8 trophies

Fifa 14 - 4 trophies

Fifa 13 - 10 trophies

Fifa 12 - 14 trophies

2010 Fifa World Cup - 5 trophies

MX vs ATV Reflex - 8 trophies

Pro Evolution Soccer 2015 - 4 trophies

Burnout Paradise - 2 trophies

Top Spin 4 - 7 trophies

WWE 13 - 8 trophies

MotorStorm: Apocalypse - 11 trophies

Fight Night Round 4 - 8 trophies 

WWE 12 - 5 trophies

Uncharted 2 - 23 trophies

WRC: FIA World Rally Championship - 4 trophies

Test Drive Unlimited 2 - 25 trophies

Pure Football - 7 trophies

Pro Evolution Soccer 2010 - 2 trophies

 

Total as of 7/11/22 - 24 "completed" games - 256 unobtainable trophies

 

 

Games I'm willing to give up on

 

 

Brain Challenge - 6 SO (still obtainable) - 6 trophies total

 

Fifa 11 - 1 SO - 7 trophies

Fifa Street - 1 - 5 trophies

Dead Island - 7 - 7 trophies

LittleBigPlanet Karting - 1 - 6 trophies

The Crew - 9 - 9 trophies

Sparkle 2 - 1 - 1 trophy

PaRappa the Rapper 2 - 1 - 1 trophy

Uncharted 4 - 2 - 2 trophies

The Witness - 2 - 2 trophies

Watch Dogs 2 - 6 - 6 trophies

Energy Balance - 8 - 8 trophies

Fifa 15 - 2 - 2 trophies

Plants vs. Zombies - 1 - 1 trophy

Critter Crunch - 2 - 2 trophies

Dirt 2 - 2 - 5 trophies

F1 2011 - 7 - 7 trophies

Need For Speed: Most Wanted - 14 - 14 trophies

Fifa 09 - 2 - 14 trophies

F1 2012 - 5 - 10 trophies

WSC Real 2011 - 5 - 5 trophies

Fifa 10 - 1 - 18 trophies

Virtua Tennis 2009 - 4 - 4 trophies

Red Dead Redemption - 10 - 10 trophies

Tetris Ultimate - 3 - 3 trophies

GT Sport - 6 - 6 trophies

 

Total as of 7/11/22 - 26 "completed" games - 109 still obtainable trophies - 161 total "unobtainable" trophies

 

 

 

Total as of 5/1/2023

50 extra "completed" games - 417 "unobtainable" trophies

371 games played - 263 "completed"

 

I'm sure that "given up on" (there's way too many " marks in this post) list will change quite a bit over time but whether it's overpriced dlc, a ridiculous grind, annoying multiplayer requirements, a high level of skill required or a combination of all of those I've reached the point where I definitely want (and need when almost every remaining game is a 20+hour commitment) to be more selective about what I commit to.

 

 

Edited January 5, 2023 by MD_91

[MD_91]

 

Cleanup enjoyment = 2/10

Cleanup difficulty = 2/10

 

Another football game with an unobtainable platinum, the trophies I had left to get were done by either simulating or playing on the lowest difficulty and all very boring but very easy, the trophy stopping me from getting the plat for winning 15 of your last 20 online matches is a frustrating one as I remember trying to do it legitimately back in 2010 and getting to 13 or 14 a few times and the thought of trying to boost it probably never occured to me back then.

 

 

 

Cleanup enjoyment = 6/10

Cleanup difficulty = 5/10

 

Still had a massive amount of dlc to complete but thankfully of the 188 events I still needed to get 3 stars on it was only a couple of the time trials that gave me any real trouble, the drift events were all pretty easy and the ai weren't much of a challenge in races. The gameplay is much more of an arcade style racer than I remembered and I was impressed by how good this game still looks having been released in 2014, I don't know what GT7 looks like on the PS4 but I can't imagine it's much better than this.

 

 

 

 

Not backlog related but feels worth mentioning as it's by far the most difficult thing I've done on my account and hopefully something I can use as motivation for persisting with harder trophies in the future. 

 

It was obvious very early on that the platinum blocker would be getting under 1m 10s in Sprint mode for the SS rank so I focused pretty much all of my time on it (only switching to other modes when I started to feel burnt out and as a result of improving my skill on sprint runs getting SS on all the other modes was pretty simple) and after roughly 120 hours of trying I went from 2m 25s on my first few attempts to this

 

 

There were several times where I wouldn't see any improvement for 10 hours of attempts and wonder if I'd hit a wall and should just give up (I'd been stuck at that previous best of 1m 12s for the last 30 hours) but then I would finally make a breakthrough and improving my time by even half a second would have me wanting to keep pushing on, I'm not going to start racking up a ton of 8 and 9 difficulty platinums but it's definitely made me realise I've been too quick to give up on certain things in the past.

 

 

Cleanup Progress: 20th October 2022 - 20th December 2022

361 games played/202 completed - 367 games played/208 completed

Completion % - 78.48% - Completion % - 79.42%

2759 unearned trophies - 2703 unearned trophies

 

 

Pretty happy overall with how 2022 has gone, taking part in events on the site and mixing in a good amount of new games helped a lot as the year went on with avoiding getting burnt out by forcing myself through too much of my backlog, I would like to hit 85% completion and under 2500 unearned trophies by the end of 2023 but they're going to be very casual targets.

 

[MD_91]

 

Cleanup enjoyment = 5/10

Cleanup difficulty = 2/10

 

Not a bad game but compared to Heavy Rain and Detroit I definitely think it's the weakest of the three, having to sit through the unskippable credits every time when playing through the 8 different endings didn't help my opinion of it either.

 

 

Cleanup enjoyment = 5/10

Cleanup difficulty = 3/10

 

Fun game but not a very fun platinum due to certain collectibles and specific actions you need to do not being tracked in game which basically means you'll need to do a fully guided playthrough. The controls can feel a bit floaty but the art style and the theatre play/puppet show theme make it worth playing, it's a shame it never got a PS4 version as it's always felt massively underrated due to a lack of marketing and releasing right at the end of the PS3's life cycle.

 

 

Cleanup enjoyment = 6/10

Cleanup difficulty = 7/10

 

Not a big fan of top down shooters so I'd put off going back to this for a while but it was more fun than I was expecting it to be, still needed to beat the game on the third and second hardest difficulties and after struggling through the first playthrough I started to like the game a lot more and the harder playthrough ended up being the easier one.

 

I somehow messed up the trophy for collecting all 40 mementos in a single playthrough twice meaning that required another playthrough on its own but having to kill 54,000 zombies requires multiple playthroughs anyway, the rarest trophy that requires reaching round 10 of endless mode isn't as bad as it initially seems if you just follow the method in the guide.

 

 

Cleanup Progress: 20th December 2022 - 20th February 2023

367 games played/208 completed - 378 games played/225 completed

Completion % - 79.42% - Completion % - 81.02%

2703 unearned trophies - 2600 unearned trophies

 

 

[MD_91]

 

Actually not as bad as I remembered it being and would probably be pretty enjoyable playing it with another person as the co-op focused game they intended it to be but still by far one of the weakest games in the series along with Full Frontal Assault.

 

 

With all of the offline stuff doable on the easiest difficult and all the online being easily boostable this shouldn't be anywhere near as rare as it is, the most challenging thing about it ended up being finding a reliable boosting partner as what should be about 20 hours of boosting ended up taking me 5 months to get finished.

 

 

Definitely wouldn't have imagined getting the plat for this 2 years ago as this was one of the last games I played right before I actually started caring about completion and now that I've done it I would probably put it just behind Tetris Effect as the most difficult thing I've done on my profile. Sadly this wasn't anywhere near as enjoyable or satisfying of a challenge as Tetris was and left me close to hating the game by the time I was finished. N Verted mode and having to get all the gems again in those levels just felt like cheap padding, the amount of boxes and the hidden placements of some of them led me to just using a guide for most levels and the time trials just gave me hours of frustration, I'm definitely not going to feel bad about autopopping the PS5 version.

 

 

This will now always stand out as one of the more frustrating games on my account, the game itself is extremely easy even if you don't know much about cricket but earning the platinum has ruined the milestones on my profile. The clock battery on my PS3 died about 6 months ago meaning I need to make sure I always sign in to PSN before earning trophies so they have a timestamp, I'm surprised it took me this long to mess up but this was the game I finally forgot to do that for, not really a big deal but I'd started to put more thought into my milestones over the last couple years so I couldn't help but be pretty annoyed at myself when I realised I'd screwed them up.

 

 

One of the positive things about platting Crash 4 was it motivated me to finally go back and finish this up and after the pain of some of the time trials in 4 coming back to get the remaining ones I still needed in this was like a walk in the park, the dlc level did give me a bit of trouble but it allowing you to skip 1 time trial from the main game when you've beat it was a good feeling knowing I didn't need to even think about dealing with The High Road.

 

 

2 Years Cleanup Progress: 20th April 2021 - 20th April 2023

304 games played/83 completed - 387 games played/237 completed 

Completion % - 64.5% (estimate) - Completion % - 81.56%

3892 unearned trophies - 2615 unearned trophies