My crazy 40% rule, where I can’t buy any 360 games if I’m at less than 40% completion, actually seems to be paying off. I’ve not grabbed a couple of games and I’ve even gone back to Rage after it annoyed me enough to stop, and pushed past the bit that was causing a problem. Total success so far and I’m very happy with the results. I’ll have to raise that number a bit soon to push me to complete more of my backlog but that’s not an immediate problem.

So now my attention turns to the PS3 and my stack of shame for that. I don’t have anywhere near as many games on PS3 (purely due to the patching if you really want to know) but it’s still a respectable collection, especially when I’m collecting “free” games from PS+. Interesting confession: I’ve still not finished Uncharted 2, although I nearly 100%d the trophies in the first. Must play that last playthrough on Crushing difficulty to get those…

As with the 360 my first task is to identify how I can get a general gist of if I’ve completed games. For now I’ll use that 40% number, which is what I determined was the average number of achievements (not gamerscore) that completing a game’s plot (and having a general nose around the world) was giving me. As with the 360 I shall discount score and so Gold, Silver and Bronze trophies all become equal. Platinum throw things slightly as you get one of those for completing all other trophies (again, having that mean you had completed the single player plot once would have been far more useful than this 100% completion rubbish) but they are only one per game so I can probably ignore them and count them too.

The PS3 makes the whole thing a lot more complicated than on the 360. To look up my percentage for that I just go along to trueachievements.com and I can see that I have 40% (42% if I discount the DLC I don’t have, that’s a handy new feature they just added). I could also look at the numbers presented through the 360 UI itself, but I’m rarely next to my 360 when I want to check. The PS3 adds many levels of irritation to this. Firstly the trophies don’t sync with the servers automatically when you get them (manual process, will also automatically do them as part of the PS+ update check process now). They then present the data in a not quite useful way so I’m using a 3rd party site to pull the data and that gives me a nice list I can scrape with my own code. It turns out that I have 16.45% of the trophies, but since I have a lot of games I grabbed from PS+ just in case I’ll go with games I have at least one trophy for already. This gives me a slightly better number of 22.74%, which isn’t too bad. Getting that up to 40% before I buy any new games is a little unfeasible though (Uncharted 3!) so I need to hit the back catalogue a bit and accept that one or two games will be coming in that just can’t be missed.

The current two that are on the go are ICO (Only a few hours left to go of course. Short game, but Rage distracted me from finishing) and inFAMOUS 2. I liked the first game but thought the moral choice signposting was almost insulting my intelligence “Good acts make you good!” and the second game is a lot better at that. Instead I’ve decided to hate the AI that fires RPGs at point blank range as if they were shotguns in this one. Still, the rest of the game is good and the city is more than interesting enough to keep my sandbox itch scratched. After that it has to be Uncharted 2 of course in readiness for the third. Luckily the big game of the week is Forza 4 and that will end up being a nice background game instead of one I’ll obsess over so I should get a couple of hours at the weekend to work on that.

I make playing games sound like hard work, don’t I?