My Decade On Xbox

A couple of weeks ago TrueAchievements published #MyDecadeOnXbox, a nice infographic for each user detailing the highlights of their achievements over the last ten years. This prompted a massive surge in registrations for the site as people scrambled to get their own infographic from TA. And honestly, who doesn’t love an infographic? In this post I (once again) take a quick walk down memory lane and pull out some personal highlights from my own summary.

#MyDecadeOnXbox

Without further ado, here is MyDecadeOnXbox as provided by the lovely folks at TA:

Active Months

I’m really surprised by this! 2019 was a pretty light year in terms of achievements overall. This was due to a combination of playing loads of Destiny 2 (I’ve almost completed all achievements there) and not finding a massive amount of time to progress in other games. Not to mention the fact that most of my backlog are sprawling open world titles taking a large time investment to complete. I set myself a gamerscore goal on TA and as December rolled around I was well short. The spike in December is really due to two things: TA’s annual Twelve Days of Christmas challenge, and Gears POP!

2015 as my overall best year in terms of achievements isn’t a huge surprise. It’s the year my daughter was born, and she always woke early (4 or 5am), at which I would head through to the living room and she would fall asleep on me again and I’d more often than not spend a couple of hours on the Xbox with her napping. I remember I basically blasted through Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag at this point. I think I also powered through Wolfenstein: The New Order just before she was born, in a blind panic that I’d have no gaming time after she arrived!

Platform Breakdown

No real surprises there, as the new console generation arrived in 2013 along with some crazy changes to achievement rules. Some games started to ship with hundreds of achievements with thousands of gamerscore, rather than the usual 1000G previously enforced on Xbox 360.

As a footnote, I really miss Windows Phone! I still maintain it is the best mobile OS I have ever used. Having built in Xbox Live with achievements in games was a definite bonus, and this is something that more games need to take advantage of, now that Xbox Live support is available across Android and iOS. Gears POP! on Android is a fun game and gave me a timely gamerscore boost in December 2019.

Completions

Looking at the completions summary, there are some interesting observations there.

Quickest Completion

I don’t massively remember Microsoft Mahjong. MS went through a phase of releasing some quite nice puzzle games on Windows Phone with cross-save on the full version of Windows. I think this 8 minute completion was the Windows 8 version of the game, which had a challenging total of three achievements for a bumper 25G! I’m guessing Microsoft just forgot to keep updating it?!

Rarest Completion

FIFA 07 was a grind. It was a pretty terrible game, falling at that awkward point between generations. I’m not entirely sure why, but EA took the approach of making the next-gen (Xbox 360 at the time) version completely stripped down, with only a handful of teams and modes. The gameplay wasn’t great, and the worst achievement involved a ninety match winning streak. I was pretty determined though, so I came back to it eventually and wound it up. Then I celebrated by deleting it and selling the disc on eBay.

Longest Completion

Ahh, Halo 3: ODST. One of my favourite Halo games, maybe my favourite overall. Moody, compelling, and introduced the awesome Firefight mode. I blasted through the campaign when it released back in 2009, but it was Firefight and the Vidmaster challenges that kept this one running long into the next decade. I picked the game back up in 2014 and joined a load of sessions on TA to complete these. Glad I did. ODST was great fun, and I’ve recently started Halo: Master Chief Collection on Xbox Game Pass, so I’m looking forward to tackling ODST again.

Rarest Achievements

UFC Personal Trainer, huh? Anybody remember Kinect? When Kinect first arrived on the scene following the runaway success of the Nintendo Wii, it seemed ideal for fitness trainers. Basically just like a fitness DVD but interactive, with feedback on how well you were doing. Unfortunately at the time I didn’t have the most space in my flat, meaning it never worked as well as I would have liked. Plus the detection was pretty bonkers. Sometimes it would just completely lose a limb, or miss entire sets of workouts. Still though, it was a pretty decent workout when it was working. Some of the trainers were complete and utter w**kers though (I wouldn’t tell them that to their faces).

Nike+ Kinect Training came out a year later and was a far more complete package with much better detection. The trainers were also much less objectionable, and the exercises just worked so much better. Xbox Fitness evolved on this well, but once Microsoft decided to sunset the Kinect, sadly this whole genre of “game” was consigned to history. Not everyone’s cup of tea, but I quite liked the idea of having to put in real physical work to unlock achievements, something Fitbit and almost every other fitness tracker have aped since.

And finally, the Seabound Soul DLC for Sea of Thieves. I’m a little surprised this is such a rare achievement. But, it’s a fairly new-ish DLC so maybe it’s just that a lot of people haven’t played it yet?

Most Played Series

Some of the results in this are a little surprising to me. I’m guessing this is calculated by the number of individual titles in a series played, rather than the percentage of games in a series played. Take Telltate for example. I’ve played 50% of the games (8 of 16), but for Battlefield I’ve played 67% (6 of 9) or Mass Effect 80% (4 of 5: I haven’t played the mobile game, Infiltrator). This maybe skews the results towards series that spew out annual shovelware, but perhaps this is slightly unfair on TA. Anyway, some thoughts:

Telltale Series

I featured The Walking Dead on my recent Top 12(ish) games of the decade post. It went some way towards resurrecting the point-and-click adventure genre and spawned a slew of identikit games across various licences, including Game of Thrones, Batman, and The Wolf Among Us. While these trended towards a decline in quality, there were some great experiences in there, with Batman and The Wolf Among Us personal favourites. I’m not sure I can necessarily be bothered playing all the others in the series, but I definitely put some time in on these due to their episodic structure, easy gameplay, and usually decent storylines.

FIFA

Yeah, this is fair enough. I used to pick up FIFA every other year. I never really thought it was worthwhile buying annually, but biennially felt about right. However, since the arrival of EA Access I’ve actually found myself just holding off and playing the previous year’s title whenever it goes free in the EA Access Vault. This is usually between April-July the following year, and I don’t really mind the wait.

Assassin’s Creed

This one’s totally fair. I loved the original Assassin’s Creed when it launched, despite a few teething problems. And 2009’s Assassin’s Creed II was an absolute masterpiece. So I’ve played all of the main entries in the series since (usually a year or so behind release). Ezio was a fantastic character, and I thoroughly enjoyed Brotherhood, although my interest was starting to fade with Revelations. Assassin’s Creed III was, I thought, harshly treated, it’s biggest crime that it’s protagonist was dull. In terms of its scale, ambition, and lasting impact however, it set the groundwork for a lot of the good that was to follow. Black Flag was just incredible fun, what with the pirates and the sailing, while Unity was an uncompromising and unfulfilling grind.

I waited a couple of years after Unity before I jumped into Syndicate, and I have to say that I really didn’t warm to it. I found the gameplay to be rather clunky, and I couldn’t stand Jacob Frye. However, with Origins and Odyssey, Ubisoft have really turned things around. Moving more towards the action-RPG genre has really worked for Assassin’s Creed, as has a slightly more relaxed release cycle. Two years between games feels about right to allow evolution, although I’d happily wait three given the size of my backlog!

Conclusion

The statistics angle is part of what I love about Trueachievements, along with their challenges. #MyDecadeOnXbox showcases the best type of content TA produces, and I hope to see more of this type of thing from them. For me, it’s been a nice opportunity to look back at some of the highlights of the previous decade that I might have otherwise forgotten.

Anyone else reading that’s done their #MyDecadeOnXbox? Please share below and let me know your highlights.