For the last 2 days I’ve now been hard at work getting some of the achievements trophies which are now available in some PS3 games since the last firmware update. And since the only game I have that supports trophies, I’ve been playing tons of Super Stardust HD again :D After getting the first 2 for finishing the first 2 levels, I noticed that for most of the trophies you have to get the expansion pack which costs 3.99 EUR. Since I wanted to get it anyway, that’s not a big deal for me, but I still think its weird and a bad idea, to be honest, to make only about half of the trophies for the core game.
But apart from this issue, it will be a really hard decision from now on, for what system to get a game. Previously, it was quite simple: If the versions were the same except for the Xbox360 version having achievements, it would always have been the Xbox360 version I would have bought. This will probably make a nice 180 when I finally get an HDTV. Then I will have identical gaming-quality with both consoles but the PS3 will be far less noisy ;-)
The interface on both systems is pretty simple, although I prefer the XMB over the Xbox360 user interface. A nice addition to what Microsoft offers is a percentage indicator telling you, how many percent of the trophies you’ve already got. Apart from that, there isn’t all that much of a difference in functionality between these two. In both you can easily compare your stats with your friends, see what achievements you’ve got and so on. In the XMB it seems a little bit more straight forward though, especially when you’re the game you want to see your stats for.
I also like the whole tier system with bronze, silver, gold and platinum trophies indicating their difficulty … if it’s used appropriately. In Super Stardust HD there is for example a silver trophy for surviving more than 7 minutes in the Survival Mode. Good luck getting this one. When I checked the high-score list last night, only 12 people world-wide managed to survive more than 7 minutes… Should something like this be really just a silver trophy? Or is the platinum trophy not the only one with some special requirements?
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