To celebrate hitting 6 figures I’m going to take a look back at the games I’ve played and pick out some best/worst of’s in various categories, first up:

Most Enjoyable Game Completion

This award goes to the game that I had the most fun playing while going for 100% completion.  It isn’t necessarily a challenging 100%, or even a long 100%.  These are the games where I never had to take myself away from just enjoying the game to grind out a bunch of achievements after the fun part was over because, let’s face it, if you want to “complete” a game most of the time you are going to have to endure some gameplay you’d normally avoid.

3rd place: Dante’s Inferno – These hack and slash games are usually a pain in the ass when it comes to achievements.  Dante’s Inferno was different, you didn’t even need to complete the game on the hardest difficulty for 100% completion, this meant that by the time I’d finished all the achievements I’d not once found myself frustrated by the difficulty of the game (that was to come later[laugh]).  There were a few “collect stuff” achievements, but the number of collectables was kept low enough that it never felt like a chore going round picking them up, pretty much the polar opposite to Alan Wake.

2nd place: Split/Second – Ahh, a good old fashioned arcade racer.  Even better the majority of the achievements are for the single player modes, and of those most are for doing fun tasks that you’d do anyway.  Even the online achievements were done well, with all online achievements easily obtainable in a reasonable timeframe without the need to resort to boosting.

Winner: Batman Arkham Asylum – Without a doubt the most enjoyable game I have played this generation on any console.  Best of all the achievements are brilliantly designed, even the usually annoying “collect hidden stuff” achievements are kept fun with a functional in-game map to keep track of your progress and provide hints as to where those you are missing can be found, without making it a trivial task to locate them.  All but 125GS is obtainable regardless of your level of skill, and by the time I hit 875/1000 I thought I’d mastered the game having beaten it multiple times.  It was only when I tried to unlock the final two achievements I realised just how wrong I was; had it not been for those achievements I would have never truly mastered the combat system.